Book Review: The Lioness

Synopsis:

Tanzania, 1964. When Katie Barstow, a thirty-year-old A-list actress, and her new husband, David Hill, a gallerist, invite their Hollywood friends to accompany them on their honeymoon to the Serengeti, they envision giraffes gently eating leaves from the tall acacia trees, great swarms of wildebeests crossing the Mara River, and herds of zebras storming the sandy plains. Their glamorous guests — including Katie’s best friend, Carmen Tedesco, and Terrance Dutton, the celebrated Black actor who stars alongside Katie in the highly controversial film Tender Madness — will spend their days taking photos, and their evenings drinking chilled gin and tonics at camp, as the local Tanzanian guides warm water for their baths. The wealthy Americans expect civilized adventure: fresh ice from the kerosene-powered ice maker, dinners of cooked gazelle meat, and plenty of stories to tell over lunch back on Rodeo Drive.

What Katie and her glittering entourage do not expect is a kidnapping gone wrong, their guides bleeding out in the dirt, and a team of Russian mercenaries herding their hostages into Land Rovers with guns to their heads. As the powerful sun gives way to night, the gunmen shove them into abandoned huts and Katie Barstow, Hollywood royalty, prays for one simple thing: to see the sun rise one more time.

The Lioness, by bestselling author Chris Bohjalian, is a thriller in which he explores fame, race, love, and death in a world on the cusp of great change.

Review:

Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-two prior books, including Hour of the Witch, that have been translated into thirty-five languages. Three of his books have been adapted for film and The Flight Attendant became a television series that garnered several industry nominations. He is also a playwright, and has written for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including The Burlington Free Press where he served as a weekly columnist from 1992 through 2015. A graduate of Amherst College, Bohjalian also holds several Honorary Degrees. He resides in Vermont with his wife, Victoria Blewer, a photographer.

Bohjalian says his inspiration for The Lioness was movies. He loves them. One day in 2019 he attended a matinee and was the only person in the theater. He describes emerging from the dark theater into the bright daylight as a “transformative” experience and found himself wondering why he had never written a Hollywood novel. He knew the book would have to be historical fiction because movies no longer “penetrate the cultural zeitgeist” the way they used to. These days, people talk about the shows they watch on various streaming platforms. Case in point: the very first movie he ever saw in a theater was Bonnie and Clyde, released in 1967. Additionally, Bohjalian considered that he had never written a book set in the era in which he grew up — the 1960’s and 70’s. He resolved to set a book in the 1960’s because it was “an era of great cultural and social transformation in the United States and the world.” Next he had to think of a locale to which he could transport Hollywood people and put them in jeopardy. In the 1960’s, Cold War proxy wars were taking place and the Simba rebellion was unfolding as East Africa sought to escape from colonialism, the brutality of the Belgians, and the United Kingdom. So he decided on the Serengeti.

Once he pulled all the elements together, he says the book’s premise was simple: “The biggest star in Hollywood finally gets married and decides to bring her entire entourage with her on a honeymoon safari” which quickly goes horribly wrong. Although he is not usually thought of as a thriller writer, Bohjalian notes that he includes thriller elements in all of his books for two reasons: he loves “dread” and wants his readers “to keep turning the pages.”

Bohjalian and his wife were lucky to go on safari in the Serengeti to conduct research in October 2019, a mere two months after he cemented the concept for The Lioness. He describes the trip as “life-changing for me as a human being and as a novelist.” Far from civilization, their plane landed on a grass strip where two Land Rovers sat ready to carry them to their first camp. His observations of the native wildlife included watching the wildebeest cross the Mara River, as well as instances of natural predators conquering their prey. He also had the opportunity to pose numerous, frequently macabre, questions to his knowledgeable guides, who assured him that the key to remaining safe on safari is following the directions provided. They also shared stories of tourists who failed to do so, which can lead to deadly consequences. The guides explained that exiting a vehicle or leaving a tent at night can prove fatal because “there are so many animals (including snakes) and trees that will kill you.”

