Wild life | 27 July 2017

Kenya

  We are on the beach, where our home is full of dystopian stories. My daughter Eve is whizzing through her A-level summer reading list, and as we share her books around we all have our noses in post-third world war Australia, the Republic of Gilead, in a submarine London and totalitarian future states. The novelist Lionel Shriver, an author of dystopias herself (with whom I once shared a house in Nairobi, before she called me a ‘spiritual pygmy’ in the dedication of her book Game Control

) says, ‘The greatest joy of dystopian fiction is that it’s make-believe. We can experiment with disaster imaginatively, close the book, then mix that martini.’ I my case I grab a Tusker beer and head back upcountry to the farm to face a dystopia that is very real in the here and now. During our last national elections in 2013 cattle rustlers raided the farm three nights in a row.