Reading Matters

'419' by Will Ferguson

Fiction - hardcover; Viking Books; 399 pages; 2012.

For me, the best kind of literature is the kind that makes you look at something afresh or takes you to a location (or time in history) that you would never normally visit. Will Ferguson's 419 is that kind of literature.

In short, it is about a Canadian man who gets stung by a Nigerian email scam, but it is also about the cultural and financial disparity between Africa and the West. It is a heady mix of adventure story, crime fiction and global thriller — albeit with a distinctive 21st century twist.

Caught in a web of deception

This rather ambitious novel has multiple storylines and a wide cast of characters. The central thread revolves around the death of Henry Curtis, a retired school teacher now working as a part-time watchman, who dies in an unusual traffic accident: his car, travelling at very high speeds, runs off the road one night and tumbles into a snowy ravine underneath a bridge. Initially, it is thought he may have hit a patch of black ice, but later, when it is revealed that his car made two attempts to leave the road, his death is chalked up as suicide. 

When the home he shares with his wife — also a retired school teacher — is repossessed by the bank, it appears that Mr Curtis had numerous, and hefty, financial debts. He had, rather naively, been taken in my an email scam (known in Nigeria as "419" after the criminal code which makes this kind of activity illegal), the type most of us would ignore or delete if they made their way through our SPAM filter.

SUBJECT: Urgent Matter to the Attention of Mr. Henry Curtis. Please do not turn away!
RECEIVED: September 12, 11:42PM

Complements of the season! With warm heart I offer you wishes of good health from Africa. I am contacting you today regarding an urgent business proposal, and though this letter may reach you as a surprise, I implore you to take the time to go through it carefully as the decision you make will go a long ways toward determining the future and continued existence of a young woman's happiness. Sir, I am writing today on behalf of Miss Sandra, daughter of Dr. Atta, late Director & Chairman of the Contract Award Committee for the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. As you may know, Dr. Atta died tragically in a helicopter crash in the Niger Delta under circumstances most suspicious. Miss Sandra's uncle vowed to care for her, but he too has fallen afoul of government-backed criminals...

His two adult children — Warren and Laura — take his death and the impending loss of the family home in different ways. Warren, a married man with children, is prone to loud outbursts, all air and fury, while Laura, a single woman who makes her living as a copy editor, decides to beat the scammers at their own game.

Multiple storylines

In a second storyline, we meet the scammer — Winston — who runs his one-man operation out of a cyber cafe in Lagos. Winston is cleverer than most — he's figured out that it pays to choose your targets carefully and "once hooked, it became a matter of playing them, of reeling in the line, overcoming their initial resistance, giving them slack at certain times, pulling taut at others". But Winston is playing a dangerous game, because the world of cyberscamming is deftly controlled by street-gang syndicates who don't appreciate those who go it alone.

A third storyline introduces Nnamdi, an innocent boy from a fishing village in the Niger Delta, who becomes unwittingly tied up with a Nigerian "mafia" boss who runs many of these internet scams. But when we first meet Nnamdi, he is working on Bonny Island — the terminus of the Trans-Niger Pipeline at the mouth of the Delta — where he "took motors apart and put them back together. He oiled bearings, cleaned cogs, replaced timing belts". His situation is in stark contrast to the rest of his peers, many of whom are blowing up pipelines and kidnapping Western employees to get the message across that the global oil corporations are not welcome in the Delta.

Later, he meets and rescues a pregnant woman, who is from the Sahel "from a clan rumoured to carry Arabian blood in their veins". This storyline — perhaps the weakest of the multiple ones that Ferguson juggles in choppy, sometimes staccato fashion — serves to show us how innocent, well-meaning people, such as Nmadi, can get caught up in events bigger than themselves. And it also shows us how corruption permeates through almost every facet of Nigerian life.

Ambitious novel

From my description above, it's pretty clear that 419 is a big, sprawling novel, filled with all kinds of social, political and economic messages about the state of the world today.

It's by no means a perfect novel — sometimes it feels like facts, especially the ways in which these "419 scams" work are being shoe-horned in, and it can never seem to work out its mind whether it's a literary novel, a travel adventure or a sociopolitical thriller. It also experiments with style — sometimes the chapters are only several paragraphs long, and the section about Nnamdi could almost be extracted as a stand alone novella — not always successfully.

