CONGO SONG

by Stuart Cloete ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 16, 1942

An attempt to do a South Wind against the sultry background of the Congo, with its beauty and its ugliness and its poison eating into the souls of the odd assortment of exiled Europeans gathered together. There is Bentinok, ostensibly store-keeper and hotel keeper, actually secret service man for the British; there is Channel, an abortionist who was found out, a philosopher-scientist-doctor-observer and commentator (at great length) on life. There is Sebastian, another Frenchman, a mad artist, ridden by his passions. There is Marais, Dutchman, dealing in dredging machinery (and receiving an extraordinary number of ""replacements"" and ""parts""). There is Van Brandt, Nazi cock-o'-the-walk, who poached on Sebastian's preserves, and who was one of the many lovers of the beautiful nymphomaniac, Olga, wife of the professor who was experimenting in rubber. Olga had a streak of perversion, evidenced in her devotion to the almost full grown gorilla, Congo, which she had nursed at her breast, and the pet snake she kept to hold Congo in check. Into this group comes Wilson -- half English, half American, sent to help Bentinok by Fraser, director of secret service in Africa. Wilson gets caught in the toils of Olga, too, and Bentinok dies, victim of a poisoned animal trap, before he has given Wilson the threads of the complex mesh of Nazi infiltration. So -- as war comes -- Marais reveals himself as the brains behind the scene, gives Van Brandt his orders -- and then both are caught by circumstances entirely outside the web they thought they controlled. Van Brandt is caught in a burning quicksand, Marais is killed by Congo, in a fit of jealousy, which costs also his own life and that of Olga's professor and his secretary. So at the close, Olga and Wilson, convinced that her past is past, and the future theirs, return to civilization. A strange book, with the makings of a good tale of espionage, or a morbid tale of passion in the tropics, turned out of both paths by perversion, and slowed down in pace by the tendency on the part of several of the characters, to air their philosophies to the listener.

Pub Date: Feb. 16, 1942

ISBN: 0548059535

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton, Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1942

Categories: FICTION