Bohjalian deftly incorporates those tangible dangers into The Lioness, making it terrifyingly suspenseful. Some of his characters fail to heed the guides’ warnings, while others find themselves in the wild without their guides by their side through no fault of their own. Regardless, many of Bohjalian’s characters are forced to use what knowledge they possess about nature in an effort to stay alive. Not all of them succeed.

The world shut down in March 2020 when the COVIC-19 pandemic struck. Fortunately, as he and his family sheltered in place, Bohjalian was able to mentally transport himself back to the Serengeti in 1964 as he focused on drafting The Lioness. He says the book will always be close to his heart not only because he is proud of how well it turned out. At a time when he was “in my worst emotional place of my life, it was the book that kept me going.” By mid-March 2020, Bohjalian lost his voice, although he experienced no other symptoms of COVID-19. It took several months to receive an accurate diagnosis, but doctors eventually concluded it is a symptom experienced by a small number of “COVID long-haulers,” including Bohjalian.

Indeed, The Lioness is a masterfully crafted, engrossing story of a thirty-year-old actress, Katie Barstow, who is a major Hollywood star. Bohjalian says the character is an amalgam of Natalie Wood and Elizabeth Taylor. She and her older brother, Billy, are the children of acclaimed stage actors who were abusive. They grew up on Central Park West in a sprawling apartment and Billy bore the brunt of their mother’s toxicity as their father mostly just went along with her actions. Katie has just married Billy’s lifetime best friend, David Hill, whose family resided in the same New York City apartment building. David owns a struggling art gallery in Beverly Hills, and insists that his father works for the CIA but is merely a “paper-pusher” laboring in the agency’s personnel department. Billy is married for the second time to Margie and they are expecting their first child.

Accompanying them on the safari are Felix Demeter, a screenwriter, and his wife, Carmen Tedesco, an actress who has appeared in supporting roles in films with Katie; actor Terrence Dutton, Katie’s co-star and good friend; Reggie Stout, Katie’s publicist; and Katie’s agent, Peter Merrick. At Katie and David’s wedding, they nickname themselves the Lions of Hollywood. Charlie Patton, renowned for leading hunting safaris with Ernest Hemingway, among others, leads the expedition.

You’ll know your moment.

Four days into the safari, the group is kidnapped by evil Russian mercenaries and Bohjalian takes readers along with his characters on a harrowing journey. They are transported in two groups by armed captors led by an intriguing and intermittently charming leader “with ice-blue eyes and a nose that a casting director would kill for if he ever needed a boxer.” As the characters attempt to discern the motive for their abduction, they witness and are subjected to appalling violence. Individually and collectively, they assess whether they can outsmart and overpower their kidnappers, and make their way to freedom. But, of course, they are far from civilization with no idea how far they might have to travel to enlist help. And they are in the Serengeti, surrounded by wildlife including leopards, hyenas, and venomous snakes, so they are forced to weight the risks, including the very real possibility that they might evade their abductors only to perish in the wild. The setting is inarguably one of Bohjalian’s characters, and he vividly describes the landscape, making readers feel the remoteness and isolation, and looming presence of those things that will kill you. He unsparingly details the dangers his characters encounter. “Character and geography intersect in all of my books,” he notes, but they are inextricably and palpably intertwined in The Lioness.

The narrative structure of The Lioness is creative and highly effective. The Prologue, related via a first-person narrative from, presumably, the Lioness, declares, “We went there and (most of us, anyway) died there in 1964.” Each successive chapter focuses on a specific character. Bohjalian reveals both the character’s history and relationship with the other characters, as well as his/her expectations for the trip and what they are experiencing in Africa. Readers learn about the characters’ Hollywood careers and alliances. Bohjalian propels the story forward at a steady pace, but his deftly-timed respites from his characters’ fraught circumstances allow readers to understand, relate to (or not), and develop emotional attachments to the characters so that they become invested in the characters’ fates. Some of the characters are innocent victims who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. And for some of them, the horror they are experiencing dredges up painful memories. For instance, Katie and Billy’s mother used to lock him in a large closet in their home for hours at a time. So when, with his hands and feet bound, he is tossed into a dark hut where all manner of creepy, crawly things might attack, the abuse he sustained as a child intensifies his fears and anxiety. Bohjalian acquaints readers with Benjamin Kikwete, a porter and guest liaison, who proclaims that he’d “rather die charging like a rhino than bleating like a goat.” His story is nothing less than heartbreaking, if inspiring. Some of the characters harbor dark secrets and scandalous pasts that, if brought to light, would cause relationships to fracture and derail careers. Some are betrayers . . . some have been betrayed, but may not know it.

