Darkness should be the same everywhere. But it isn’t. This was a desert country. These were desert people. We could feel the difference in the sand under our feet, see it in the brightness of the stars, the shadowed shape of the bare mountains. The chill of it was in our bones. It was as alien as the moon, as cold and naked. And the agony of that death-wailing froze our blood. (p.226)
Background
The novel is set in Morocco in the early 1950s. At the start of the 20th century France and Spain had carved out separate spheres of influence over the country. A nationalist party had been founded in 1943 and campaigned for independence. Only in the previous twenty years (from the 1930s) had the south of the country, where the final scenes are set, been ‘pacified’ ie subjected to French colonial rule. Tangiers is an ‘international city’ administered by Spanish officials. The actual inhabitants, the Arabs and the Berbers from the south, are cut off from the Europeans who cover the country like a very thin layer of icing which could be thrown off at any moment. That is the political background to this novel.
The plot
The story is narrated by Philip Latham who runs a Mission at a remote village, Enfida, in the south of Morocco. He had advertised for a doctor to help him and had only one reply, from a Czech based in England named Kavan, who had written to say he is qualified but with little experience, he just needs to get away and start a new life. Since he was the only applicant, Latham confirmed his appointment and acknowledges that Kavan will, rather unconventionally, be travelling to Morocco in a yacht owned by a man called Wade.
The novel opens with the port of Tangiers lashed by a storm as a motley assortment of individuals watch the yacht foundering, failing to make the harbour, and running ashore on the beach A man throws himself into the sea wearing a life jacket. Latham strips off, gets the police to tie a rope round his waist, and swims out to the fast-disintegrating ship to rescue the man they saw.
In the next pages, we learn that:
- the survivor Latham rescued is Dr Jan Kavan, the doctor he’s expecting
- Kavan claims the owner of the yacht, Wade, was washed overboard on the journey out in bad storms
- Kavan is extremely secretive and paranoid; his own wife (Karen) had come to meet him at the beach but they both refused to acknowledge each other – What are they hiding? Who are they hiding from?
- Once safe at Latham’s hotel and recovered, Kavan decides to pretend to be Wade until they can get out of Tangier and into the interior: Why? To avoid awkward questions and being sent back to England as a ‘stateless person’.
- And he reveals that the dead Wade was a crook, caught up in various plots with a local Greek criminal named Kostos, which Kavan – and by extension, Latham – now find themselves embroiled in.
Dr Kavan
Kavan’s backstory is that he is a physicist ie a much-prized commodity behind the Iron Curtain. He was married to Karen before the War broke out, whereupon he was taken away by the Germans to work in Essen. Here he managed to smuggle information out to the British, working with French couriers including one Marcel Duprez. After the War he returned to Czechoslovakia and had two happy years with Karen before the Russians took over, at which point he fled to Britain.
There he is not only a stateless person but becomes a target for the Czech Communists who want him back and try to discredit him to get him deported. They denounce him as a communist to the British authorities, send him secret letters in code which they leak to the authorities, anything to get him deported back to Czechoslovakia.
Hence Kavan’s
- seizing the opportunity to escape from Europe altogether to a remote part of Africa where he can be free
- nervousness about giving his real identity to the authorities in Tangier
- suspicion of even his wife, who he is terrified might have been blackmailed by the communist authorities into meeting him solely to force him to return
Heading south
Having got himself mixed up in Kavan’s elaborate plans, Latham finds himself using his knowledge of the country to smuggle Kavan out via the small local airport on a flight to Casablanca; he himself will catch the sleeper train and they’ll rendezvous there. The disparity in departures gives Latham time to be accosted by Kostos who has with him Ali d’Es-Skhira, a Berber nationalist from the south. Both of them claim Wade was carrying deeds to land in the south which Ali’s tribe desperately need, because it has water and fertile land to grow dates on. They offer Latham a lot of money for the documents. Of course, he doesn’t have them or know anything about them but it makes him suspicious of Kavan.
Latham and Kavan meet up as planned in Casablanca and catch the train south to Marrakesh (Innes does good descriptions of the sights and smells of the busy souk area). But they notice suspicious things – a boy who offers to guide them deliberately loses Latham and decoys Kavan deep into the souk, Kavan swears that a native is following them, and so on. Atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia.
