In my never-ending quest for something to read I have taken to scanning the Penguin Classic lists on my Kindle. This was the only one in the first fifty or so I hadn’t read, though I have seen the play, so I thought I’d give it a try. Basically, stick with the play. This is a very silly boy’s own adventure, though I did enjoy that the boy was a colonial from Rhodesia (which is now Zimbabwe). The British people in the novel seemed to regard anyone who had survived Africa with awe, and consider him capable of all kinds of derring-do. I don’t know why I never get this kind of response from the British.