The Russia House

It is two years after perestroika. Although the leaders of the US and USSR are hugging each other on TV it’s still cold war for their spy networks. And while the doves in the US government are asking for cuts in military spending the hawks are screaming for more. Yakov is a rebel scientist who wants to expose the defects in Russian technology. When his secret documents find their way to the secret service of Britain and US, Barley is recruited and trained in spy work then sent to Russia to establish the genuineness of the source, because the documents were sent to him to publish as a novel, by Yakov whom he met during a visit to Russia.

Barley gets to Russia and falls in love with Katya, a friend of and his contact with Yakov. After his first trip as a spy he is taken over by the Americans who have more at stake in the secret coming out. He agrees to continue and returns to Russia. By this time Yakov had been detained by the Russian authorities. Barley began to suspect this when he noticed that he and Katya were being watched, and again from a letter from Yakov which wasn’t in his usual style. He works out a plan to save Katya and her two kids and puts this into effect when Katya herself learned in code from Yakov that he’d been held. This involved his leaving the British and American secret services to work with the Russians. Katya and her relations were not detained as a result, though Yakov died of illness. After a year in Russia he was in Lisbon, preparing for the arrival of Katya and the kids to join him.

August 26, 2015. Review initially written in 1992. Novel first published in 1989. Picture source: Google Images.

Maru

A thoughtful and poetic little novel about racial discrimination in Botswana against the Bushman people. When the orphan daughter of a Bushman who was raised by an English missionary grows up and goes to teach in a remote village she becomes the target of contempt and hatred by both adults and children, who had taken it for granted for too long that Bushmen (of the Masarwa tribe) were only on Earth to be their slaves. Then two prominent men fall in love with the lady and wage war against each other for her sake, the first time since their long years of friendship.

August 26, 2015. Review initially written in 1993. Novel originally published in 1971. Picture source: Google Images.

Altered States

Eddie Jessup is an ex-religious scientist investigating altered states of consciousness. He goes to Mexico and joins an Indian tribe in a mushroom smoking ritual, where he experiences a sense of return to an earlier period in man’s evolution. He takes some of the mushroom stuff back to the lab where the active drug was identified and then synthesized. In an effort to study the drug’s effects further, he takes some and goes into an isolation tank, with some colleagues standing by to observe. He transmogrified into an earlier man-form and x-ray pictures proved it. His colleague could hardly take in what happened and tried to discourage him from further testing himself with the drug. Some felt he was getting mad and out of hand, and his wife just returned from Africa on a study was constantly worried for him.

He takes the drug again and enters the isolation tank, alone this time. He changes into an ape-like creature, attacks some of the college staff working the night, follows a pack of dogs and ends up in the African Savannah section of a zoo, where he changes back to normal human form and is found naked asleep by a night guard. His wife and colleagues could hardly believe him and he tries the experiment again under their eyes, to convince them. This time he turns into a black ape and his colleagues do some tests and take blood and tissue samples. But after they leave him he continues transgressing backwards, to the horrifying beginnings of the planet, and is about to turn into thin air but for his wife who could no longer stand it and rushes in to hold him. A terrific climax to a story about a drug that could change one physically to an earlier evolutionary form lasting 4 hours.

August 25, 2015. Review initially written in 1992. Novel first published in 1978.

The Garbage King

The Garbage King is the gang name given to Mamo, a poor orphan teenage boy forced to live in the streets of Addis Ababa for survival, following the death of the sole breadwinner, the mother, and after an ordeal in the countryside as an enslaved cattle boy. His is one half of the story. The other half is about Dani (Daniel), the spoiled fat son of a rich, popular but very strict man. Dani is not popular at school, not being athletic, not exceeding in science subjects, much to his dad’s displeasure. When he fails most of his exams one more time, his dad decides to send him to a remote countryside place, to a harsh disciplinarian that should put him straight. But rather than spend a day with the dreaded Feissal, Dani decides to run away from home.