The mission
When they finally arrive by train at Latham’s mission, outside a village in the foothill of the Atlas mountains, they discover a catastrophe has occurred. Just a few days earlier a big landslide buried the entire Mission, the main buildings and dispensary, the playground and olive groves, everything Latham has built up with his own hands over the previous five years. A friend, Graham, a kindly painter, has been killed in the disaster – his sister, Julie, seeing it happen from the safety of the old bus parked a little along the road but powerless to help.
Latham is devastated. He is now a man without a future and – as I’ve noted in reviews of other Innes books – the sense of a settled future is the Holy Grail, the Nirvana towards which all Innes’ books navigate.
We sat in silence after that, drinking tea, wrapped in our own thoughts. For each of us that landslide meant something different. And for each of us the future was uncertain. (p.101)
Confession
Latham finally pushes Dr Kavan to come clean: he didn’t take the job at the Mission at random. Turns out that, when he was doing his forced labour for the Germans during the War, he worked out a way to smuggle secrets to the Allies, using a network of Frenchmen. There was one in particular, Marcel Duprez, working in Europe but who had, before the War, spent many years in the south of Morocco gaining the respect of the local inhabitants and eventually being ceded some land round a village called Kasbah Foum.
As Duprez lay dying, he willed Kavan this land. After the War Kavan corresponded with Marcel’s lawyers to confirm his claim, but was forced to return to Czechoslovakia to work before he could do any more. But as the communist regime became more repressive his one dream was to escape to this Utopia in the desert. Now he is almost there. Will Latham come with him?
This is quite a shock to Latham, who realises he has been used, both in giving Kavan a job he never intended to take, and in breaking the law in concealing Kavan’s identity and smuggling him out of Tangiers. Moreover, the net is closing in. The newspapers are now onto the story that there was a second man on the yacht: they think it was the Wade that Latham claimed to have saved from the sea. Latham finds himself getting deeper into trouble as he has to tell further elaborate lies to the police. And during these interviews he discovers that the Greek Kostos and the nationalist Ali have travelled south in pursuit of him and Kavan.
Together these facts (his lying to the police, Kostos’ pursuit) as well as the devastation of his Mission, persuade him to accompany Kavan on the last leg of his quest south to Kasbah Foum. The sister of the painter horribly crushed under the landslide, Julie, insists she too wants to come along. So the three of them drive high up into the Atlas mountains, through the pass and down into ‘the strange land’ beyond.
Zone of Insecurity
After a vividly described journey through the mountains and desert, our gang of three arrive at Kasbah Foum. It’s a valley comprising two separate settlements each with a kasbah or old castle, a fertile irrigated area and an old mine covered by a landslip.
The existence of this mine is further news to Latham. Only now does it become clear that the whole novel boils down to the rival claims to this oasis and the mineral wealth which may or may not lie beneath it. They discover one Ed White, an American prospector who thought he had the rights to the land, is well-advanced on his plan of using bulldozers to clear the rubble of a rockfall away from the reputed opening to the mine. He had been corresponding with Wade about a deal to develop the mine. Wade had been corresponding with Kostos. Everyone is deceiving everyone else, and poor Latham is the last to realise it.
Who owns the land and the mine? Everyone agrees that the Caid Hassan (the local native leader) gave the land to Marcel Duprez for his services to the community, who then willed it to Kavan. But now it appears that European law doesn’t count – the Caid must re-confirm that gift. This is going to be tricky as he is at daggers drawn with his eldest son – none other than the fanatical Ali, the man who has been pursuing them along with the crook Kostos all the way from Tangiers.
In addition, our gang have to placate the local French authorities in the shape of Captain Legard, who doesn’t believe their (rather convoluted and improbable) story. To add complication, the body of Wade has washed ashore in Portugal but, since the authorities were told it was Wade who came ashore in Tangier, they mistakenly identify the body as Kavan. Which throws suspicion on Kavan-posing-as-Wade that he murdered Kavan-actually-Wade. Complicated.
Back with the Caid and and his son, Ali, there is a tense night-time ‘tea date’ where Kavan and Latham witness the tired old man and the fanatic son arguing over the future of the land, the Caid wanting to honour Duprez’s memory, the nationalist son wanting to keep the land for his people. This ends with the Caid sending a messenger to our gang’s camp with a note confirming the grant – but the messenger is attacked by vassals of Ali, who slash him with knives and he is only saved by the intervention of the Europeans. Slowly the tension is ratcheting up.