But, on the whole, this is a gripping read, one that feels authentic and edgy. It takes a big picture view and marries a cracking good plot with finely crafted prose and believable characters. And I suspect it would make a brilliant film, not least because of Ferguson's eye for detail and the visual quality of his writing.

Of the three Giller Prize shortlisted novels I have reviewed so far, I would be more than happy to see this one win it.

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I read this book as part of the Shadow Giller Prize 2012. For another take on this novel, please see KevinfromCanada's review. Thanks to Mrs KevinfromCanada for hand-delivering this copy to me.

'Something Is Going to Fall Like Rain' by Ros Wynne-Jones

Fiction - Kindle edition; Acorn Digital Press; 250 pages; 2012. Review copy courtesy of the author.

“El Niño caused the drought, but human beings caused the famine,” admits one of the aid workers very early on in this story, which is, by turns, inspiring, terrifying, heart-hammering and desperately sad. First published in 2009 and recently re-released in a Kindle edition, Something is Going to Fall Like Rain is set in southern Sudan some 10 years before it acquired independence.

An African adventure

The story is told from the point-of-view of a female aid worker, Maria Marshall, a trainee doctor from London, who is grieving over the death of her single parent mother.

Not long after Maria arrives in the remote village of Adek, in war-torn southern Sudan, and meets her two colleagues — Billy, from the US, and Sean, from Northern Ireland — than the local airfield is bombed. This means all three aid workers are now trapped, because the roads are too treacherous for travel, and a news blackout is put in place in case the story should "attract the attention of Government militias interested in Western hostage taking".

Now that she no longer has the option to return home, Maria must adapt to a new way of life and confront the reality of famine and sickness, "where everyone has lost someone. Fathers and brothers to the war, daughters to famine and childbirth, mothers to rape and sickness, children to bombs".

We stayed put and the food drops came down from the sky, a beacon attracting many more thousands of people from across Bahr el Ghazal and up into the neighbouring province of Darfur, drawing like a magnet any family capable of walking. New arrivals told us thousands more people – the sick, the very youngest and the elderly – were being buried daily by their surviving relatives in dusty graves across the plains towards Adek or left marooned in flooded villages facing certain famine and death. Arriving in Adek meant at least a fragile chance of life, however desperately short we were of food. But it also made the village even more vulnerable than before – a sitting duck target for militia attack or Government bombings. “It’s a cat and mouse game now,” Billy said.

Maria makes friends with many of the village residents, including a young boy who has been severely crippled by polio and the Chief who wanders around in a woman's dressing gown unaware of how ridiculous he looks, and learns about the Dinka way of life. And all the while she works around the clock helping to distribute basic food aid to the thousands of famine victims who flock to the camp.

Hints of a lucky escape

For much of the story, it feels like nothing much happens, but because the narrative is being told retrospectively by Maria ten years later, we get hints of something terrible occurring. It is these small nuggets of information interspersed through Maria's chronological account of her time in Adek that keeps the reader turning the pages. What happened when she was there? And how did she return to the UK?

I admit to myself for perhaps the first time, that the malaria is not the only recurring damage from Southern Sudan. That a decade ago a part of me died in Adek’s marketplace. That my label of ‘survivor’ is not the whole story because not all of me survived. After Sudan, something closed off hard inside me, suddenly and painfully, as if a part of my inner self had been cauterised without anaesthetic, irreparably and violently damaged. Something burned and blackened began lurking in the corners of my imagination, a wounded minotaur stalking the bloodied chambers of my heart and mind.

An authentic tale

The best thing about Something is Going to Fall Like Rain is that it feels authentic. That's probably because Wynne-Jones is an award-winning journalist who has worked in conflict zones around the world — from South Sudan to East Timor, Kosovo to Rwanda — and I suspect much of it is based on first-hand experience.

She is able to bring Africa and her people to life, and she can also write searingly good sentences, too:

The empty glass Ark stood grounded on dry land, sitting astride its own Godless in-land Ararat. Above the noise of the traffic, it seemed to me I could actually hear the sky-scrapers scraping the grey sky.

But occasionally the prose feels a bit forced when background information on the political situation is being explained — usually via extended pieces of dialogue — and I would have liked to have known more about Sean and Billy, both of whom seemed slightly two dimensional. But these are minor quibbles.

This is an excellent read, harrowing in places, heartwarming in others. And as a debut novel it is confident and self-assured. If you liked Andrea Eames' The White Shadow, Chris Abani's Song for Night and Gil Courtemanche's A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, then add this one to your list, because it is of a similar heart-rending ilk.

