Review: Among the Okapi

John S Taylor, Among the Okapi (FriesenPress 2023)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/152204115-among-the-okapi

Memories of Africa cause ramifications for everyone back home

The last students have left Anatomy class at Waverly College in Toronto where Fred is lab demonstrator. He’s determined to ask his head of department Dr Smith for a pay rise. An affair with the landlady Inge has not saved him from paying rent, but his mind is on a student from his hometown of Darby whom he remembered from high school, Esther.

John Lyon is studying the sales figures of his lager-brewing company. A phone call promises that his son Jason will come home to visit. Wife Daphne is out at a meeting with the arts committee. Esther, their niece, orphaned at age 10, is staying there for a while. The two cousins have never met.

Dr Smith commissions Fred to edit the study he did in Africa on the okapi. Esther, a vegetarian, wants to be excused from dissecting white rats. Dr Smith thinks she look familiar. Fred and Esther bond during a spot of undercover activity.

Chapter 5, we break to quoting every other chapter from Dr Smith’s African journal—his tale of the okapi and of Alice. Every other chapter, however, goes back to the present-time narrative, so we don’t break the continuity.

Dr Smith seems obsessed with a Mark Van Dusen, someone from the Africa days.

These two sets of characters revolve around each other. Jason finally tells Dr Smith, ‘every time there’s been a serious problem in my family, it’s somehow connected to you.’

The characters are all very well developed, and their histories intersect in interesting, complex ways. I would have liked a bit more enlightenment earlier on concerning Van Dusen. When we finally learn, it’s suitably astonishing, with misunderstandings all around.

A very well written story.