The backdrop to all this is that the locals are unhappy: the date harvest has failed, leading to money and food shortages. The American has alienated everyone by using big bulldozers instead of spreading his money around the impoverished community and hiring them as manual labourers. The atmosphere is becoming poisonous.
There are unusually heavy storms. These soften the mud and rocks and help Kavan and White clear the rockslide from the mountainside until they finally reveal the entrance to the historic silver mine. They are naively excited.
But when Latham goes to recruit some local men to help them remove the rocks, he realises the atmosphere has become violent. The heavy rain has turned the stream which meanders through the valley red with mud. The locals think the white men have poisoned it. First they killed the date palms, now they poison the water. The white man must be driven out.
Just as he’s reporting this back to Kavan and White, the Greek Kostas arrives looking harassed and pale, with bad news. The Caid has died. Ali has taken over leadership of the local tribes. He is leading a hundred men or more towards the camp, bent on revenge.
Explosions
And so on to the thunderous climax of the last 40 or so pages: egged on by Ali, the mob arrives at the European camp and start burning our chaps’ tents and sabotaging the bulldozers. Then they turn to menace our heroes. The cowardly Kostos had got separated from them, scrambling up onto a ledge of rock above the only-just-revealed mine working. Whereas our chaps try manfully negotiating with Ali before retreating, the Greek throws a lighted stick of dynamite at the mob – unfortunately, too close to the main store of dynamite – Boom! The whole hillside goes up, causing a massive avalanche, reblocking the mine, sweeping away Kostos, and plunging down onto Ali and his men. When the dust has cleared, the survivors are baying for blood and our gang have to escape further up the gorge and up the mountainside.
Repetition and frustration
I found reading this novel frustrating. Why doesn’t Kavan just tell the authorities who he is (the nominal reason is he doesn’t want to be repatriated to Britain, but he in fact creates much bigger problems for himself masquerading as Wade, who is liable to be charged for murdering Kavan). Why does Latham allow himself to be drawn deeper into Kavan’s deception, which involves lying to every police, immigration and security official he meets? Many of Innes novels convey a nightmare sense of characters unable to escape from repetitive and claustrophobic situations – but here the failure of the main characters just to tell the truth seems wilful and a contrived way to create a permanent sense of tension where there needn’t be one.
Also the rising tension leading to trouble with the natives could be seen a hundred miles off, but the characters seem pitifully, implausibly, slow to appreciate it.
This frustration comes to a head in the scene where – after the dynamite and rockslide has killed loads of natives – the Europeans spend hours climbing up the sheer face of the gorge and over the mountain to the piste out of the valley but then – walk back down to the valley towards the villages! Innes gives a reason – White, their scout, saw ten Berbers on mules going up the piste to the pass – our chaps would probably encounter them and may do badly – but walking right back down the track into the valley where thousands of peasants live whose husbands and sons they have just murdered – is inconceivably stupid of them and frustrating for the reader.
They go to the French Poste and wake up the French official but there’s not much he can do. And while they’re still discussing plans and counting their pitiful little armoury, a crowd of a thousand or so angry peasants, egged on by their womenfolk, march up and surround the Poste. Their ringleaders work them up to a frenzy. They start throwing rocks through the window, then one pokes a gun in and shoots. Looks like it’s going to be a massacre.
Climax
But it isn’t. Our man Latham walks out into the crowd, speaks to them in Berber and outfaces them. Till one shoots him in the shoulder (!), but still, he has planted enough of a seed of doubt to disperse the mob. There’s a stand-off for several hours while our heroes agonise about what to do next.
Then, in a kind of dumb repetition which is very characteristic of Innes, the whole thing happens again: the crowd surging forwards, the menfolk egged on by the women making their terrifying ululations, the rocks and shots through the window. It’s a peculiar fictional technique to repeat virtually the same scene, almost move for move. The Europeans are forced by the baying mob up onto the roof of the Poste and are preparing to meet their end when —
The paternalistic French policeman Legard rides to the rescue. He has ridden hotfoot from Marrakesh after receiving a garbled message before the phone line was cut and now rides straight into the crowd calling individuals by name and defusing the whole situation. Phew! The crowd disperse grumpily and – suddenly it’s a happy Hollywood ending. White and Kavan reckon they can clear away the landslide and reveal the shaft again. The yacht which sank at the start was insured so Kavan-posing-as-Wade should be able to collect a big pot of money. He’ll share the proceeds and help Latham build a new mission. Latham and Julia realise they’re in love. Aaah.