'The White Shadow' by Andrea Eames

Fiction - paperback; Harvill Secker; 336 pages; 2012. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Andrea Eames is a young writer, who grew up in Africa, moved to New Zealand and now lives in the USA. The White Shadow is her second novel.

An African coming-of-age tale

The story is set in Rhodesia during the guerrilla war of the late 1960s. But this is not a book about the war, although the political situation is ever present and the soldiers — "white people who passed through our town, thin and bitter as woodsmoke" — are often mentioned in passing.

Instead, this is essentially a coming-of-age tale about a young boy growing up in a rural village, who wants to better himself by getting an education and going to university. Tanishe is partly inspired by his rich uncle, who drives a big silver car and lives in the city, and his cousin, Abel, who visits the village during school holidays and has everything a young boy could wish for.

But events and circumstances conspire against Tinashe, not least his troublesome younger sister, Hazvinei, whom he must protect from the forces of the Shona spirit world and the unwanted attention of men, and the sudden arrival of cholera in the village.

A tragic story

This is not a happy story, although the descriptions of Tinashe's simple childhood pleasures — swimming in the river, walking to the bottle shop for a coke and exploring the kopje on foot — are delightful. It is the ever-present threat of danger — whether it be from the war, the witch doctors, domestic violence or disease outbreaks — that gives the narrative a bit of bite and makes it a page turner.

Eames paints a fascinating portrait of an African childhood and of the friendship between the three main characters — Tinashe, Hazvinei and Abel — and how this changes and is tested over time.

And her prose, which is simple and fable-like, is hugely evocative of Africa, of the heat, the dust and a way of life in which Catholicism often takes a back seat to voodoo and witch doctors. She also does a wonderful job of contrasting city life with rural life and of showing the difference in attitude between blacks and whites, men and women, the educated and the non-educated. Less impressive is her slight obsession with bodily functions — there's a lot of menstruation and going to the toilet — and male genitalia in this novel.

Some inconsistencies

I also thought there were some inconsistencies in characterisation and voice — for instance, I didn't find the male voice convincing and thought Tinashe, as a toddler, was far too wise and knowing for his years  — but I quite liked the way the story shows how people's life paths are often determined by their family background, the order of their birth and their gender.

The White Shadow is far from sappy and sentimental, but there's a genuinely heart-rending aspect to the tale. For instance, when Tinashe throws away a golden opportunity to secure his future in order to do the right thing by his selfish, bratty sister I felt distressed — and annoyed — by his misplaced loyalty. 

All in all, this is an effortless read that combines shocking true-to-life events with folklore and great sensitivity.

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The publisher Harvill Secker offered this book to our Riverside Readers book group. Everyone enjoyed the story and we awarded it a total of 7 out of 10.

'Down the Rabbit Hole' by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Fiction - paperback; And Other Stories; 74 pages; 2011. Translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Most of us understand the phrase "down the rabbit hole" as a reference to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. But the only similarity between that novel and this one is the surreal nature of the journey the reader is taken on.

Juan Pablo Villalobos's novella Down the Rabbit Hole was recently shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award — and it's easy to see why. It's a mesmerising and powerful read about one small boy's dream to acquire a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia.

This might sound outlandish, but seven-year-old motherless Tochtli lives a rather cossetted life in a secure compound — or "palace" as he describes it — where his drug baron father will buy him anything — toys, playthings and even a pet lion — in order to compensate for the guilt of his unusual upbringing.

The story is set in Mexico, with a side trip to Liberia to look for the rather endangered you-know-what, and is told entirely from Tochtli's perspective.

A precocious little boy

Tochtli is an ordinary little boy, albeit with an advanced vocabulary — "Some of the difficult words I know are: sordid, disastrous, immaculate, pathetic and devastating" — who has an over-active imagination and loves wandering around all day in his dressing gown because he thinks it makes him look like a Samurai.

But he's also fascinated by guns, violence and death.

There are actually lots of ways of making corpses, but the most common ones are with orifices. Orifices are holes you make in people so their blood comes out. Bullets from pistols make orifices and knives can make orifices too. If your blood comes out there's a point when your heart or your liver stops working. Or your brain. And you die.

