The Geneva Option by Adam Lebor

Yael Azoulay is a fixer for the UN Secretary General. She is not the kind of fixer whose primary tool is a gun. She relies on her wits, her intuition, and her ability to negotiate with anyone, whether warlords, genocidal dictators, and unscrupulous businessmen. When she is sent to the eastern Congo to negotiate with a Hutu warlord, something goes wrong, and she realizes that she's in serious danger, a danger with roots that snake there way back to the United Nations Headquarters.

Lebor writes action as well as just about any author I have read, and he sets scene quickly and vividly, sometimes with little more than a sentence or a phrase. One such sentence read, "Yael was drenched in seconds as the wet gusts hit her." This came in the middle of a fist-and-foot-fight between Yael and her captor in a car, shortly after the passenger-side windows shattered. At its core, the sentence is pretty basic, but it provides readers with a vivid setting for this scene in a mere eleven words. Brevity is hard to do.

Lebor includes a near perfect amount of detail in his writing, enough to immerse readers in a city, in a culture, or in an ornate 19th century building, but still well short of the overly-detailed writing of authors like Tom Clancy.

Although the preponderance of characters in The Geneva Option are fictitious, Lebor lends some verisimilitude to his international thriller, by referencing real-life events, situations, and in some instances even political figures. This, no doubt, stems from Lebor's investigative journalism background.

Although I really enjoyed The Geneva Option, I have one slight caveat. While I liked Lebor's Yael Azoulay character, there were a number of instances where it was obvious that this strong female lead was the creation of a male mind.

The Mission Song by John le Carré

I wasn't going to count this book because I didn't actually read it. I listened to part of it while driving home from New Orleans, and the rest while driving home from Atlanta. But Brent made a convincing argument for my counting it.

I must confess that the name John le Carré meant nothing to me prior to this book. I have since been informed that he was written quite a few well-known spy novels, such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Constant Gardener, The Tailor of Panama, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

The Mission Song is told in first person past tense, by Bruno Salvo, a top-class interpreter who works for the British Secret Service. Born in the Congo, he now resides in London and is married -- although not happily -- to a prominent tabloid journalist. As the son of an Irish Catholic priest and a Congolese woman, Salvo is somewhat of an outcast. He knows many Congolese languages, as well as French and Enlgish., making him a valuable asset to the secret service.

The story that Salvo recounts is one of political machinations. An unknown entity -- it is hinted that it is some American corporation -- has arranged talks between the various ethnic groups within the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with the stated purpose of brokering peace that would be economically beneficial to all involved parties. But as the summit progresses, Salvo begins to suspect that instead of peace, the goal is really to spark a civil war in the Congo. He realizes that he must do what he can to stop this from happening.

I don't particularly like audiobooks. I think the medium only works well in a small number of cases. Books of essays, such as the works of David Sedaris or Sarah Vowell, work well. Memoirs too. However, the novels that I have listened to have lost something in the translation. John le Carré is a good writer, but I found it harder to appreciate his writing when it was read to me. I plan on actually reading one of his other books.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Apparently, I am the only English major I know that has made it this far along without reading this book, so I suppose it’s about time I got around to it. If you haven’t read it, I should warn you that this contains spoilers.

Heart of Darkness is a long short story about a man named Marlow whose career as a boatman mirrors Conrad’s own. It opens with Marlow recounting a past trip down the River Congo to several other men on a ship called the Nellie. The text is told with a strange combination of English liberalism and racism that would later enrage the famous Nigerian author Chinua Achebe to speak out against Conrad, fifty years after his death.

While this book is well written and reeled me in, I still found it hard to swallow. Specific scenes, like Marlow finding some shade under a tree and then realizing the people sitting around him were not doing the same, but instead propping their emaciated bodies up against the trunks as they waited to die, were understandably disturbing. The thing that upset me the most was the character Kurtz. Everyone from the company was in awe of this man who had been sent not only to procure ivory but also to be a missionary who desired to better the lives of the natives. Some missionary… After running out of materials to trade with, he procured his ivory by raiding the villages with his guns. Furthermore, he did not bring God to the natives. Instead, he let them believe that he was some kind of god himself after he won them over by showing off the firepower his guns made possible to him. When Marlow and others from the company went to relieve him from his station that had run out of materials, he had the natives attack the company’s ship so that they would turn away because he did not wish to leave a place where he was held highly to return to a place where he was merely a man.

The story was exciting, though, minus the seemingly unending period where Marlow was waiting for rivets to mend his ship so that they could set off. Extinguishing fires! Sharing a ship with thirty starving cannibals! Dodging whizzing arrows! I can’t quite imagine than any combination of yoga or breathing exercises would get me through that trip.

My one disappointment with the book that had nothing to do with morals or the stripping of humanity from the natives of the Congo was that the reader does not get to hear much from Kurtz until he is on his death bed, fever dreaming. This man who “enlarges minds” and is known as a Voice above all other things, who seems to impart wisdom to everyone around him gives the reader none. Instead, what we see is an obsessive and flawed character through Marlow’s fixation with him. We see his hypocrisy but never get to understand why the other men of the company (minus the irked Manager) were so inspired by him, making their adoration slightly less than believable.