Conclusions
This novel doesn’t work for me.
- I kept expecting the swapped identities theme to turn out to be a clever double bluff but it just carried on being really boring – Kavan pretending he was Wade in innumerable tedious interviews with police authorities all over Morocco.
- Latham is meant to be a missionary and once or twice he prays to God but there was no real feel for the spiritual or numinous anywhere in the book. There’s plenty of travelogue colour description of Casablanca or Marrakesh – but nothing about the real soul of the inhabitants.
- Which raises the biggest problem: with his customary research, no doubt Innes mugged up on and respected the traditions and culture of the people he writes about: but he too often describes them in a patronising way. The final mob scenes (which drag on and on) repeatedly compare the Berbers to animals.
And they scuttled away across the sands in ones and twos, like whipped dogs with their tales between their legs. (p.247)
- The narrator and his pals easily forget that one of their own, a fellow European, has just killed fifty or more of the male wage-earners in this poverty-stricken population. When that happened it changed the entire tone of the book for me. It no longer seemed ‘a bit of a mix-up with a couple of bodies thrown in but hey, the hero gets the girl and all is well’ – which is what happens in most of his other novels. It seemed exploitative to kill off so many of the faceless natives simply for dramatic effect. Bad taste in the mouth.
End of Empire
The storyline seems all-too-aptly to summarise the post-War colonial experience: white men causing untold bother among themselves in their greed for buried treasure (here, silver), while failing to help or support the native populations whose land they exploit, and allowing the moderate older rulers to be swept away by a younger generation of violent nationalists. Much is made that the French colonial officers are struggling to bring a food convoy over the mountain to the villagers. But, with the benefit of hindsight, we know that it will be too little too late for this and scores of other European colonies around the world.
In 1953, presumably while Innes was researching or writing the book, the country had experienced nationalist uprisings, including attacks on Europeans in the street. In 1955, the year after the book was published, the country’s leader Sultan Mohammed V, was overthrown.
Several times the characters mention that the French outpost can’t call on any troops to help put down the mob because there are no French troops stationed in south Morocco. They have all been sent to Vietnam to put down the uprisings there. Premonitions of a world of trouble…
Related links
- The Strange Land on Amazon
- Hammond Innes Wikipedia article
- Independent obituary
- New York Times obituary
- Hammond Innes book covers on the Bear Alley website
Classic 1960 Pan paperback edition of The Strange Land
Hammond Innes’ novels
1937 The Doppelganger
1937 Air Disaster
1938 Sabotage Broadcast
1939 All Roads Lead to Friday
1940 The Trojan Horse – Barrister Andrew Kilmartin gets involved with an Austrian Jewish refugee engineer whose discovery of a new lightweight alloy which will make lighter, more powerful aircraft engines leads to him being hunted by an extensive and sinister Nazi network which reaches to the highest places in the land. The book features a nailbiting chase through the sewers of London and a last-minute shootout on the Nazi ship.
1940 Wreckers Must Breathe – Journalist Walter Craig stumbles across a secret Nazi submarine base built into a ruined tin mine on the Cornwall coast and, along with local miners and a tough woman journalist, fights his way out of captivity and defeats the Nazis.
1941 Attack Alarm – Gripping thriller based on Innes’ own experience as a Battle of Britain anti-aircraft gunner. Ex-journalist Barry Hanson uncovers a dastardly plan by Nazi fifth columnists to take over his airfield ahead of the big German invasion.
1946 Dead and Alive – David Cunningham, ex-Navy captain, hooks up with another demobbed naval officer to revamp a ship-wrecked landing craft. But their very first commercial trip to Italy goes disastrously wrong when his colleague, McCrae, offends the local mafia while Cunningham is off tracking down a girl who went missing during the war. A short but atmospheric and compelling thriller.
1947 The Killer Mine Army deserter Jim Pryce discovers dark family secrets at a ruined Cornish mine which is being used as a base by a father-and-son team of smugglers who blackmail him into doing some submarine rock blasting, with catastrophic results.