A perfectly pitched voice

His naive voice is beautifully rendered. It's never cloying or "fake" as some child narrators are wont to be and even though he knows a lot of advanced words, he doesn't quite understand the context in which to use them — which makes for some funny moments.

Most of his narration treads a fine line between comedy and heartbreak. It works because you know that the violence Tochtli witnesses on a day-to-day basis, the bad language he hears and the puzzling behaviour of his elders that he experiences, is largely incomprehensible in one so young.

For instance, he is confused by the presence of Quecholli, a woman who visits their palace two or three times a week. He doesn't realise she is a prostitute hired by his father, but he knows there is something not quite right about her.

Everything about Quecholli is a secret. She walks around the palace without looking at anyone, without making a sound, always clinging to Yolcaut. Sometimes they disappear and then reappear, really mysterious. They spend hours like that, the whole day, until Quecholli leaves. Then Miztli brings her back again and it's back to the secrets and disappearing.

A fast but powerful read

Like the very best novels, this one presents an unfamiliar world that feels so real you forget that you are reading a book. And Tochtli is such a brilliant character, someone you want to protect and keep close, that it's hard not to be affected by his situation — you understand the danger he is in, even if he doesn't.

Down the Rabbit Hole is an ultra-quick read — you can easily consume it in a couple of hours — but its brevity should not be mistaken for shallowness. This is one of the best novellas I've ever read.

Finally, just a word about And Other Stories, the publisher of this book. This small independent press has been set up as a not-for-private-profit company and encourages its subscribers to have a say in what gets published next. If Down the Rabbit Hole is any indication of the quality of the rest of its titles then readers are in for a real treat! You can find out more via its official website.

Note that its production values are very high and the books have a similar look and feel to Peirene Press's award-winning designs.

'Song For Night' by Chris Abani

Fiction - paperback; Akashic Books; 168 pages; 2007.

Earlier this year I read a profoundly disturbing and confronting novel — Gil Courtemanche's A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali — about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Chris Abani's novella, Song for Night, treads similar territory, but it is set in an unspecified West African nation at a time of war. (Given that the main character speaks Igbo, a language from south-eastern Nigeria, that is probably the likely location of the book.)

The story is told from the perspective of a child soldier, a ghost who travels the countryside looking for the platoon from which he was separated. He is known as My Luck, an ironic name given he's lead a short and rather unlucky life: his father, a Muslim cleric in a country of Roman Catholics, is murdered "before the hate began" and not long later his mother is killed in front of him.

When he is 12 he is recruited for a "special mission", something that gives meaning to a life already in disarray:

I had been selected to be part of an elite team, a team of engineers highly trained in locating and eliminating the threat of clandestine enemy explosives. Even though I had no idea what clandestine enemy explosives were, I was thrilled. Who wouldn't be after three weeks of training and all the time marching for hours in the hot sun doing drills with a carved wooden gun while waiting for the real thing — either from the French who had promised weapons or from the front, where they had been liberated from the recently dead.

Under the wing of Major Essien, nicknamed John Wayne, My Luck is taught to detect unexploded mines with his bare feet and then disable them with a jungle knife, a dangerous occupation, made all the more cruel by having his vocal chords cut — "so that we wouldn't scare each other with our death screams" whenever a fellow solider is blown up by a mine.

This is a horrific, hate-filled world that Abani presents here — and some of the scenes depicted are sickening in the extreme. But there's a strange beauty at work — the prose is often poetic and dreamlike — as My Luck traverses the landscape, alone and unaided, and often under the cover of night, as he searches for the people who accidentally left him behind.

During this adrenalin trip across rebel territory littered with bloated corpses and mass graves, where one false move could end in death, My Luck recalls events which have lead him to this point in time. It is three years into a brutal civil war, so there is much to tell. There's the looting, the rapes, the love affair with a platoon member — and the constant, overbearing tiredness of survival. You want to egg him on, to continue his quest, but then you wonder if there would be any point? Surely, My Luck is trapped in an endless cycle of death and destruction?

Song for Night is not a pleasant read, and if you're troubled by scenes of violence and bloodshed it's probably not for you. But this is an important book, one that feels "truthful" about a world few of us know anything about and, thankfully, have no experience in. Amid the terror and the brutality, there is a deep, underlying humanity here, about what it is like to have your childhood stolen from you, a world in which life is cheap and hate comes easily.

