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  • The American Scholar

    A Fallen Angel of Mercy

    Mar 05, 2018 4 minutes
    Review by Michela Wrong

    IN FULL FLIGHT: A Story of Africa and Atonement

    BY JOHN HEMINWAY

    Knopf, 336 pp., $27.95

    FOLLOW ANY CONTEMPORARY television drama long enough, and you’ll notice the plot twist. Frustrated and heartbroken by a series of mishaps, a character quits the job, gives up the apartment, plans to leave forever. “Where to?” friends ask, aghast and vicariously excited. “Africa,” comes the answer, although it could just as well be Brobdingnag, El Dorado, or Mordor. What’s required is a nebulous destination offering personal obliteration.

    Exile—or rather, self-exile—to Africa has become a fictive trope in the West because the continent so often served that purpose in reality. For centuries,

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