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.