The Lioness is a cautionary tale about fame. Like the Serengeti, Hollywood is a critically important character in the book. At the beginning of each chapter, Bohjalian includes blurbs — some actual, some invented — from a magazine or newspaper that was published in 1964, among them The Hollywood Reporter and Movie Confidential. To do so, he researched the popular movie magazines of the era, dubbing them “Twitter’s ancestor.” Much the way social media does today, those magazines influenced the public’s beliefs and perceptions about actors and actresses, often exploiting but sometimes keeping performers’ secrets (e.g., Rock Hudson, Liberace), and spreading fake news. Bohjalian also weaves pop culture history into the story, including references to stars of the day. For example, famed Caucasian film director Otto Preminger dated Dorothy Dandridge, a Black actress, but their relationship was “only alluded to” in the magazines and trade publications. As the story progresses, Bohjalian cleverly unveils how fame plays into his characters’ predicament, paving the way for the horrors they experience.

Bohjalian also explores racial tensions. Terrence Dutton, a successful Black actor, recently co-starred in a film with Katie. They have been great friends for some time, but their relationship has remained platonic, in part, because if a romance became public, Katies observes, Terrence would never again work in Hollywood. The movie they made was controversial and one particular scene stopped short of their characters kissing. Bohjalian examines how Terrence’s experiences and complex emotions as a Black American visiting Africa differ from those of the other members of the group. He interacts not only with his traveling companions, but also with the African guides and porters who work for Charlie Patton. For example, Benjamin is thrilled to be serving the group and notes how down-to-earth Terrence is. He can’t wait to tell his father that Terrence, who is only the third Black man from America Benjamin has ever met, told Benjamin to address him by his first name. Will he get the chance?

Reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and, more recently, Peter Swanson’s Nine Lives, characters are eliminated, one by one, in various dramatic and horrific ways. Simultaneously, Bohjalian reveals who organized the kidnapping and why, pulling together various story threads and clues dropped along the way, and again demonstrating what an adept and creative storyteller he is.

The Lioness is an engrossing, entertaining, and wildly inventive mystery populated with fully developed, compelling characters. It’s a page-turner — an adventure set in the most exotic location imaginable — filled with plenty of themes to keep readers both guessing and thinking about the price of fame and glamor, and how well anyone can really ever know those closest to them. What might they do if faced with similar threats? And what about the title character? Who is The Lioness? Does she survive? Once again, Bohjalian has created a strong female character who exhibits bravery, determination, and resolve she did not even know she possessed until faced with unimaginable danger. By the end of the story, she confesses, “I really do see myself in my mind as a lioness . . .”

Excerpt from The Lioness

Chapter One

Katie Barstow

Hollywood royalty gathered Saturday night at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where Katie Barstow wed Rodeo Drive gallerist David Hill. The two of them left afterward for Paris and then the wilds of Africa on a “safari.” Rumor has it that the actress is bringing along an entourage into the jungle that will include her brother and sister-in-law, Billy and Margie Stepanov; her agent, Peter Merrick; her publicist, Reggie Stout; actress Carmen Tedesco and her husband, Felix Demeter; and Katie’s friend and co-star in the still controversial Tender Madness, Terrance Dutton. The little group has nicknamed themselves the Lions of Hollywood — though anyone who knows Katie Barstow or has seen her on the screen understands that she is the lioness in charge of this pride.

—The Hollywood Reporter, November 9, 1964

She was watching the giraffes at the watering hole after breakfast, no longer as awed by their presence as she’d been even four days ago, when she’d first seen a great herd of them eating leaves from a copse of tall umbrella acacia, their heads occasionally bobbing up to stare back, unfazed and not especially alarmed by the humans. Their eyes were sweet. Their horns were the antennae on a child’s extraterrestrial Halloween mask. The inscrutable creatures were wary of these humans, but they felt no need to flee.

