NAIROBI, MON AMOUR

By R.Z. Sheppard

One sign of a civilization's slippage is the ease with which it blurs the line between tragedy and farce. Consider Justin Cartwright's Masai Dreaming (Random House; 287 pages; $23), a novel about the making of a Hollywood adventure movie with a Holocaust hook. The satirical possibilities are unnerving. Spectacular East African scenery, colorful colonials and free-range tribesmen, with the Final Solution worked in. How about Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts?

Spiraling gracefully toward that conclusion, Cartwright, a novelist with film experience, often becomes the target of his own satire. At the center of the story is S.O. Letterman, a movie producer who starts off high-minded and ends with his eye on the box office. Letterman does not give a rat's rump for historical truth. Tim Curtiz, a London-based journalist taking a crack at a lucrative script-writing assignment, does. The subject of the movie, called Masai Dreams, is a striking French anthropologist named Claudia Cohn-Casson, whose work among the Masai, and whose fate at the hands of the Nazis, illustrate the collapse of the 20th century's grandest assumptions about reason and scientific objectivity.

Curtiz pieces the Cohn-Casson story together from interviews with people who knew her in the '30s. An old Masai spiritual leader tells of his nephew who may have been Claudia's lover. A former British army officer describes his romance with Cohn-Casson and her return to Paris during the final months of World War II. Why would an intelligent, worldly Jew deliberately return to Hitler's Europe? While Curtiz is pursuing the answer in Kenya and Tanzania, Letterman is busy in Paris checking out every aspect of a celebrated French actress. She turns out to be a transsexual--just one of the illusions shattered on the hard, polished surface of this novel.

A bit too polished, in fact. Cartwright's characters have more than one dimension, and his view of a culturally debased world is properly droll. But he can't resist tarting up his tale with a bit of porn and pretense. He gravely quotes Elie Wiesel on how Auschwitz negates any attempt to fictionalize it, and then includes fictional scenes of the Holocaust. And did Cartwright really have to call his journalist hero Curtiz, which sounds like Joseph Conrad's Kurtz? Can't anybody write about Africa without invoking Heart of Darkness?