Book Review: Assegai by Wilbur Smith

This was a strange book. Not really a bad one, but, at nearly 400 pages in length, the first half felt like a succession of short stories about various African hunting safaris in the years just before the First World War. Former US President Theodore Roosevelt and his son Kermit have sizeable roles to play out on safari but amount to absolutely nothing once the real plot started to unfurl itself.

Smith’s main character is Leon Courtney, whose unnamed father is presumably Ryder Courtney from ‘The Triumph of the Sun’ and whose named uncle is Penrod Ballantyne, another character from the novel about Khartoum – which, I will say here, was much more focused than Assegai.

Only with about one hundred and twenty pages left did the real story unfold: the nefarious plotting of a German entrepreneur to combine the forces of Kaiser Wilhelm’s armies with the still-disenchanted Boer rebels in an effort to overthrow British rule in Africa. Even then, there was plenty of hunting to be done. Bad guys, good guys, in-between guys, they all hunted! Easily half the book was devoted to the killing of one animal or another. 

For some reason, Smith wound up the climactic final scenes very quickly, in comparison to the multiple depictions of safaris, which stretched for page after page. It made the ending far less climactic than it should have been.

Like I wrote about The Triumph of the Sun, Smith obviously loves Africa – in the way that Tom Clancy loves his technology – and it shows in how he writes about tribal life. It’s fascinating at first, but there’s only so many tribal gatherings I can read about before I start skipping pages. Same goes for Clancy and his techno love, too.

If you’re going to advertise the book being about a World War One plot by the Germans, then actually tell that story. Lo and behold, Courtney meets a woman, and the pages Smith dedicates to their courtship comes in second behind only the pages dedicated to the safaris. It felt like the German plot to ally with the Boers against the British was only thrown in as an afterthought, something to pass the time between

Like I said, a strange nook. Could have been better.