When Centaine de Thiry is left destitute and pregnant after the death of her fiancé Michael Courtney during an aerial battle in World War One, she decides to make her way to Africa, where they had planned to live together after the war.
This is the first book in this subsection of Wilbur Smith’s most long-running series, which follows the exploits of the Courtney family in South Africa. Like all the other books, it includes lots of adventure, drama, and some spectacular descriptions of the flora and fauna of Africa.
Centaine is unusual among Smith’s protagonists for being a woman, but she’s as resourceful and cunning as the rest of them, with a knack for making the right allies at the right time. There’s plenty of action, but also long introspective sections as the characters travel through the wilds of Africa. I especially enjoyed learning about traditional Bushmen lifestyle during this time, and was stunned to learn about the genocide these people were subjected to during the colonization of this area of Africa.
However, the pacing can be a bit patchy, leaving some sections of the story underdeveloped – for example, Centaine’s romance with Luthor, when it finally arrives, is rather shallow and short. My big sticking point of this book, though, was the decision that Centaine makes at the end of the book, where she takes over and exploits a place that she necessarily does not hold any claim to.
She leaves Luthor because she perceives how their relationship betrays her adoptive family, and then she turns around and does something I think they would regard as far worse. I ended up thinking about her decision long after I finished the book, trying to understand why she chose to go ahead with such wholesale destruction. I guess it’s another example of the triumph of capitalism, just feeling extra bizarre in contrast to the rest of the book.
