SCRIBBLING THE CAT Travels with an African Soldier

Although she writes beautifully, this follow-up to Fuller's immensely successful memoir, DON'T LET'S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT, has the earmarks of a manufactured sequel, rather than a book that needed to be written. With a husband and children waiting for her in America, Fuller cooks up a trip from Zambia through Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) to Mozambique, with K, a war-scarred loner, banana farmer, and former soldier of fortune, in order to write about it. South African-born Lisette Lecat does well with the regional accents of K and other southern African characters met along the way, but she chooses a plummy British drawing-room accent for Fuller that seems, to say the least, counterintuitive. The whole enterprise seems a mixed blessing. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine [Published: DEC 04/ JAN 05]