Novel set in Mali (“a fairly clear picture of Mali”)

11th January 2015

The Lonely Desert – by Sarah Challis: a novel set in Mali.

Emily, Hugh, Divinity and Will travel to Mali, West Africa. All four have different agendas: Hugh, an anthropologist, wants to do some field work with the Dogon people; Divinity seeks to source wonderful fabrics for her design business; Will is researching a documentary about the rise of Islamic schools and intends to visit some madrasas; and Emily is on a mission to discover what has happened to Clemmie, her best friend. The latter, on a previous visit to Mali, took up with a Tuareg tribesman and elected to stay there and throw herself into nomadic life. Yes, really!

From their arrival in Mali, the story moves at a rattling pace and is just interesting enough to keep the reader’s attention as the four get themselves into some pretty hairy predicaments and discover that Clemmie is, indeed, in a very sticky situation. No surprises there. To be honest, the storyline is probably the best thing about this novel, even though it stretches credibility to its limit and the ending is pure fairytale. Call me an old cynic, if you will, but are we really being asked to accept that a young woman with everything going for her is going to cast in her lot with a camel riding nomad who is going to abandon her for weeks on end and leave her to sweep sand and chase flies with the other tribeswomen who don’t welcome her and with whom she doesn’t even share a common language? That’s without even mentioning the nefarious business her husband, Chamba, and his brother are involved in or the ever-present threat of Islamic terrorists behind every sand dune.

The novel has three different narrators – Emily, Clemmie and Divinity and unfortunately Challis doesn’t differentiate the first two sufficiently. Both of them, most of the time, sound like something out of a romantic novel from a hundred years ago. “At midday on a bright, chilly Saturday in April, I tucked my cold and trembling hand through the crook of my father’s arm and prepared to walk down the aisle of the little grey stone church …” – Emily describing her marriage to Hugh. Or, Clemmie, “There is so much I didn’t understand that went on between the men of the family, and Chamba never told me. He said there was no need for me to know.” And then, as if she has just remembered that she’s writing a novel set in the twenty first century, Challis bungs in the odd colloquialism which jars unpleasantly, like Clemmie speculating that she might be suspected of “grassing” on her husband.

The third narrator, Divinity, thankfully, is refreshingly unpleasant and her speech is securely grounded in the present day. She’s also no shrinking Victorian heroine and takes a dim view of Clemmie’s “wafting about the desert with some sort of chieftain”.

Challis does provide the reader with a fairly clear picture of Mali, although it’s not an attractive one. She describes the experience of being beleaguered by beggars with their “beseeching little faces” and she certainly doesn’t underplay the dangers and difficulties of visiting this country. When the group visit Djenne, a World Heritage Site, she details the dirt, the drains and the dead rats without sparing.

All in all, she makes Mali sounds like the kind of place you should leave off your travel agenda, just as this novel should be left off your book list.

Ellen for the TripFiction Team

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