The Dust Diaries by Owen Sheers

...and the largest strand, a piecemeal novel taking up Cripps's decades in Africa...

...Sheers uses his captivating biographical fiction to comprehend the split nature of Cripps's character, joining the man's moral stringency with his swooning, poet's susceptibility to beauty...

...the screen upon which Europe threw the pattern of its inner fantasies, both noble and corrupt...

...He did so by becoming a thorn in the side of administrators (and his own superiors in the church hierarchy) bent on producing docile African Christians for the colonial labor market...

...simple, direct and just a little ridiculous" to a litterateur district commissioner who envisions him the subject of a novel...

...he runs his finger across the page, "tracing the looping, slanting ink that ran back through the pen to your hand...

...Beneath all the playful narrative undercutting lies a haunted fascination with time and mortality...

...their memories of the man tend to mirror their own life values and predicaments...

...By laying bare both the procedures and the implications of his attempt to capture Cripps in narrative, Sheers highlights the contingent nature of history, our collective memory...

...perhaps not...

...For a Cecil Rhodes, of course, the lure of Africa was obvious...

...The Dust Diaries is finally a sympathetic portrait of a turn-of-last-century sensibility, part muscular Christianity, part passionate Romanticism, and part fiery late-Victorian reformism...

...Studying photos of Cripps in boyhood and old age, he feels "uneasy," sensing "something voyeuristic in my ability to have the boy and the old man in front of me, a lifespan laid out on the table...

...Owen Sheers, poet and Oxonian himself, had heard about his ancestor in family conversations over the years...

...The Dust Diaries gives us both a moving human story and the author's commentary on the problematic nature of composing that story...

...A handful of obscure references in poems and other documents hint at romantic tragedy: a woman left behind in Britain, possibly a child fathered out of wedlock...

...The language of The Dust Diaries bears a poet's stamp of beauty...

...I must admit to being skeptical about "on the trail of" books...

...The Dust Diaries is Owen Sheers's investigation of the life of his great-great-uncle, Arthur Sheerly Cripps...

...An Oxford graduate, poet, and Anglican priest, Cripps left England in 1901 for Rhodesia, where he lived for half a century as an impoverished and notably eccentric missionary, in the process authoring a 1927 treatise, An Africa for Africans, that raised an angry voice on behalf of the colonized...

...He lay there for a moment, listening to the night outside: the turning of the sea's pages, the hush and fizz of the waves on the shore, the sudden screeching and confusion of two cats fighting, then silence...

...Historical figures wander in for sparkling cameos, like the notoriously brutal hunter and soldier Richard Meinertzhagen, about whom Cripps wrote a nightmarish poem...

...These musings reveal a romantic's awe at the sublime nature of time and its powers of oblivion, burying the living Cripps under "a hundred years of forgotten memories...

...Is The Dust Diaries' version of Cripps's life, the theory Sheers himself puts forth about the man, true...

...a wielder of magical powers to the Mashona peasants he lives among, who know him as Kambandakoto, or "He-Who-Goes-About-As-A-Poor-Man...

...Armed with boxes of correspondence and manuscripts, Sheers set out to shed light on his forebear and the mystery of why he abandoned Europe for a life in the veld...

...The Arthur Cripps of The Dust Diaries is many things to many people: "a troublemaker, a liberal, and a negrophile" to officers of the British South Africa Company, whose policies he opposes...

...This story is written as a fiction," Sheers explains, "the fiction I formed in my mind so as to better understand Arthur's life...

...Struck by a life "almost penitential in nature, as if governed by a duty of atonement," he suspects some buried wound...

...It's a challenging life to take on...

...Sheers shows us a man who found his life bearings almost entirely in reading-Keats first and foremost, but also David Livingstone, Rider Haggard, and Olive Schreiner- deriving an idealism all the more uncompromising for its being essentially literary...

...Paralleling empire's project of mining the continent for buried treasure, novelists explored a moral and psychological geology, digging deep into the self to discover what lay beneath...

...curiosity and a vague intuition of affinity spurred him to find out more...

...But what about the fringe figures of empire, the explorers, the bureaucrats and missionaries...

...Perhaps," the author muses...

...As for Sheers, he develops his own thesis about the man...

...He writes it into his book...

...To unearth someone from oblivion, Sheers perceives, is both rescue and appropriation-"colonizing your life with my imagination," he writes, addressing the ghost of his ancestor...

...Doing so lies somewhere between discovery, fabrication, and interpretation-Sheers burrowing through a life of driven service to a core of sorrow, attempting to locate in Cripps a specific, personal love as profound as the man's selfless idealistic love of Africans...

...nndeed, The Dust Diaries could have been written simply as a historical novel, and a good one...

...This may sound dryly academic, but it isn't...

...unsettlingly attractive to a bored frontier wife whose dinner table he enlivens...

...And yet it has the truth of fiction, persuading us by letting us inhabit it...

...Uncivilized Africa served as a blankness or void: the veld, the bush...

...The Dust Diaries comprises three narrative strands: Sheers's evocation of August 1,1952, and a small hut where the blind, octogenarian missionary is living out his last hours...

...But Sheers has redeemed the genre brilliantly, with a thoughtful, lovely, and innovative work...

...too many seem like excuses for the writer's excellent adventure...

...Sheers's haunted elegy of a book is postmodern in structure, but its soul is Romantic to the core...

...One reads The Dust Diaries as a twenty-first-century poet's ode to a nineteenth-century forebear, and to his attempt to locate in poetic ecstasy a viable stance for confronting injustice in the world...

...There's a love story there, Sheers decides...

...People in Zimbabwe relate conflicting impressions of Cripps...

...But Sheers has larger ambitions, and they involve frequently interrupting his story to show us how he put it together...

...in Sheers's hands, it comes off as elegant testimony to the stubborn elusiveness of the past...

...Mixed themes of paradise and exile mirror in a "mysterious" continent the mystery of its conquerors...

...Sheers insists this is not simply a benign process...

...Above all," writes Sheers, "he wanted to prove himself worthy...

...Thus we read an engrossingly detailed scene, set in the 1930s, between Cripps and his longtime personal secretary, Leonard Mam-vura-then turn the page to find Sheers in Africa, visiting the real-life Mamvu-ra, who is providing information Sheers will later use to write the fictional scene we have already read...

...From now on, Cripps will largely become the person we meet in these pages-left for posterity as Sheers has re-created him here...

...Ironically he joins himself to the company of empire: like those digging for gold or for souls, the writer digs the past for stories, unearthing historical figures and making them his own...

...It's startling to shift time frames and genres like this, to be repeatedly reminded that the engrossing reality we've been enjoying is a fictional construct...

...Opening a packet of Cripps's correspondence, Sheers imagines he is inhaling the same air his great-great-uncle breathed over them a century ago...

...his own travel report from current-day Zimbabwe, where he tracks down the dwindling circle of elderly people who knew his great-great-uncle...

...Rand Richards Cooper reviews movies for Commonweal, and is the author of two books of fiction...

...But Sheers proves a skillful novelist as well, deftly portraying vivid secondary characters, such as the pugnacious Bishop William Gaul, who removes his cleric's collar before delivering a pugilistic rebuke to a drunkenly abusive Irish railway worker...