Review: 'The Old Drift' is a brilliant literary response to generations of bad politics
By Mark Athitakis March 26 at 8:00 AM Novels about the fate of nations tend to be complex affairs, as if the most appropriate literary response to generations of colonialism, violence and bad politics is Henry James’s proverbial “loose baggy monster.
“The Old Drift” of the title refers to the name the region was given by British colonists in the 1800s, starting with the infamous explorer David Livingstone. “Oh, father muzungu!” intones an impish chorus as the story begins. “The word means white man, but it describes not a skin colour but a tendency.” The novel repels easy summary, but figure it is about that tendency — the urge to exploit in the name of “Civilization.
On one level, this oddball cast of characters simply represents the joys of the picaresque novel, in which the author’s set design is intentionally surreal and ironic. Zambians, as Serpell writes, “were so used to foreigners being strange, they had no expectations or judgments about the nature of that strangeness.” Serpell is a natural social novelist, capable of conjuring a Dickensian range of characters with a painterly eye for detail.
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