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Amazon.co.uk Review
Owen Sheers, already picked out as poetry's bright hope by poet laureate Andrew Motion, reveals with The Dust Diaries that he is also a dab hand at biography, travel writing and fiction--all in one gripping book. A stray comment from his grandmother one summer afternoon whets his interest in her uncle--a poet called Arthur Shearly Cripps--and the more Sheers finds out, the more Cripps and his life intrigues him. Gradually, a fragmentary portrait emerges of this distant relative who left England for Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) where he lived as a missionary until his death.
Given the assumption of guilt against missionaries of the era, readers may well be surprised to find themselves warming to Cripps. He was clearly a thorn in the side of both the colonial administration and the Anglican church, constantly siding with the Africans. Yet Sheers does avoid the temptation of making him a saint. Why did this successful man leave England? The untold dust diaries of experience are what Sheers imagines as he tries to come closer to his relative. The book successfully shuffles fictionalised episodes from Cripps's life, including wartime adventure, with Sheers's visits to Zimbabwe. Sheers writes lyrically and vividly of each experience. We come to know his remarkable ancestor, the Shona people he lived with and the troubles and beauty of their land. Fittingly, it is at the all-night, all-singing, all-dancing Shearly Cripps Festival--held at Cripps's grave--that Sheers finally learns what his ancestor means to him, in a very Shona way. --Stefan Tobler
Review
Owen Sheers has written a powerful and evocative biography of his great uncle, who in 1901 travelled to Africa as a missionary. Father Arthur Cripps made Rhodesia his home and his anti-establishment views on religion, land and the natives frustrated the bulldozing machine of white pioneers. The Dust Diaries is his story, but to classify it solely under the genre of biography would be to dispel it as a compelling memoir, a travelogue, history and even a colourful work of fiction. Fluttering between ages, Sheers retells the story of his enigmatic relative, as he retraces, breathes and imagines it. A poet himself, Sheers has drawn breath from Cripps's lyrical lungs and created this beautiful book, significant in Zimbabwe's current affairs. (Kirkus UK)
Poet Sheers, a descendant of his subject, lustrously re-creates the life of Reverend Arthur Cripps: poet, African missionary, thwarted father, a man about six leagues ahead of his European contemporaries. Writing about "my great, great uncle . . . reflected through my imagination," the author pays close attention to the surroundings: "the muezzin's call to pray, skittering across the sky from one of the minarets," the coral-rag buildings of Zanzibar, the ruins of Arthur's church, where he is buried with "a long key in the lock of his grave." Sheers is a highly visual writer; impressions and meanings reveal themselves like the horizons of a dig. ("There were flecks of grey in his neatly-parted hair and Arthur thought again of the white brine on the black funnels, the signature of the storm.") As the author seeks to take his relative's measure, he finds plenty of storms: Arthur's cherished, and pregnant, beloved's father would not let them marry ("Think you can have your way with us, do you? Well, damn you, Mr. Cripps!"); he saw the grotesqueries of WWI as fought out in Africa; and he forever ran counter to the church and the colonial administration in the respect with which he treated the African people. Arthur opposed the hut tax and bitterly noted the "asymmetry of indulgence on behalf of the philanthropic nature of European settlement." Ultimately he was hounded out of his official capacity, a man too appreciative of the Shona's highly developed spiritual intelligence and the maturity of their belief system. But he returned as an independent missionary, an itinerant teacher, minister, and doctor. Sheers reveals Arthur to be a man in love with beauty, with Keats, with faith, and with the people among whom he lived and died. A neat piece of creative nonfiction. (Map, photos) (Kirkus Reviews)
Poet Sheers, a descendant of his subject, lustrously re-creates the life of Reverend Arthur Cripps: poet, African missionary, thwarted father, a man about six leagues ahead of his European contemporaries. Writing about "my great, great uncle . . . reflected through my imagination," the author pays close attention to the surroundings: "the muezzin's call to pray, skittering across the sky from one of the minarets," the coral-rag buildings of Zanzibar, the ruins of Arthur's church, where he is buried with "a long key in the lock of his grave." Sheers is a highly visual writer; impressions and meanings reveal themselves like the horizons of a dig. ("There were flecks of grey in his neatly-parted hair and Arthur thought again of the white brine on the black funnels, the signature of the storm.") As the author seeks to take his relative's measure, he finds plenty of storms: Arthur's cherished, and pregnant, beloved's father would not let them marry ("Think you can have your way with us, do you? Well, damn you, Mr. Cripps!"); he saw the grotesqueries of WWI as fought out in Africa; and he forever ran counter to the church and the colonial administration in the respect with which he treated the African people. Arthur opposed the hut tax and bitterly noted the "asymmetry of indulgence on behalf of the philanthropic nature of European settlement." Ultimately he was hounded out of his official capacity, a man too appreciative of the Shona's highly developed spiritual intelligence and the maturity of their belief system. But he returned as an independent missionary, an itinerant teacher, minister, and doctor. Sheers reveals Arthur to be a man in love with beauty, with Keats, with faith, and with the people among whom he lived and died. A neat piece of creative nonfiction. (Map, photos) (Kirkus Reviews)
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