Violet Nedden, “The Rain Child”
Violet is the first-person narrator of the story, an expatriated British teacher in an African school for more than two decades. Violet’s fractured sense of identity and alienation from her native culture and the culture she’s been surrounded by since leaving is juxtaposed with the arrival of new student, Ruth, just returned from England when her father returns to his homeland. Laurence's recurring themes associated with dualistic identity is put on high intensity display when the Ruth's father is revealed as being unable to freely connect with either the natives of his homeland or the European colonists.
Godman, “Godman’s Master”
Perhaps the most idiosyncratic character in any Laurence short story is Godman. He’s a midget who has been kept hostage inside a box for exploitation as a strange oracle of even stranger prophetic forecasts. Then one day a young man who has been away at college in England returns and liberates Godman who eventually is cast into the world in a way he’s never known: complete and horrible freedom.
Vanessa MacLeod, “A Bird in the House”
A Bird in the House is a novel as short story sequence. The stories are narrated by Vanessa MacLeod as a middle-aged woman looking back upon the events and family dynamics that shaped her life and development into a writer. Vanessa is noted as being a semi-autobiographical character by Laurence.
Adamo, "The Voices of Adamo"
Laurence’s most ironic character might just well be the tribesman named Adamo. His story: his village is wiped out by an epidemic of smallpox which he manages to survive only to wind up along in the jungle. Against heavy odds and haunted by the voices in his head of those he lost he manages to survive his odyssey through the jungle only to wind up with a British regiment whose language he can’t understand and who can’t understand him. He becomes a regimental drummer, thus finding a “new tribe.” The bandleader, Captain Fossey, recognizes that it is merely a short matter of time before Adamo’s country wins independence from English colonial rule and, wanting to ensure Adamo can thrive without his tribe of musicians, put into motion a plan to give him his own freedom and the necessities for survival on his own. The irony ends tragically as both men fail to communicate precisely and Adamo, thinking he is going to be left alone again, kills the Captain out of a despondent terror.
Matthew, “The Drummer of the All the World”
Matthew is the white narrator of this story of the son of a British missionary. Matthew returns to England to go to school while still a boy and ten years later returns a man. The Africa he returns to seems to bear little resemblance to the Africa of his memories. Eventually, he comes to realize that the warm portrait of the Africa he remembers from childhood was always a fantasy vision of the continent open only to colonists seeing things from a much different perspective than the natives.