'Walking on Dry Land' by Denis Kehoe

Fiction - paperback; Serpent's Tail; 248 pages; 2011. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Denis Kehoe is a young Irish writer, based in Dublin. Walking on Dry Land is his second novel. But the story is not your typical Irish fare: this one is set in Portugal and Angola, and has a distinct West African feel about it.

Admittedly, this is not what I expected when I requested the title from the publisher and for the first 50 or so pages I had trouble orientating myself. But once I got my head around the location -- and the storyline -- I found myself thoroughly enjoying it, particularly as it has the pace of a thriller without sacrificing the meatiness of the content. And there's something about the prose style, and the shortness of the chapters, that lulled me into a dream-like state, so that whenever I put the book down I felt as if I was still caught up in its pages.

The story is an age old one, about a woman's search for the mother she never knew, but it's told in a refreshing way.

Ana is in her early 30s and was raised by her Portuguese parents in Lisbon. She's now a professor of film studies and is doing her PhD at Trinity College Dublin, where she resides. (That, you see, is the Irish connection.)

Ana's mother has recently died (of breast cancer), prompting her to investigate the secret she's always kept hidden to herself: that her birth mother was not a white Portuguese woman, but a black woman from Angola, with whom her father had an affair. This knowledge has been something she has kept to herself her entire life.

Her first memory of not truly belonging to her family happened when she was four, as she was walking down a Lisbon street with her elder brother, Tiago, and two gossiping neighbours stared at her.

But it took Ana a few more moments to figure out that the two sets of dry, hungry eyes were trained directly on her, that they had been following her. And to understand the words they were swapping were careless scissors set to snip her apart, two dogs barking at her heels. Yes, all of a sudden she was coldly certain these two women were busy trading versions of where she came from. Of who she really belonged to, for as sure as they were guardians of order and respectability in Carcavelos, this child, almost white but not quite, was not the offspring of José and Helena de Castro. There was a story here, a scandal here, and they were so busy inventing their own versions of it, they didn't expect the voice shouting at them from the other side of the street. "Senhoras, calem a boca! Close your mouths! Close your mouths or the flies will get in! The flies will get in!"

Armed with a photograph and a vague idea that her biological mother might have been a cabaret singer, Ana heads to Luanda, the capital of Angola, to begin her search. Her brother, Tiaga, also happens to live in Luanda, so her trip is disguised as a visit to catch up with him and his young family.

Ana's story is undercut, in alternate chapters, with the story of her parent's -- Helena and José. Beginning in Lisbon in October 1965, it traces their romance, marriage and new life in Luanda, where they settle and have children in the early 1970s. These chapters, short and sweet, provide the narrative tension that makes you want to keep reading on, because how could these two idealistic, young adults move from romantic love to one in which José screws around with the native women?

What I liked most about this book, aside from the great characters (Ana's mother, Solange, is particularly well drawn), was the little insights into Angola's troubled history, particularly its relationship with Portugal, which ruled it as an overseas territory until 1975. These snippets, including Helena and José having to flee the war that erupted during independence, gives the narrative a distinct flavour.

And I liked the constant references to films -- one chapter's opening is even written like a movie poster -- which are dotted throughout, giving weight to Ana's character as a film obsessive.

I can't say this is a happy book, although there's a resolution here which makes it a rewarding one. Walking on Dry Land is a compassionate, complex tale, ripe with politics, passion and family secrets.

'A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali' by Gil Courtemanche

Fiction - Kindle edition; Canongate; 320 pages; 2009. Translated from the French by Patricia Claxton.

One of the consequences of living in the fast-moving modern world is that we become desensitised to events that should shock us to the core.

We are bombarded with so much news and information that we cannot process it in any meaningful way. War, floods, famine might fill our TV screens every night but unless you are directly affected by those events we are too removed, both physically and mentally, to do much about it. Deaths become mere numbers -- and numbers are impersonal. What does it matter if 80 people were blown up by a suicide bomber in a country you've never been to and probably never will?

Thank goodness, then, for the humble novel, which still has the power to move -- and to shake us out of our complacency.

Gil Courtemanche's A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is one such novel. It's set during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which more than 800,000 people were systematically slaughtered. It was an event that I was aware of in only the vaguest terms -- probably because, as Courtemanche writes in this novel, "the media don't show dead bodies cut up by men and shredded by vultures and wild dogs".

Now, having read this book, I know more about what happened in Rwanda than I possibly may have ever wanted to know, but it felt so much more real, heart-breaking and hard-hitting than anything the TV screen could have shown me at the time.