The two boys are brought together when they end up sleeping in a cemetery by sheer chance. Dependency and friendship develops and the two are shortly taken in by a nonviolent street gang as members. Dani undergoes the sort of change that the dad wanted in the first place as he learns to survive in the gang, losing his spare fat, becoming lean and watchful. Accounts of the methods of survival in the streets were given, begging, sleeping wrapped up in blankets in the open, foraging through garbage particularly those of restaurants for thrown-away food, doing the toilet in the open waste grounds, showering in nearby rivers. The gang members were happy to share out Dani’s rich clothes at first. But because he really was not poor and homeless like them and he could not do the begging like them (as he could be recognized and then reported to his dad) he was often looked down upon, with the exception of Mamo that usually stood for him. Until he begins writing stories down and Mamo succeeds in selling them for the group. But this very act that sealed his acceptance in the gang was to sow the seeds for his later discovery by the dad who had called up all the people he thought Dani could run to without hearing anything about him. One of Dani’s stories got sold unknowingly to a teacher in Dani’s school, to Dani’s own teacher in fact, who quickly recognized his handwriting then went to see the dad.

Things end happily for everyone, with Dani going back with his father once he was assured he would not be sent to Feissal, and Mamo also going to live with his newly married sister, starting night school to learn to read. The story appears written with kids in mind, with conscious attempts made to avoid explicit language regarding sex, like using “doing it.”

August 25, 2015. Review initially written in 2007. Novel first published in 2003 by Macmillan Children’s Books, this Heinemann Educational Publishers edition being published in 2004. Picture source: Google Images.

Strip Jack

Inspector Rebus novel number 4. This one is set in Edinburgh, around a clique of people that had been friends in earlier school days, a couple of women and four guys. The story is woven around the personalities of members of the group, most prominent being Gregor Jack who had wormed his way to the position of a Member of Parliament.

The story opens with a raid at a high-class brothel in which Jack was one of the men “caught.” It looks like he’s been set up, so the question becomes why and by whom. Then his wife is found murdered and dumped in a river, and a high profile murder investigation starts. As the plot unfolds, we are told the reason Jack visited the brothel was to see his estranged sister. Someone had called him and told him his sister was there. This was how he was set up, and it was one of the members of the clique, someone that happened to be in love with his wife.

As the investigation winds to a conclusion, it turns out that it was Jack himself that murdered his wife in the course of a violent argument following the publication of his scandalous visit to the brothel. He is about to murder the man responsible for that blow to his public image when the cops turn up. In the scuffle that follows, he ends up jumping into another river, in an apparent suicide mission rather than facing arrest and imprisonment.

August 22, 2015. Review initially written in 2011. Novel first published in 1992 by Orion, this edition being published also by Orion in 2005; ISBN 0-75287-723-2.

Under the Frangipani

This is the story of poverty and corruption in the changing society of post-colonial Mozambique. It reflects the nature of white/black relations in the country during colonial times when whites always assumed supremacy, at independence when a lot of whites fled the country to Europe or other white lands. The story, a collection of accounts from selected inmates of a port that had stored slaves in the past, then prisoners of war, and now old people, told with spicing of traditional Mozambican beliefs.

Following the liberation struggle corruption has set in and the old ways are being abandoned. Old people are being ignored or insulted or robbed even by their relations. The mulatto head of the fort (Vastsome Excellency) has died under mysterious circumstances, and a policeman (Izidine) is sent to investigate. His investigation is a series of interviews with the old people, a curious mix of characters, including a white man that refused to flee to Europe with his wife and child, a cursed “man-child” that aged to an old man the same day he was born, and a witch that supposedly turned into water at night. Each one claims to have killed the dead man for his/her own reasons. But then towards the end the truth is revealed by the witch in a sort of trance: That the fort had concealed arms and the old people had destroyed the arms with witchcraft. But when the military men in the know came for the arms and found it gone, they took out their revenge on Vastsome. And now even the policeman that was sent was not safe as he too had been penciled down for elimination. But then again due to witch craft or whatever, the men that were supposed to come and kill him get blown up in terrible stormy weather at the end.

