Adventuress absolute

West with the Night is not as compelling as the persona it depicts of its author.  The book has no plot, and I'm a reader who loves plot.  It meanders non-chronologically through a series of testosterone-laden topics: flying, hunting, race horses . . . and then more on hunting and flying.  There's an entire chapter ("Royal Exile") written (mistakenly, in my perspective) from the point of view of a horse.  There's no mention of men she's loved, sex she's had, women friends who were important to her.  She doesn't mention her mother.  As Martha Gellhorn observes in her introduction, West with the Night leaves many questions unanswered (p. ix).

But whatever the failings of the book, I wanted to keep reading it because Beryl Markham comes through the text as so palpably fascinating a person.  I felt like I was having coffee with a person who, regardless of whether I liked her, transfixed me.  Not that Markham seems unlikable in the book . . . just remote.  Unknown.  Unbelievable.  She'd lived through a number of confrontations with lions, had been thrown from horses, trained champion thoroughbred racers, pioneered the use of planes in safaris, flew across the Atlantic by herself, wrote an elusive and fluid memoir -- how could a person of her many and varied talents, courage and insight exist?

West with the Night is all voice.  Whether fact or fiction, her voice is so compelling that I wanted to keep listening.  Time after time in the course of reading, I was jolted by a frisson of recognition, identification or empathy:

"Oxygen to a sick miner.  But this flight is not heroic.  It is not even romantic.  It is a job of work, a job to be done at an uncomfortable hour with sleep in my eyes and half a grumble on my lips."  (p. 13.)

"It is really this that makes death so hard -- curiosity unsatisfied."  (p. 25.)

"He remained a man of mystery, without age or youth, but burdened with experience, like the wandering Jew."  (p. 61.)

"If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work."  (p. 153.)

"I have had responsibilities and work, dangers and pleasure, good friends, and a world without walls to live in."  (p. 239.)

"There is no hell like uncertainty."  (p. 255.)

"The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all."  (p. 283.)

Given how strongly Markham speaks to me, I am cautiously pessimistic about her fate: three times married and divorced, chronically impoverished, called a "high-grade bitch" by Ernest Hemingway, a man who fraternized with her friends; always distinct and apart.  I have no doubt that Beryl Markham had no regrets, but my own sake I wish her example was less severe.