The story is told in the third person, but we see it mainly through the world-weary eyes of Bernard Valcourt, a widower and highly experienced journalist from Canada, who is bored with his job as a Radio-Canada producer.

When a friend informs him that the Canadian government is financing the establishment of a television station in Rwanda he jumps at the chance to be its co-director. We get a real sense of what makes Valcourt tick, because it's not the station's honorable cause -- which is to be educational, "particularly in community health and AIDS" -- that attracts him, but the idea that it will save him from the loneliness of his current existence.

But this is mere backstory, because when we first meet Valcourt, by the pool at the Hotel des Mille-Collines in Kingali where he resides, two years have passed since he accepted the job. The television station still hasn't been launched because the Rwandan government keeps finding reasons to put it off. Once again, Valcourt is bored -- and lonely.

But one thing had impassioned Valcourt. He had discovered with horror that over a third of Kingali's adults were HIV positive. The government was denying its own statistics. Those stricken with AIDS were living in infamy, shame, concealment and delusion. Only a few people were trying to face up to the disaster and, paradoxically, they were parish priests and nuns.

The disease is like a ghoulish spectre that hangs over the entire novel. There is so much death here that the coffin makers can't keep up with the demand.

But even this outrageous situation, which could easily be contained by condoms and education, is overshadowed by something more sinister: the looming genocide of the Tutsi population. (To paraphrase one character, people might be dying of AIDS and malaria, but the biggest killer is hate.)

On several occasions Valcourt describes the situation in Rwanda as "tropical Nazism". The country's "two ethnic groups, the Hutus, the majority by far, and the Tutsis, about fifteen per cent of the population, were locked in an undeclared civil war". But the Hutus, by sheer numbers and force, had the upper hand.

As a novelist, Courtemanche does not shy away from describing the consequences of this unchecked racism between two black groups. There's an overwhelming sense of hopelessness when family after family are being torn asunder by brutal rapes and savage murders. And yet, with every incident Courtemanche relays (often in overwhelming technicolor detail), the sense of abject pointlessness begins to build and build.

This is a country on the road to ruin, but no one, including the corrupt Rwandan government officials, the Hutu militia, the Westerners who swan around the pool at Kingali, the international media and the United Nations, do anything about it.

One might expect that Valcourt, already jaded by his time in Rwanda, would flee the country. But something holds him back. Without wishing to make the novel sound like a tacky romance, it's the love of a good woman who gives him reason to stay.

Indeed, his relationship with Gentille, a Hutu who looks like a Tutsi, is a welcome contrast to the death and destruction that fills most of this novel. While their life together is generally described in carnal terms (along with death, there's a lot of sex in this novel -- you have been warned), Gentille serves as a stark reminder that people cannot be simply classified as a Hutu or a Tutsi on appearance alone.

Time after time, Gentille must explain her background and show her ID card (specifying ethnicity) to prove it, but you know that not every machete-wielding Hutu is going to take the time to check.

Of course, a novel of this nature doesn't have an uplifting ending. It's based on a true story after all. Indeed, Courtemanche claims the book is an "eyewitness report" and that he hasn't bothered to change the names of those who planned and carried out the genocide. But as you read his account (masquerading as Bernard Valcourt's account) the sense of impending doom builds and builds. It reminded me a lot of Ma Jian's Beijing Coma, another novel with a real ring of authenticity about it.

Although there were times that I felt the author was editorialising, I never felt as if he was putting a spin on events or trying to make a point other than the fact that civil war and genocide is a messy, horrifying business and that while humans do terrible, unimaginable things to one another, life must go on. There is some finger-pointing at the Western media, but as a journalist, it's clear Courtemanche understands the constraints and machinations well enough to know that it would be foolish to pin all hopes on an international news organisation saving the day.

It's true that no one comes out of this novel looking good. The Westerners who live in the hotel come across as selfish ignoramuses, more intent on living a life of "great adventure" with "perks of prestige, power and freedom they'd never known before". And yet "every one of these good people gathered around the pool had seen a Rwandan colleague disappear mysteriously, or funds evaporate as if by magic."

The Belgians, who colonized Rwanda, come out of it looking pretty bad too, mainly for fuelling the racial tensions by favouring the Tutsis for their more "European" appearance.