August 22, 2015. Review initially written in 2006. Novel originally published as A Varanda do Frangipani in Portuguese by Caminho, Lisboa in 1996. This English translation was by David Brookshaw, first published in 2001. Picture source: Google Images.

The Man With the President’s Mind

This is a thriller about the Cold War timed in the late sixties. Having had to accept defeat over the Cuban affair on account of President Kennedy, the Soviets are plotting to regain lost glory. To ensure success they need to have a way of predicting American reaction to each of the moves they would make. Operation 471 was created for this: A man with a background similar to the US president’s (Levin) was picked out to live an American life in a replica of the White House, and receiving most of the material that went to the US president, with the main objective of predicting how the president would react to events.

In the first few months things seem to be moving pretty well as Levin’s predictions come true, and the Soviets begin feeling overconfident. The site of the operation is secretly moved to the US itself. Levin had refused going anywhere without his girl and so he was drugged. At the new location Levin finds out that his girl had been eliminated as a security risk, and that the Soviets didn’t just want to reunite Berlin and send foreign forces packing, but to take over Europe with World War III if it came to that. Realizing his government didn’t care much for individual life, he decides to escape from the new site and warn the Americans about the impending doom. He succeeds and the catastrophe is averted, but at a cost of his own life.

August 19, 2015. Review initially written in 1992. Novel first published in 1977. Picture source: Google Images.

The Crippled Dancer

This is an Igbo novel in English, set somewhere near Aba apparently in the 1940s and fifties. It is a story about inter-family village quarrels, the struggle for power among adults and the lamentation of the elders about the changed youth of the day and the destruction of a glorious past by the ways of the white man.

Specifically it is a story of the struggle of one family to ensure the continuation of their line in the village. The object of this struggle is Ajuzia, whose mother died during his birth, and whose only-surviving-child father died during his youth. He is brought up by his grand parents, who impress on him the need to carry on the family struggles and war with other villagers early in his youth.
He could not reconcile himself with the young wife his grandfather married for him. But he takes on the family struggle personally after he and his grandfather were locked up for four days following a fight with Radio, a notorious son of the village, for having an affair with his grandfather’s wife. When Radio was killed by a speeding car, his grandfather was accused of using witchcraft to cause the death. The elders found the grandfather not guilty.

For a change something good happened—the grandfather rose to the position of senior elder in the village. But then their ancestry was challenged by Chief Orji. Ajuzia had to involve the father of his girlfriend at Aba who happened to be a police boss in winning this last fight, and in having the family’s prime enemy in the village locked up. So that war with the village enemies seemed won. But Ajuzia’s girlfriend was now pregnant. This was something his grand parents would rejoice for, but he first had to break the news to her violent father.

August 19, 2015. Review initially written in 1993. Novel first published in 1986. Picture source: Google Images.

Polar Shift

“A Novel from THE NUMA^® FILES” and “A Kurt Austin Adventure” is a blend of science fiction—with “the scientific discovery of the century” repeated here and there—and 21st century (2004?) international action thriller. The bad guys have Gant and Margrave at the head of the pack, working for the same purpose but with opposing reasons: They want to cause a geological polar shift by bombarding the earth with electromagnetic energy so as to cause a disruption in the world’s telecommunications systems, believing it would be temporary. But the actual fact is that once the shift starts, there will be no halting it, with the destruction of all living things on earth in its wake. While Margrave’s intention is to force the “Elites” that surreptitiously rule the world via multinational corporations to a bargaining table, Gant actually wants to take over the political world order by owning the world’s telecommunications facilities shortly after the “temporary” disturbances. Gant is a ruthless maniac that would go to any length to achieve his aim, giving orders to eliminate anyone that might pose a threat without blinking an eye. The good guys have Austin and some brilliant and beautiful people leading them, doing their damnedest to first, ensure that the grand-daughter (Karla) of a dead electrical genius (Kovacs) that might possess the “antidote” for a polar shift attempt is not eliminated by agents of Gant, then second, race against time to apply the antidote to checkmate the bad guys.

