FRANCE FREEMAN
Wilbur Smith
Dark Continent provides big ideas for author
JOE PAR TRIDGE
TO MOST OF US, Africa is still a million worlds away. It’s the stuff of ancient, elemental happenings, racial divide and devastating ethnic struggles, largely relegated to textbooks on the one hand, the foundation for celebrity fund-raising and soapboxing on the other.
To best-selling author Wilbur Smith, the continent is not only home, but the richest source of inspiration for which an author could ever wish. Smith has penned more than two dozen novels, including River God, this month’s Book Buyer’s Pick, that explore, celebrate, dissect and personalize Africa, its people and history.
“I am at heart a nomad, and I get restless if I stay too long in one place,” confides the 74-year-old Smith, son of a mining contractor and a homemaker. “However, Africa is where I leave my heart. Africa is always the well and font of my inspiration.”
Born and raised in a remote part of Africa in the country that is now Zambia, Smith absorbed his family’s colorful involvements in the continent’s history. C.S. Forester (Horatio Hornblower) and H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon’s Mines) provided major inspiration for his own creative writing. Smith has been a fervent fan of Haggard’s swashbuckling adventures since his mother first read them to him in his childhood, importing the books from a small dealer 500 miles away from the isolated land on which the family lived.
In his teen years, Smith discovered the writings of John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, whose Green Hills of Africa, Smith claims, “sung to my African heart and gave me an insight into the writer’s mind and novelistic techniques.”
In his early 20s, Smith, then a divorced father of two and miserable in his work as a tax man, decided to try his hand at fiction. He penned several novels, which failed to capture the interest of publishers. At last, in 1964, he fashioned a literary hero, Sean Courtney, based on his grandfather—“a machine-gunner with prodigious handlebar mustaches”— amid an action-packed, historically resonant tale of gold mining, African warfare and family scandal. The resulting novel, When the Lion Feeds, launched Smith’s career.
“My African roots go very deep, as my ancestors
on both sides of the family were traders, explorers, hunters and soldiers in Africa,” he says. “I learned firsthand what it was like in this continent’s early days, and worked them into the novels that began my career as a published author.”
After devoting nearly two decades and 13 novels “chasing” the centuries-spanning adventures of the Courtney clan, Smith decided to turn his literary ambitions to tales of ancient Egypt with River God. The change of pace initially outraged his legions of international fans. It is perhaps testament to Smith’s abilities as a storyteller that those naysayers were won over, along with millions of new readers, making Smith’s Egypt novels his best-selling.
Smith calls his Egyptian series—River God and its sequels, The Seventh Scroll, Warlock and the latest, The Quest—his essential achievement, a harmonic, deeply romantic, white-knuckle saga that resonates for him, personally, for its “haunting setting, and characters who love and hate and fight and succeed and fail as we do today. It’s timeless in those ways, and readers around the world seem to agree with me, for which I am very, very grateful.” C
J. Rentilly is a Los Angeles–based journalist who writes about film, music and literature.
Pennie Clark Ianniciello Costco Book Buyer
WHO NEEDS summer blockbuster films when the right book can provide readers with more adventure, laughs or passion than a movie ever could? (And don’t get me started on all of the extra details found in books versus films!) If you’re looking for action-packed fiction, I suggest Wilbur Smith’s River God. It’s such a sweeping story that it can only be described with the words “epic” and “grand.”
The novel stars a eunuch slave, a pharaoh and a beautiful young girl. It also features torrid love affairs, political upheaval and exile. River God is available at most Costco warehouses and at costco.com. C
COSTCO HAS 10 copies of Wilbur Smith’s River God, with signed bookplates, to give away. To enter, print your name, membership number, address and daytime phone number on a postcard or letter and send it to: Wilbur Smith, The Costco Connection, P.O. Box 34088, Seattle, WA 98124-1088, or fax it to (425) 313-6718.
No purchase is necessary. Only current Costco members are eligible to win. One entry per
household.
Entries must be
received or post-
marked by June
1, 2007. Winners
will be randomly
selected and not i-
fied by mail on or
before July 2, 2007.
The value of the
prize is $7.99. Void where prohib-
ited. Winners are responsible for
all applicable federal, state and
local taxes. The decision of the
judges is final. Employees of
Costco or St. Martin’s Press and
their families are not eligible.
References:
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