The men of Rwanda, whether black, white or some colour in between, also come across as brutes who regard women as nothing more than sex objects. Gentille puts it in simple, eloquent terms when she tells Valcourt:

"My whole life, all I've ever heard is orders, advice, forbiddings, litanies, hyms and sermons. I've never been part of a conversation. I've also heard insults and roars from men showing they were pleased or frustrated, but the only long sentences meant just for me are the ones you've said."

And finally, the Hutus come across as Nazis, who arranged mass killings in an organised, systematic and savage manner. To put it more bluntly:

It was not because they were improvising or were out of their minds, but simply that they were too poor to build gas chambers.

I doubt very much whether this review has done justice to this eye-opening novel. It's probably the most confronting book I've ever read. It's so shocking and horrifying I felt dirty reading it. It also made me terribly ashamed. You only need to visit this website to see how the international community turned a blind eye to this terrible atrocity.

A Sunday at the Pool in Kingali spent more than a year on the Quebec best sellers list when it was published in the French language in 2000. That same year it won the Prix des Libraires, the booksellers' award for outstanding book of the year. I'm not in the least suprised. This is a profoundly important book that reveals so much more than a two-minute news bulletin ever could.

'A Change in Altitude' by Anita Shreve

 

Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 365 pages; 2010.

Anita Shreve is one of my guilty pleasures. Sadly, she seems to get pigeon-holed into "popular fiction" rather than "literary fiction" which means she rarely garners critical acclaim, and yet I find her body of work -- 15 novels at last count -- immensely impressive. Shreve knows how to pen a fast-moving narrative peopled with believable, usually flawed, characters, but her real strength lies in her ability to reinvent her style anew. She is not a one-trick pony; each book is vastly different to the previous one; and she seems equally adept at writing historical fiction as she does contemporary fiction.

A Change in Altitude, her latest paperback, is no exception. This book is set in the late 1970s and revolves around a newlywed couple, Margaret and Patrick, who move to Kenya from Boston. Patrick is a doctor; Margaret a newspaper photographer. Together they go on a climbing expedition to Mount Kenya, accompanied by an older British couple (their landlords), and a Dutch couple. It's supposed to be an adventure, a chance to experience the "real Africa", but from the outset Margaret is clearly not confident about the trip (she lacks experience and fitness) but agrees to go because she loves her husband.

During the ascent, which is physically and mentally strenuous, a terrible accident occurs, which results in one of the party being killed. The rest of the novel looks at the impact of this death on Margaret and Patrick's marriage, which is put under further strain by a series of robberies (their car is stolen and their house ransacked several times) and their complete inability to adapt to a strange, new culture.

Essentially the story is nothing more than a fairly dull domestic drama that plays out on foreign soil. Admittedly, I found that the second half of the book did not live up to the excitement of the first half in which every step of the mountain climb is spelt out in the manner of a psychological thriller. But after the accident, which occurs about a third of the way in, the narrative seems to lose momentum. Indeed, the book becomes radically different, as Shreve charts Margaret and Patrick's relatively dreary lives in the aftermath of the expedition. The narrative pace only picks up again near the end when the pair decide to commemorate the first anniversary of the trek by climbing the mountain for the second time.

Even though A Change in Altitude is a quick, enjoyable and entertaining read (I particularly liked the section in which Margaret gets herself a job on the local newspaper), the characters are frustratingly unknowable throughout. Despite being written in the third person, Shreve never really reveals anyone's motivations nor provides any inner dialogue. This means that Patrick remains a complete stranger, and Margaret is not much better. If anything, they both seem incredibly naive and immature, which is not helped by the implausible premise (which I won't reveal, because it's a plot spoiler) upon which their marriage flounders.

All up, A Change in Altitude is perfect fodder for those times when you just want a light read that won't tax the brain matter too much. But if you are looking for something more intellectually stimulating with an African setting you might be better tackling Nadine Gordimer's July's People.

For other Anita Shreve books reviewed on Reading Matters visit my Anita Shreve page.

'Not Untrue & Not Unkind' by Ed O'Loughlin

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 288 pages; 2009.

The 2009 Booker shortlist gets announced this coming Tuesday, so I thought it was about time I reviewed one of the long-listed titles -- Ed O'Loughlin's Not Untrue & Not Unkind. I read it more than a month ago now but haven't been able to muster up enough will power to review it because, to be perfectly honest, I found this an incredibly disappointing book.

