Book Review 

Desert God, by Wilbur Smith 

Born in Zambia in 1933, Wilbur Smith knows Africa like no other writer. His writing career has so far lasted an impressive 54-years. During this time he has written a prodigious amount of stories about love, friendship, war, and adventure with indefatigable gusto. His latest novel is a clear indication that there is still plenty of lead left in his pencil. On a personal side note, Smith´s debut, When the Lion Feeds, remains a timeless classic and one of my all-time favorites. 

Desert God is the latest installment in Smith´s series of ancient Egypt, and our hero is once more the intrepid eunuch Taita, servant and friend of the mighty Pharaoh Tamose. The soaring majesty of the previous paragraph notwithstanding, the timeline of the series is somewhat confusing and Desert God fits into the middle, between the events in The Seventh Scroll and Warlock. Luckily, new readers need not fear, since the story is written to be more or less a stand-alone.  

The plot begins with war and turmoil. Following an invasion by a warlike tribe known as the Hyksos, the people of Egypt have been forced out of their homeland and now live in their new kingdom on the upper banks of the river Nile. With the war against the savage Hyksos having reached a bloody stalemate, it falls to Taita to devise a cunning scheme to save his beloved Egypt and restore Pharaoh Tamose to his rightful kingdom. The future of Egypt hangs in the balance and Taita´s plan to save it hinges on an alliance with the insidious Minoan kingdom of Crete. Their baleful ruler who, besides a penchant for human sacrifice, has the largest fleet in the Mediterranean. As if all this wasn´t enough, Taita is also in charge of two lovely royal princesses, Bekatha and Tehuti, who needs to be kept as far away as possible from all the young males of Egypt until they can secure the vital alliance with Crete through marriage. 

Before that can happen, Taita and his princesses, accompanied by a band of loyal followers, must embark on a long and dangerous journey. A journey that will take them across the deserts of Arabia, to the fabled city of Babylon and finally across the stormy waters of the Mediterranean. To brave the many dangers of their expedition, Taita and his friends must summon up all their courage and resolve. At the same time Taita´s cunning is stretched to breaking point trying to prevent the princesses from becoming too friendly with a pair of strapping young army officers serving with the expedition 

As usual when reading one of Smith´s novels, the reader is treated to a lavishly captivating story, and you find yourself breezing through the pages seemingly without any conscious effort. There are very few other writers in the world capable of writing adventure stories with the same effortless ease as Wilbur Smith, a skill he has obviously honed to perfection throughout his long career. 

Amid all my praise however, there is the occasional small fly in the ointment. Taita, the protagonist of the story, must be the single most talented human being of all time. Besides possessing a preternaturally sharp intellect he can switch roles effortlessly from playing the lute and singing to his princesses to developing staggering engineering projects to riding his war chariot while turning a hairy Hyksosian into a pincushion with his compound bow. Protagonists should be made to feel human to be relatable, we are often told, and Taita´s only conceivable weakness is the fact that he is a eunuch. Even this is turned to his advantage, since it gives him a most lovely singing voice when he plays the lute (I haven´t heard it myself but I trust the writer on this). 

In the end I capitulate completely before Smith´s latest novel. His writing career has been an astoundingly varied one, despite the fact that all his books have taken place on the same continent. No one can make the wild wastes of Africa come alive with the same colorful splendor, and no one can write an adventure story that is more eminently readable. Desert God undoubtedly deserves a place on your bookshelf.