Reviews

I am trying to read my shelves and I picked this up after reading another of the author's novels, Mrs. Caliban. In this novel, a childless couple travel to London on the way to a work Safari for the husband, a college professor. The marriage seemed to be lifeless, but Millie, left on her own to explore London and shop, comes to life and transforms into the exciting life of the party. Her husband, Stan is mystified by her changes and shocked when she rejects him. This is the portrait of a marriage as well as the story of a middle aged man trying to revive his career. The Africa parts were a little dull, as was Stan, so 3 stars from me.

readingweird's review

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5.0

I have no shame in admitting that when I picked up Binstead’s Safari, I was expecting (read: hoping for) an encore of Ingalls’s earlier novel, Mrs. Caliban, except with a lion man instead of a frog man. I maintain that my favorite (though criminally underwritten) subgenre is Embattled Housewife Absconds With Nonhuman Lover.

Binstead’s Safari gave me more than I bargained for and I take it as a personal attack, honestly. Ingalls’s critique of the colonial impulse that drives Western academia cuts through the thick cloud of the novel’s otherwise hazy, hypnotizing prose. As the title might suggest, the Binsteads travel from Boston to Africa and go on safari so that Stan, an anthropologist, can conduct his research. Stan, who begrudgingly lets Millie tag along, is out to hunt for something far more valuable to him than big game: he’s out to “discover” (and, yes, that word should be dripping with colonial implications) a secret lion cult he is certain exists deep in the African countryside.

If I have one complaint about this novel (which actually might be its greatest strength—we’ll see where I’m at by the end of this rambling) it’s that Millie Binstead doesn’t take center stage for most of the second and third acts. It’s Stan whose inner monologues we’re privy to more often. Stan has some serious issues (heaps of survivor’s guilt and a generalized self-loathing he seems to remedy with endless philandering) and is convinced he can make life mean something if only he can unearth the essential truth about the human condition. The keepers of the secret knowledge he seeks, of course, are “exotic” people he would otherwise dismiss as primitive, regressive, but simultaneously fetishizes for (as he sees it) their elemental understanding of the inner workings of things.* Stan’s searching for a peace he hasn’t been able to find in his own culture, and believes that turning the question into a research problem will get him closer to the gooey center of life he’s so sure must be there.

Isn’t it infuriating, then, when his wife (a woman he’s long written off as uninteresting, vapid, meek without bothering to question his own role in her gradual selfward retreat) seems innately able to convene with the very forces he’s looking to uncover on a research trip where she’s merely meant to be an inconvenient interloper? This is why I say that despite my frustration at not getting closer to Millie, this is possibly Ingalls’s savviest move. Millie, like the weird happenings throughout, is impenetrable to Stan and to the reader, never glimpsed directly but always seen through a fog.

*There are lots of novels that deal with this trope but the one that comes to mind insistently is Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps

jo_crescent's review

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

agmaynard's review

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dark emotional mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Wonderfully done! Often unspooling dream like, desultory, as the story builds languidly. Mysterious.

homefreys's review

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dark mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

I love Rachel Ingalls' writing, and her characters have such rich and nuanced inner lives. I found the centering of almost exclusively white characters in a novel set in Africa to be troubling, especially the character of Harry Lewis. It sort of ruined the magic of the story, and that character in particular.

bibispizzas's review

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adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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