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In The Constant Gardener, master storyteller John le Carre peeled back the mystery surrounding the murder of a diplomat's wife to reveal corporate corruption and its corrosive effects on Africa's poor.
Six years later, le Carre returns to the politically and economically troubled continent in The Mission Song (in stores Tuesday), another testament to the rot in Africa's belly.
Le Carre made his name as the master of the Cold War novel. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy are icons of the spy thriller genre. The Cold War is over, but le Carre continues to find timely subject matter. And the results are electrifying.
Mission Song protagonist Bruno "Salvo" Salvador, 29, is a clever interpreter proficient in English, Swahili and African minority languages. Born in the Congo and living in London, he's the love child of a Catholic Irish missionary and a Congolese mother. Like the zebra on the book jacket, he's neither black nor white, but he's definitely both. His emotional fence-sitting has him married to a white English woman but in love with a black African.
Salvador picks up the occasional freelance job from British intelligence. When he's asked to travel to an unnamed island to eavesdrop at a highly classified meeting, he jumps at the chance.
But if Salvador's intuition is correct, he's in for a lot more than he bargained for -- and so are the Congolese people. If the contract being negotiated by African warlords and a secret corporate alliance comes to fruition, more of Africa's resources will be bled out of the ground, with profits landing in the pockets of international profiteers and corrupt politicians.
The novel is sometimes comedic in tone as le Carre mocks Africans and outsiders for the continent's plight. The secret negotiators condone their actions with comments such as "And who, please, is the more primitive? The Hutu who chops off a baby's arms and legs, or the Western bureaucrat who consigns half a million dying Tutsis to his out-tray?" and asides that the "new" African politicians riding around in their Mercedes limousines are "the same old, old faces of the same old, old crooks!"
At 74, le Carre is as astute as ever. This is his 20th novel, and his understanding of how the world ticks is, as always, machete sharp.
It's all part of his brilliance as a writer and a thinker. In his last novel, Absolute Friends, he proffered that the war in Iraq was built on shaky evidence and political manipulation. Politicians and corporate elites might bristle at his take on world events, but there's no arguing with his ability to tell an incendiary tale.
The Mission Song
By John le Carre
Little, Brown, 343 pp., $26.99
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