The author’s major aim was probably more to entertain. When the plans of Gant and Margrave became known to Austin and his team, I was left wondering why they didn’t just put them under arrest. Instead the author let them attempt to unleash their hidden agenda, so that Austin and his people will have something to keep them busy, trying to stop them.

The “the scientific discovery of the century” finally turned out to be living “dwarf” mammoths and a crystal city found inside a spent volcano in a remote Siberian island named Ivory Island. The mammoths were miniature versions of their giant ancestors, previously thought extinct, but now thought to have survived by adapting to the diminishing food sources. The people that built the crystal city inside the mountain had been smart enough to domesticate the mammoths and used them as beasts of burden much the same way horses have been treated.

August 19, 2015. Review initially written in 2014. Novel first published in 2005 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons; this Berkley Books (Penguin Group) edition being published in 2007; ISBN 978-0-425-21048-2.

Abyssinian Chronicles

Originally published in 1998 in Amsterdam as Abessijnse Knonieken, this book is about life in Uganda from the late ’60s to the late ’80s with emphasis on the religious and sociopolitical developments. Told in an all-knowing first-person narrative, it is an account of developments around Mugezi, an Ugandan boy, from birth in a village, to myths and beliefs of villagers, to growing up with the grandmother in the village, then in a strict Catholic family in Kampala, school life in the city and sexual exploits, life in the seminary, the impact of political upheavals from Obote to Idi Amin and back to Obote and guerrilla fighting, to life in university and then as a teacher, to the sometimes suspect role of relief agencies, and finally to life in Amsterdam living among Ugandans in the “Ghetto” and then among whites.

Very interesting, and reveals how similar to Nigeria Uganda is in terms of common colonial past, control of the economy by foreigners, North-South ethnic divide, religion (Islam, Catholics, Protestants, local practices), cultural practices and beliefs (witch doctors and their followers), civil war. Particularly interesting was how Mugezi could easily buy for himself a British passport with birth certificate to match, and how in Amsterdam girls sold their bodies in glass cage displays.

August 17, 2015. Review initially written in 2005. Novel first published in 2000. Picture source: Google Images.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

In the British intelligence organization (Circus) one of the top brass (Haydon) got unhappy about the West and decided to work for Russia. He was hired by Karla the mastermind of the Russian spy agency (Moscow Center) to play a game of double cross from within the London Circus. Karla cooked up a plot for Haydon to play to his colleagues in the Circus, that they had an agent in Moscow (Merlin) gathering secret information for them about Russia. A secret agent at the Russian Embassy became the go-between between Merlin and Haydon (alias Gerald to the Russians) under the “Witchcraft” plot by Karla. Haydon though uses this ploy to hide the fact of his working for Karla. The old man in charge of the Circus (Control) got suspicious particularly as he was left out of the Witchcraft club. When this got to Karla he draws up another plan which successfully removed Control through humiliation and death by heart attack.

The Circus was reorganized, with the top people who were loyal to Control being shoved out. Then something unexpected happens and top detectives who heard it began to smell a rat again. Secretly, they ask Smiley who had been Control’s next in command to investigate the past and present in order to discover who was secretly working for Karla. The complete story comes out in the course of his investigation, which was successful in picking out the mole Gerald as Haydon. Has a taste of The Fourth Protocol in having a British citizen secretly working for Russia, but perhaps not as interesting as The Little Drummer Girl.

August 16, 2015. Review initially written in 1992. Novel first published in 1974. Picture source: Goodreads.com

The Kalahari Typing School for Men

This book is generally about the people and culture of Botswana, a country termed a shining beacon in Africa, a quiet traditionally cattle-rearing people with high moral standards that are somewhat being eroded by modernity and city life. I’ve learnt the most from it about Botswana: The city of Gaborone that used to be called Chief Gaborone’s Place, some other towns and places like Mochudi, Francistown, Lobatse; the widely respected first president that instilled in people the abhorrence of corrupt practices in government, the low population of about two million people many living in rural areas rearing cattle, the manner of referring to males as Rra and females as Mma, the dry weather that made water precious to the people and the land, traditional norms of greeting and courtesy to people, the love for football, and so on.