I actually bought it long before the long-list was announced, having spied it at Dublin Airport back in mid-April. I was attracted by the story of a foreign correspondent working in Africa and liked the fact that O'Loughlin was a former foreign correspondent himself, so would no doubt know what he was talking about in the novel. Anne Enright's coverline describing it as "the most exciting first novel I have read in many years" sealed the deal.

The story opens with Dublin-based journalist Owen Simmons riffling through the papers of a dead colleague and discovering a photograph that makes him reflect on his time, 10 years earlier, as a foreign correspondent in Africa. He then recounts an endless succession of events -- genocide, war, corruption -- that wouldn't be out of place in Evelyn Waugh's delicious satire about journalism, Scoop but that's about where the similarities end.

Instead of delivering a novel about those fascinating news events O'Laughlin chooses to focus the story on the people covering those events, so what we get is a kind of dry account of the camaraderie between an eclectic mix of foreign correspondents, freelancers and photographers. All of these people face enormous news-gathering challenges and experience some incredibly disturbing situations, but this tends to take a back seat to shifting love affairs and petty rivalries.

This would be perfectly fine if any of those characters were remotely interesting, but I found most of them dull, shallowly drawn and, occasionally, morally dubious.

Sadly, the narrative suffers from a lack of drive, and the only time I felt it getting exciting -- when a reporter, getting worn down by the news cycle, goes off the rails in his bedroom and throws a gorilla doll out the window in a fit of blind fury -- it slides back into its normal plodding pace, with journos lolling around hotel pools or boozing up in hotel bars waiting for the next story to break.

What this all amounts to is a story that lacks emotion, which is difficult to square given the fact it's set during some of the most devastating and violent conflicts in recent times. This is such a shame, because the book had all the right ingredients for a really powerful, hard-hitting and devastating read and what you get is something as dreary as watching grass grow.

Despite this, it's clear that O'Laughlin can write: his prose style is clear and direct, and when he describes the landscape he really comes into his own, as the following passage demonstrates:

The wind chased us to the edge of town and there it halted. It was the strangest thing. Looking back, I could see a brown spire rising over the hills and rooftops, flecked with shreds of paper and plastic, and dust devils played like stray children on the scrub at the edge of town. But ahead of us the hot vacant road shimmered in the sun and there was no wind to trouble the massive indifference of the bush.

But beautiful writing isn't enough when the story you're telling lacks oomph. The only saving grace is the twist at the end, when Owen realises that sometimes your past can come back to haunt you...

'Out of a Clear Sky' by Sally Hinchcliffe

Fiction - paperback; Pan Books; 295 pages; 2008. 

Sally Hinchcliffe's debut novel Out of a Clear Sky has already drawn comparisons to Barbara Vine, so I can't claim to be original by stating the same. Yet the quiet build-up of tension and the psychological drama that plays out is hugely reminiscent of Ms Vine's best work. It also has shades of Nicci French, mainly in its depiction of a single young woman on the run from a disturbed man.

And yet there's something about Out of a Clear Sky that is wholly original.

The story is set in the world of bird-watching (or "twitching" as it is colloquially known) with each chapter headed by the name of a bird species -- kingfisher, firecrest, wren -- espousing on the theme. This continues with lovely descriptions of wild birds and the places in which they inhabit, giving the story a languid kind of beauty, almost a hymn to the natural world. 

But belying this sense of calm is a tension that builds and builds, as the narrator Manda comes to terms with the realisation that a fellow birdwatcher, the mysterious and slightly spooky David, is observing her in much the same way as Manda observes the birds -- closely and with much patience. Having just broken up with Gareth, her long-term boyfriend, Manda is already feeling pretty fragile, not helped by the lack of support shown by her small circle of friends who have seemingly abandoned her.

As the narrative progresses, and Manda shuts herself away by going on more solo birdwatching trips, we get glimpses of her troubled childhood in Africa and the inexplicable death of her mother. These flashbacks are seamlessly woven into the main storyline, so the reader is almost unaware of the subtle shifting backwards and forwards in time. But what you do begin to appreciate is that Manda has always been a victim and that history seems to be repeating itself. Will she find the energy and the will to keep on fighting, or will she succumb to a loner's morbid fascination?

Despite a slightly weak circular plot (I guessed the major twist at the end long before I reached it), Out of a Clear Sky is a quietly thrilling read, and I'll look forward to reading more by this talented writer in the future.