They’d just finished breakfast and were still at their camp. Her husband, David, was on her left, and her brother, Billy, was on her right. Both had their cameras out. Terrance was sitting nearby with his notebook on his knees, sketching the creatures. Katie had known that Terrance was as talented a visual artist as he was an actor–her husband loved his paintings — but she was still stunned by how quickly and how remarkably he was drawing the animals they saw. The eyes of his elephant had broken her heart. Earlier that autumn, when they were still in L.A., David had said it was only a matter of time before he could risk giving the man a show. (“He’s a movie star,” she told David when she heard the hesitation in his voice. “He’s a Black movie star,” David had reminded her, and while he was only acknowledging the backlash he might face from some quarters, she had still felt the need to remind him it was 1964, not 1864. His gallery’s fiscal foundation couldn’t possibly be so weak that it couldn’t withstand blowback from racist critics and so-called connoisseurs.)

The group, all nine of them and their guides, were about to climb into the Land Rovers and start the drive to the next camp, a journey through the savanna that would take three hours if they didn’t stop, but would, in fact, take seven or eight because they expected to pause often for the Serengeti’s great menagerie of animals. You just never knew what you would see and where you might detour. Yesterday, they had been particularly lucky. They had witnessed the great wildebeest crossing at the Mara River: thousands of wildebeest and zebras storming down the sandy banks into the water and attempting to reach the grass on the other side.

There were five giraffes this morning, three with their legs splayed awkwardly as they stretched their long necks down to the water to drink. She felt a small pang of guilt that she was taking for granted her witness to their presence, animals over fifteen feet tall — their legs alone were taller than she was — with their cream-colored coats and those iconic tawny spots. She wondered at the way her mind was wandering instead to the differences between coincidence and synchronicity. Her brother, Billy, a psychologist, had been expounding on the two words over breakfast in the meal tent.

A coincidence, he had said, was the fact that there were nine Americans on this photo safari, and last month two had been caught in the same end-of-the-world traffic jam that brought freeway traffic to a standstill before the Beatles’ appearance at the Hollywood Bowl: Katie’s husband and Katie’s agent. Though David Hill was nearly thirty years younger than Peter Merrick, the idea that they had turned off their engines and stood smoking Lucky Strikes on the highway beside their cars at almost exactly the same moment near almost exactly the same exit had still been fascinating enough that it had broken the ice their first night in the Serengeti, and led David and Peter to bond in ways that transcended the generation and a half that separated them. (It also gave them something less awkward to discuss than the reality that Katie Barstow, their more obvious commonality, made dramatically more money than either of them, or that they were two big, strapping men who depended upon the earning power of a one-hundred-pound woman with a childhood more freakish than fairy tale who was barely five feet tall.)

Synchronicity was something more profound, a connection that suggested a higher power was at work. In this case — on this safari — it was the idea that on their second afternoon in the savanna, one of their guides overheard two of the guests discussing Katie’s latest film and the MGM lion that was the first thing a person saw in the theater, and on a hunch drove the Land Rover to the far side of a tremendous outcropping of boulders, one of the kopjes not far from their camp, and there they were: a female lion and four of her cubs. Regal and proud, the cubs content, all of them lounging in the grass beneath the trees that grew beside the rocks. Even when the second vehicle had roared up behind the first so that everyone could see the animals and snap their photos, the mother lion had done little more than yawn. The cubs looked on a bit more intently, slightly more curious, but since their mother wasn’t alarmed, they merely rolled over, stretched their small arms with deceptively large paws, and found more comfortable positions in the grass. The two Land Rovers were barely a dozen yards from the lioness.

“Katie?”

She turned now toward David.

“I think we need to bring a few home,” her husband said, motioning at the giraffes at the watering hole. “And a couple of zebras. We’d never need a lawn service.”