That is the skeletal framework for the story. To dress it up is a cast made up of two ladies running the country’s first detective agency (The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency) that have teamed up with a man and his two apprentices running a mechanic workshop (Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors). The senior detective and owner of the agency, Mma Precious Ramotswe, is engaged to the owner of the workshop, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni and they have agreed to foster two orphan children. The story brings out a number of incidents in the lives of every one of these people, beginning with Ramotswe’s worries about the fact that her assistant, Mma Makutsi, is a single lady with no suitor.

It is Makutsi that thinks up the idea of setting up a school to teach men typing in secret to save the men from the possible embarrassment of being seen to be learning a woman’s job. In the process one of her students falls in love with her, lying to her that his wife left him with their kids for another man. Though it turns out the wife didn’t actually leave him, he just felt unloved at home. When the wife goes to Ramotswe to get her to find out what the man has been up to, she now has the problem of breaking up the affair without hurting her employee. And this sort of works out quite okay.

Then there is the story of Mr Molefelo, a client with a past he now wants to make amends for, following a near-brush with death, in order to free his conscience. In his younger days he’d gotten his sweetheart pregnant, had secretly robbed the family he was living with to get money for the abortion, and had dumped the girl. Now over twenty years later and after becoming a successful businessman, he wants to find the family and the girl and apologize and give them money if necessary. This also works out well, thanks to the skillful handling by Mma Ramotswe. She finds the family (less the man who’d died) and arranges for a reconciliatory meeting between the widow and Molefelo. She also finds the dumped girl now a happily married woman with kids, and convinces Molefelo to help pay for the education of the woman’s daughter that now wants to be a nurse, since the woman herself could not go on to become a nurse because of the abortion.

The language is rather simple and formal, and it appears the way the cultural habits are explained, the audience is people outside Botswana. One gets the feeling that Africans or at least those from Botswana’s cherished past, were honest, courteous and kind people that loved cattle and the land.

August 16, 2015. Review initially written in 2007. Novel first published in 2002. Picture source: Goodreads.com.

The Negotiator

This is a long but interesting conspiracy tale. The Soviet Union is facing an energy crisis, with dwindling oil reserves and production. They will have to import more from abroad, and to finance the imports less funding will have to go to military spending. Their military chief personally would rather invade Iran for their oil. But Gorbachev is in power and it is the era of perestroika and glasnost, so the military leader’s plan for invasion had to be kept in the cooler.

Following the visits of their leaders to each other, an arms reduction treaty is hammered out between the US and USSR. When in effect, it would lead to reduction in military spending with savings amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. Due to following reduction in military budgets, it will also lead to the bankruptcy of some defense industries, especially in the US where investments had been tied up in the manufacture of advanced weapons. A group of five Americans conspired to force the American President Cormack to resign, by kidnapping and murdering his only son, but making it look like the Soviets were responsible. This would prevent the arms reduction treaty from coming into effect. With the cooperation of some highly placed military men in the Soviet Union who also did not want the treaty to be ratified, the kidnap plan was effected.

In comes Quinn as the negotiator, charged with securing the release of the president’s son from the kidnappers. Relying on skills and experience from negotiating release of kidnap victims in the past, he manages to effect the release of the US President’s son, Simon. But unknown to Quinn the US cabinet and even the CIA people working with him had been compromised by the conspirators, who did all they could to increase the president’s pain over the kidnap and render him unfit to govern. A belt concealing a bomb had been planted on Simon and after he was released, the compromised CIA agent used remote control to trigger the bomb.

The death of Simon nearly led the president to resign as the conspirators wanted. So they were feeling happy about the execution of their plan. Until Quinn, aided by the new intelligence leadership in Russia, managed to checkmate and expose them at the last minute.

The author unfolds the plot without emotion, leaving gaps here and there for the reader’s imagination. He mentions Biafra in the discussion of European and South African mercenaries.

