NONFICTION - Dec. 19, 1993

THE GREAT SAFARI: The Lives of Joy and George Adamson by Adrian House (Morrow: $25; 465 pp.) Just when you thought you knew everything there was to know about the lion people, here’s Adrian House with a fresh, exuberant new biography. The Adamsons’, of course, was a marriage made in hell--and lived in heaven (or Eden; or more precisely, Kenya, “a showcase of creation”). Here’s Joy on George: “dirty, smelly, stupid, uncultured, silent, stingy, untruthful.” Here’s George on Joy: Nada. (He was not dirty, smelly, stupid. . . . He was silent.) According to House, arbiter and editor who published them both, George, a game warden from England, was a man of compassion and integrity, afraid of nothing, “tough as goats’ knees” and one of Kenya’s “best-loved persons.” Joy, an amateur artist from Austria, was “volatile, romantic, troubled, compulsively unfaithful,” passionate in every sense of the word. Only while on Safari were they compatible; happily for us all, that was often.

Nature is the star of House’s book, as it must be; Nature and her creatures: the mongooses that sleep with Joy far more than George does; the hyrax that insists on its own portable toilet; elephants that charge and ostriches that kill and cheetahs that purr. Even those quirky, unpredictable two-legged beasts. (Joy to her diary during a hot trip across the Sahara: “Camped in a sandstorm in a sand dune. Too tired to bathe. G. wants a naked photo of me again.”)

Snarling and clawing at each other all the way, the Adamsons, starting out “with no more than courage, curiosity and a love of independence,” transformed their world. And ours.