“The zebras would certainly help. But giraffes don’t eat grass,” she reminded him. They’d just bought a ranch. Or, to be precise, she had just bought a ranch. Thirty acres. It was near Santa Clarita, north of the valley. She’d considered buying something in Malibu, but she’d grown up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a theater kid born to theater parents, and now that she was — and the words simultaneously made her bask and cringe–a movie star, she wanted to steer clear of the mod world that these days marked the sands: the beach houses with their massive windows, circular fireplaces, and Peter Max paintings against the crisp, white walls. She imagined someday she might have a horse. Or horses. One would be lonely. She’d ridden horses in two different movies and enjoyed the experience. She’d felt horrible when she’d watched her stunt double put the animal through some terrifying gallops and then send it to its knees after the creature was, supposedly, shot.

“Point noted,” David agreed.

Beside them, her brother, Billy, was photographing the giraffes with a camera that had a lens so stout it looked to Katie like a club, and his wife, Margie, was staring at the giraffes through binoculars so delicate they reminded Katie of opera glasses. Billy was thirty-five, David’s age and five years her senior, and Margie was thirty-three. Margie had found out she was pregnant in August, and her doctor had thought morning sickness alone was a reason why she shouldn’t go on the safari, but she was game. Said she wouldn’t miss it. This was both her brother’s and Margie’s second marriage. Billy had a four-year-old son at home from his first, but Margie had left no children in her wake when her previous marriage had imploded. Katie knew that she was supposed to want children, and speculated sometimes what it meant that she didn’t. Perhaps she was too ambitious. Or immature. Or selfish. Perhaps it was her hatred of her own parents, who had made her career possible, and yet had also been mercenary and mean and fake. And, yes, cruel. They had not been cruel to each other, which in hindsight was rather surprising, but they had been cruel to Billy and her. (Billy, however, had borne the brunt of the abuse. Most of the real horrors had been inflicted upon him, and it was their mother who was behind the lion’s share of that carnage. How Billy had wound up who he was, rather than whoever was strangling all those women in Boston, was a mystery to her. But, thank God, he had wound up a pretty gentle therapist instead of a pretty violent monster.)

Katie’s team at the studio, her publicist, and her agent all expected that someday soon she and David would have a baby. And most of them had mixed emotions about that. On the one hand, at thirty she was already outgrowing “starlet”: how many more times could she play the ingenue? Besides, now that she was married, it would be unnatural not to have a baby. What would her fans think? On the other hand, most of her entourage disliked the idea of her taking time off, given the box office bullion of everything she touched. Even Tender Madness, her movie with Terrance, had done well, despite the inference in one of the scenes at the mental hospital that the pair had kissed after the cut. (They had, though the moment had wound up on the cutting room floor.)

Reggie Stout was the lone exception: he honestly seemed to want only what she wanted. He was far more to her than a publicist and she put considerably more stock in his counsel than she did in even her agent’s — and she trusted Peter Merrick a very great deal. Reggie seemed as invested in her future and her happiness as a real father might be, though this was supposition since some days she hoped desperately that Roman Stepanov was not her real father. Even now, she and her brother, Billy, joked that both of them were babies who had been swapped out at birth, and they weren’t really related to the two grown-ups who had pretended to be their parents. She had chosen Billy to walk her down the aisle the week before last, since her own father had died last year within days of Jack Kennedy, though in far less dramatic circumstances. He’d had a heart attack in a cab on the way home from the theater. The cabbie, at her mother’s direction, had turned around and raced to St. Luke’s, but her father was dead by the time he was wheeled into the emergency room.

The New York papers would have devoted more space than they did to the Broadway icon’s death, but the president took precedent. Katie was grateful, because the last thing she would have wanted that horrible week was to do press with her mother and have to feign grief. She was a good actress — but not that good. Billy was convinced she had chosen movies over the stage, which was the family business, because it meant that she was usually at least three time zones away from their mother, a woman he once called “a singular rarity: a cold-blooded mammal.” Both siblings detested her. They had disliked their father, with reason, but they had loathed their mother–though, arguably, Billy had greater cause than Katie.

“This is when the giraffe is most vulnerable,” Emmanuel, their African guide, was saying, his accent sounding both British and Maasai to Katie. “How much does a giraffe’s neck weigh?” he asked good-naturedly. He was easily seventy, and he was like a schoolteacher with these Americans. He didn’t merely want them to see the Serengeti: he wanted them to understand it. It was a world that he loved and a world he loved sharing.

