The Lass Who Loved a Lion

THE LION (244 pp.) -- Joseph Kessel-- Knopf ($3.75).

"Had he pulled at my eyelids to find out what they concealed? I couldn't be certain about this." These titillating opening sentences promise events sinister, portentous or at least symbolic. But "he" turns out to be nothing more alarming than a pet monkey who had wandered into the visitor's hut in a game reserve in Kenya. The reader is soon introduced to the monkey's owner -- a precocious ten-year-old girl who can converse familiarly with animals and gets no back talk.

Officially, Patricia is daughter of the game warden, a great, burly white hunter who has repented and now lives only to prevent other hunters from harming his animals. But the natives whisper that her real father is the king of beasts -- a legend Patricia encourages by spending all her afternoons on chummy terms with the reserve's biggest lion.

Which to Shoot? What is her uncanny power? It seems that the lion was found by the warden as a cub, and Patricia named him King and reared him, feeding him from a bottle and sleeping with him in her crib. When he finally became too big, he was banished to the wilds. But King still plays dead on Patricia's command. He loves the warden, too, and will wrestle with him on invitation.

Trouble comes when a young Masai warrior takes a fancy to Patricia. This nymphet of the Carnivora is delighted. As she well knows, a tradition of the Masai once held that a tribesman could not take a wife until he killed a lion, and Patricia eggs him on to fight King for her. The lion duly eviscerates the tribesman, but just as he is about to dispatch him, up runs the warden. Which to shoot? He hesitates for several paragraphs between his pledge to protect all animals and "an instinctive feeling of solidarity with [the man] rooted in the first dawn of human awareness."

Patricia is stunned that death has resulted from her innocent game. Disillusioned, she goes off to school, presumably to lose forever in civilization her unique communion with simple beasts.

What Meets the Eye? A Book of the Month Club selection for July, The Lion is the work of a busy Frenchman named Joseph Kessel. Since the age of 20, he has managed to write 30 books, most of them based on his sightseeing. The Lion is the product of two months spent in Kenya in 1954, where he visited just such a game reserve, which was run by just such a warden, who had just such a daughter, who had just such a pet.

In the translation by Peter Green, Kessel's prose comes out as National Geographic exclamatory. Kessel has an eye and nose for Africa, from the way Masai warriors dress their hair (with red clay) to the construction of a native hut (from cow dung). But apparently he was trying to crossbreed Lolita with Rima, the bird-girl, and to enhance the result with the mystical animal overtones of Romain Gary's The Roots of Heaven. He professes to see Patricia as a study in "the passage from innocence to non-innocence." But the reader who, like the monkey, pulls at Kessel's eyelids is apt to find they conceal nothing except what meets the eye.

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