August 11, 2015. Review initially written in 1991. Novel first published in 1989 by Bantam Press (Transworld), this Abiola Bookshop Press edition being published also in 1989; ISBN 978-014-000-X.

My Once Upon a Time

The vicinity is the tough neighborhoods of East London, versus the richer and whiter West London. Boy is a private eye formerly in the paid service of the government, now freelancing. A mysterious man turns up and pays him the biggest advance he’d ever had for any case, forty grand. And all he has to do is to find a particular special woman to be his queen in his country-side estate, within seven days. He thinks it’s going to be easy, until unusual things start happening.

We are taken through the various sides of the city, the street hustlers and drug dealers, the life of the rich in a black-life resort located in the west, nightclub and show violence, hired thugs, and the spiritual lord known as the Race Man, the sport of cricket and an annual event between the West and the Rest. Boy manages to find the woman at last, but falls so in love with her that he’d rather kill his client than give her up to him. He discovered much too late that the man was after all a god known as Eshu (the fallen patron’s saint), and that he had been sent to him. The result of his stabbing the man to death was that he too had to fall.

Author: Diran Adebayo

August 11, 2015. Review initially written in 2001. Novel first published in 2000. Picture source: Google (Images)

The Perk

A very interesting thriller, plotted from so many angles, but with one central theme—the meaning of justice. The hero Beck Hardin left his small town of Fredericksburg near Austin, Texas a teenager angry with his father J.B. Hardin after his mother died, angry with the discriminatory justice meted out by the town judge Stutz. Twenty-four years later he is forced to return to the small town because his own wife has died from cancer and he is unable to raise his two children by himself; they go back to his father who is still very much alive.

Four years before Beck’s return, Heidi, the beautiful daughter of Beck’s high school best friend Aubrey, was killed by a cocaine overdose and found dumped in a ditch. Because of a debt Beck owed Aubrey, Aubrey now wants him to find the killer of this daughter before the time runs out, so that justice could be done. As the story unfolds, Beck is elected the new judge, by a curious stroke of fate, and he quickly finds out why the favored candidate had to drop out at the last hour. As Beck investigates Heidi’s case, he discovers that Heidi’s mother Randi, who divorced Aubrey shortly after Heidi’s death, had in fact contacted the man responsible for her death, movie star Chase Connelly, who settled her with a mansion in Austin and $25 million to be paid over several years but provided she would keep her mouth shut. So now, would it be justice to expose Chase and deprive Randi of her settlement wealth? Beck thinks so.

However by the time he manages to get Chase’s DNA matched with that of the semen found inside Heidi’s vagina, the time for conviction of the culprit has run out. The positive DNA result comes in 57 minutes late. But while the law fails to catch up with Chase, something else does: Heidi had been HIV-positive before Chase had his way with her in his limo. And so had transmitted the virus to him, or so it seemed. When Chase turns up in his courthouse the night he is supposed to be convicted, it is Beck that has to give him both the good news—that he won’t be tried for lack of time—and also the bad—that his blood had tested HIV-positive and that he’d been infected by Heidi.

Some of the other interesting angles to the story include the issue of racism. The whole county had just one black person and so the racism portrayed wasn’t the usual white against black, but white against brown: Between the Anglo residents of Fredericksburg and the mostly illegal Mexicans, living in a barrio (slum) part of town and doing menial jobs for very low wages. There is the issue of sports as big business and how kids were taught by society via the TV and movies to cheat to win at all cost, if they could get away with it. Another is the issue of how the town was run by German descendants who would go to any extent to keep outsiders out. There is segregation in the kids’ schools, with Anglo and Mexicans being taught separately. Then there were two female friends that moved into town years before. They lived together and did nothing to dispel the false rumor they were lesbians, but only for selfish reasons—not wanting the lonely farmers to bother them for wives. Running through most of the book was the discovery by Beck that he had failed in his duty as husband to his wife and father to his children while the wife lived, as he now has to read how the wife told his father via email the story of their lives, her sickness and her evaluation of him.

August 10, 2015. Review initially written in 2011. Novel last published in 2008; ISBN 928-1-84744-070-9.