“Easily six hundred pounds,” Katie answered. She was the only one of the nine guests who’d never been to college, and she understood it was a little pathetic the way she always had to be first with the correct answer. But she did. She needed Emmanuel’s approval.

Carmen was like that, too, though she had been to college. In her case, Katie supposed, it was because Carmen always played supporting roles: she was usually the leading lady’s best friend or sister, the gal with a couple of memorable wisecracks but never the sort of scene that allowed her to show off real acting chops. Being the smartest woman in the room was her way of compensating.

“Good, good,” Emmanuel was reassuring her. “It takes time to look up and look around. That’s why they don’t all drink at once.”

“And their legs,” Katie said. “They’re in no position to run.”

“No,” Emmanuel agreed. “Excellent.”

David put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her into him. He whispered into her ear, “Thank you.”

She turned from the giraffes to her husband. They’d now been married thirteen days. They’d honeymooned alone–in style and civilization–in Paris, before meeting the other seven guests she was bringing on safari at the airport outside Paris and flying to Nairobi. Now they were still traveling in style and in a most civilized fashion–the kerosene-powered ice maker the excursion company provided awed her, because, of course, you had to have a proper gin and tonic at the end of a long day on safari–though the civilization was provided by an entourage of seventeen Kenyans and Tanzanians (including two armed rangers), sixteen of whom were Black. The exception was Charlie Patton, no relation, he pointedly told everyone as soon as he was introduced, to the American general. Patton had once been one of the great white hunters, born to colonials at the very end of the nineteenth century–he still had the sort of handlebar moustache she associated with cavalry officers from another era–but he had figured out the real money now was with the likes of movie stars such as Katie Barstow. People who wanted to photograph elephants, not shoot them. People who might want a zebra rug or a zebra purse but didn’t want to see the damn thing actually killed.

“Thank you for what?” she asked David, turning from the guide to her husband. She spoke softly in response to his whisper. The camera loved it when she spoke quietly, and directors had often told her that her voice, when she murmured, was gold.

“For this,” he said. “For bringing me here. For bringing us here.”

She took his fingers that were on her shoulder and brought them to her lips. She kissed them. Though David was her first husband, three years ago she had been briefly engaged. That fellow — that actor — had been threatened by her bank account. Not by her, but by her box office grosses. She had broken it off when he disappeared, drunk, the night of the Wild Girl premiere. He ended up going to Italy to lick his wounds and be the bad guy in bad films: Gunfight in Bloody Sands and The Smoking Winchester. Her brother the shrink had warned her that it would be difficult to find a man she might actually love who would ever be completely comfortable with her success, unless he were at least as successful. But men like that? They were rare. Grace Kelly had had to marry an honest-to-God prince. Elizabeth Taylor had just married her fifth husband, Richard Burton, an actor whose star was as bright as hers, even if the movies weren’t the blockbusters that Liz’s were.

But David was different. He was a gallerist: he owned a gallery in Beverly Hills. He’d grown up in Manhattan, too, in the same building as her own family, and had always been in her world because of his friendship with Billy. In some ways, he’d been like an older brother to her, too — albeit one she lost touch with until he moved west and opened a gallery on the corner of Rodeo and Brighton. Her brother was the one who’d suggested they get together, and so they had: he’d brought David to her house that first time and then had the two of them to his place for lunch. Their first date had been dinner at Taylor’s Steakhouse.

“It is amazing, isn’t it?” she said to him now. “More magic than I ever expected.”

The giraffes that were drinking raised their gargantuan necks and joined the two others that were staring at the five humans. They grew more attentive. Alert. She tried to imagine what one of them had done to interest the giraffes, but suddenly they were retreating, retreating fast, racing in that distinctive giraffe gait: what Emmanuel called “pacing,” the two right legs moving and then the two left. She smiled at their beauty, their grace, but then she heard the pops behind her, understood they were gunshots, and — more curious than alarmed — along with all of the people around her turned to look back at the camp.