Living 'in between' in chaotic 1950s Kenya

The In-Between World of Vikram Lall

By M. G. Vassanji

Knopf, 372 pp., $25

For so many of us whose impressions of Kenya were shaped by two memoirs, ''The Flame Trees of Thika" by Elspeth Huxley and ''Out of Africa" by Isak Dinesen, M. G. Vassanji's newest book is a revelation. Brilliantly written and deeply felt, it is a resonant family novel that is also a brutally honest portrayal of the last half century of tumultuous Kenyan history.

Vassanji explores a group of people as vital to Kenya as the white colonialists and hunters and the black Kikuyu and Masai, a group practically invisible in the literature of the Dark Continent: the Indian Africans who came to Kenya to build the railroads and roads at the beginning of the 20th century, who lived in backbreaking penury and indescribable loneliness, whose sons were born in Kenya as British citizens and became the canny shopkeepers of every thriving Kenyan town. These ''brown Shylocks," as Vassanji refers to them several times, were forced to live on the fringes of society, much as the medieval Jews did. They and their sons inhabit the ''in-between world" of Vassanji's title, a place where ''myth and reality often got mixed up in our lives." Vikram tells us, ''I therefore prefer my place in the middle, watch events run their course. This is easy, being an Asian, it is my natural place." Yet to live in such a world is to live in limbo, and Vikram's story is heartbreaking and all too relevant in these times fraught with so much conflict about race and belief.