What began as a mentoring relationship between established novelist V. S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux, a young writer working on his first novel, went on to endure as a “friendship” for thirty years as both writers traveled the world but remained in touch. They met when Theroux was a young ex-Peace Corp worker teaching in Uganda at the university in Makerere in 1966, and Naipaul, nine years his senior, became “writer-in-residence” there, though Naipaul hated teaching and mocked the writing of his students and the Makerere faculty. He did, however, recognize Theroux’s talent, and he did help and encourage him to get his novel published. Theroux, in turn, was an astute reader of Naipaul’s work, and both benefited from the relationship, at least at first. A crusty, critical, and often cruel man, full of contradictions, Naipaul was a difficult “friend,” and when he decided that he did not like someone, there was no turning back, no forgiveness for human failings. Theroux managed to navigate that minefield of hostility for thirty years. Despite the pettiness and frequent mean-spiritedness of Naipaul, it is also a portrait of Theroux, who published this book as his own enduring form of payback.
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One of the most delightful and original satires I’ve read in ages, this debut novel pokes fun at just about every aspect of British society, from government spin-meisters and crass politicians to marriages of convenience, TV interview programs, consumerism, and the belief that many of the world’s problems would be solved if only other people were “more like us.” What makes this satire particularly refreshing is that the author writes it with a smile on his face, obviously preferring to prick balloons with his witty needling, rather than wield a rapier in a slashing attack. The absurdity begins on the first page, with a startling letter from an estate agent to Dr. Alfred Jones, a fisheries scientist whose crowning achievement to date is an esoteric paper entitled “The Effects of Increased Water Acidity on the Caddis Fly Larva.” The agent, Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, has a client “with access to very substantial funds” who wants to sponsor a project to introduce Scottish salmon and the sport of salmon fishing into the wadis of the Yemen during the yearly rains. (On my list of Favorites for 2007)
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Posted in Exploration, Historical, Kenya, Sudan on Jan 15th, 2011
Setting his massive, almost 700-page novel in Sudan and neighboring Kenya, Philip Caputo details the extraordinary efforts of non-government organizations (NGOs) from around the world to bring aid into “no-go” zones, those zones declared so dangerous that the UN will not enter. Many of these agencies ferry aid through the use of bush pilots and small airlines from Kenya, which fly into Sudan and land on hidden, usually make-shift, landing strips, often dodging small-arms fire and enemy aircraft when they try to return home. The Muslim government of Sudan, located to the north in Khartoum, has long been at war with the oil-rich, largely Christian south, and atrocities occur on a regular basis—the abduction of children for children’s armies, the rape and enslavement of women, the maiming and mutilation of the healthy, the cutting off of food and water, and the theft of medical supplies to prevent disease. Lacking weapons and ammunition, the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) is no match for the heavily supplied army from Khartoum.The action is generated by characters who fly for Knight Air out of Kenya—Fitzhugh Martin, a mixed race Kenyan; Douglas Braithwaite, an American entrepreneur and pilot; and Wesley Dare, a Texas mercenary—along with their lovers, an Anglo-Kenyan philanthropist and a female Canadian pilot.
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Written in 1978, this is a murder mystery set near the South Pole in 1909, the same year as Shackleton’s first expedition and five years before the Endurance epic. A similar crew of explorer-scientists and sailors, with the same attitudes and prejudices that one finds in the literary record of the Endurance, perform similar tasks under similar conditions, with one big exception. Captain Eugene Stewart (sharing initials with Ernest Shackleton) must also investigate his own crew as he attempts to unmask the murderer of Victor Henneker, the expedition’s representative of the press, who intends to record the voyage for posterity. With the same care for historic details and period attitudes which one sees in some of Keneally’s later, prize-winning books, such as Confederates and Schindler’s List, Keneally reveals Henneker to be a blackmailer who holds damaging information about almost everyone in the crew.
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Posted in Cape Breton, Literary, Scotland on Jan 15th, 2011
Alexander MacDonald, the narrator of this warm and ennobling family saga, comments to his brother that “Talking about history is not like living it…Some people have more choice than others.” And there, in a nutshell, is the essence of this tender generational novel. The MacDonalds are, in many ways, an “ordinary” family on Cape Breton, but author Alistair MacLeod creates a history for them so alive that the reader experiences it, too, feeling their sorrow and joy, admiring their pluck and independence, and celebrating their loyalty and bravery as they make the hard choices their lives require. They become heroes to us not because they have performed unusual feats but because they have achieved nobility within the collective memory of their own family. The book pulses with heart, an unforgettable novel by a writer who is so precise in his structure and word choice that in his entire career he has produced only this one novel and fourteen short stories published in two extraordinary collections. (At the top of my All-Time Favorites List.)
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