Book: West With the Night
Author: Beryl Markham
Country: Kenya ✨
Format: Audiobook
Narration: Anna Fields*
Duration: 9h
Publication: 1942
I first heard about this book in the beautifully crafted blog The Marginalian and was mesmerized by the writing style of the quotes from the author.
This is the memoir of Beryl Markham, the first woman to cross the Atlantic East-to-West in a non-stop solo flight, and the first pilot to ever do so departing from England. And she did it in 1936.
But she’s so much more than that. At 17 she was a horse trainer, building a business pretty much on her own and competing in races. At 13 she would escape her house to go hunting wild boar with the local tribesmen. At 6 or so, she survived a lion attack. On top of all that, she is a talented writer, being envied even by Ernest Hemingway, who confessed in a letter that he was “completely ashamed of myself as a writer” after reading her book.
“Night flying over the charted country with the aid of instruments and radio guidance can still be a lonely business, but to fly in unbroken darkness without even the cold companionship of a pair of ear-phones or the knowledge that somewhere ahead are lights and life and a well-marked airport is something more than just lonely.
West With the Night
It is at times unreal to the point where the existence of other people seems not even a reasonable probability. The hills, the forests, the rocks, and the plains are one with the darkness, and the darkness is infinite. The earth is no more your planet than is a distant star — if a star is shining; the plane is your planet and you are its sole inhabitant.”
In her book, she describes her childhood in Njoro, in what was British East Africa and is now Kenya. She was born in the U.K. and moved to Africa when she was 4 years old. This is one of the many authors that gave me some work in figuring out their nationality.
Initially, I had classified her as British. But in reading her book and seeing how indivisible her life is from Kenya, I had to reclassify her. Still, she was part of a group of British colonizers that, while profoundly enmeshed with the history of the area, was part of an often brutal domination process.
But this is also part of Kenya.
“Africa is of an ancient age and the blood of many of her peoples is as venerable and as chaste as truth. What upstart race sprung from some recent callow century to arm itself with steel and boastfulness can match in purity the blood of a single Maasai?”
West With the Night
Then I thought, if it was the opposite, if she was a Black woman born in Kenya, moved to London at 4, lived her whole life in a British fashion, and wrote a book that was soaked with British culture and references, wouldn’t I call her British?
She has a witty and honest way of describing the people on the two sides of this relationship, criticizing both the colonizers and the colonized. You can see how much she cared and was interested in the human nature of every man and woman she met.
“I think the Sikh must have been less than 40 years old then, but his face was never any indication of his age. On some Sundays, he looked 30 and on others, he looked 50, depending on the weather, the time of day, or his mood, or the tilt of his turban.”
West With the Night
I confess that some of the passages about her relationship with the people of the land and the deference with which they treat her made me cringe. But her description of the relationship she has with the land, the animals and even the planes is mesmerizing. I couldn’t care less about horse races, but I was glued to my spot on the sidewalk when she was describing her horse’s first big race.
“I see Wise Child (the horse) falter once more. And then straighten. I see her transformed from the shadow she was to a small swift flame of valor that throws my doubt in my teeth.”
West With the Night
One of the other things I didn’t like though is how little space she dedicated to her big feat, crossing the Atlantic non-stop in a four-seater small plane, and being the first person to do the England-North-America crossing. The was a lot of anticipation and I felt impatient in the chapters where she describes all the bureaucracy (and sexism) she faced when flying to other countries.
But in the end, it was worth it. The chapter in which she describes how she flew west with the night, departing in the evening on a 20+ hours flight is another breathtaking passage of her work.
It’s weird, but even weeks after finishing the book I still got a feeling of longing for it, I miss hearing her stories in the voice of Ann Fields.
Beryl Markham died in 1986, but her story lives on.
*While editing this post I learn about the premature death of Anna Fields, the narrator of the audiobook. She was 46 and narrated more than 200 audiobooks. You can see some of her other titles here.
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