1947 The Lonely Skier Writer Neil Blair is hired to visit the Dolomite mountains in Italy, supposedly to write a script for film producer Derek Engles, in reality to tip him off when key players in a hunt for Nazi gold arrive at the ski hut in the mountains where – they all think – the missing treasure is buried.
1947 Maddon’s Rock Corporal Jim Vardin, convicted of mutiny at sea and imprisoned in Dartmoor, breaks out to clear his name and seek revenge on the captain and crew who pretended to sink their ship, the Trikkala, but in fact hid it at a remote island in the Arctic circle in order to steal its cargo of silver bullion.
1948 The Blue Ice Mineralogist and industrialist Bill Gansert sails to Norway to discover the truth about the disappearance of George Farnell, a friend of his who knew something about the discovery of a rare metal ore – an investigation which revives complex enmities forged in Norway’s war-time Nazi occupation.
1949 The White South Narrator Duncan Craig becomes mixed up in the disaster of the whaling ship Southern Star, witnessing at first hand the poisonous feuds and disagreements which lead a couple of its small whalecatcher boats to get caught in pack ice, fatally luring the vast factory ship to come to their rescue and also becoming trapped. It then has to evacuate over 400 men, women and children onto the pitiless Antarctic ice where Craig has to lead his strife-torn crew to safety.
1950 The Angry Mountain – Engineering salesman Dick Farrell’s wartime experiences come back to haunt him as he is caught up in a melodramatic yarn about a Czech spy smuggling industrial secrets to the West, with various people from his past pursuing him across Italy towards Naples and Mount Vesuvius, which erupts to form the dramatic climax to the story.
1951 Air Bridge – Bomber pilot fallen on hard times, Neil Fraser, gets mixed up with Bill Saeton and his obsession with building a new type of diesel aero-engine based on a prototype looted from wartime Germany. Saeton is helped by partner Tubby Carter, hindered by Tubby’s sex-mad wife Diana, and spied on by Else, the embittered daughter of the German who originated the designs. The story moves to Germany and the Berlin airlift where Saeton’s obsession crosses the line into betrayal and murder.
1952 Campbell’s Kingdom – Bruce Campbell, given only months to live by his doctors, packs in his boring job in London and emigrates to Canada to fulfil the dream of his eccentric grandfather, to find oil in the barren patch of the Canadian Rockies known as ‘Campbell’s Kingdom’.
1954 The Strange Land – Missionary Philip Latham is forced to conceal the identity of the man who replies to an advert to come and be doctor to a poor community in the south of Morocco. Instead of curing the sick, he finds himself caught up in a quest for an ancient silver mine, a quest which brings disaster to the impoverished community where it is set.
1956 The Wreck of the Mary Deare – Yacht skipper John Sands stumbles across the wreck of the decrepit steamer Mary Deare and into the life of its haggard, obsessive captain, Patch, who is determined to clear his reputation by revealing the owners’ conspiracy to sink his ship and claim the insurance.
1958 The Land God Gave To Cain – Engineer Ian Ferguson responds to a radio plea for help received by his amateur radio enthusiast father, and sets off to the wilds of Labrador, north-east Canada, to see if the survivors of a plane crash in this barren country are still alive – and what lies behind the conspiracy to try and hush the incident up.
1960 The Doomed Oasis – Solicitor George Grant helps young tearaway David Thomas travel to Arabia to find his biological father, the legendary adventurer and oilman Colonel Charles Whitaker, and becomes embroiled in a small Arab war which leads to a siege in an ancient fortress where the rivalry between father and son reaches a tragic conclusion.
1962 Atlantic Fury – Painter Duncan Ross is eyewitness to an appalling naval disaster on an island of the Outer Hebrides. But intertwined with this tragedy is the fraught story of his long-lost brother who has stolen another man’s identity. Both plotlines lead inexorably to the bleak windswept island of Laerg.
1965 The Strode Venturer – Ex-Merchant Navy captain Geoffrey Bailey finds himself drawn into the affairs of the Strode shipping company which aggressively took over his father’s shipping line, thereby ruining his family and driving his father to suicide. Now, 30 years later, he is hired to track down the rogue son of the family, Peter Strode, who has developed an obsession with a new volcanic atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean, whose mineral wealth might be able to help the Maldive Islanders whose quest for independence he is championing.
1971 Levkas Man – Merchant seaman Paul goes to find his father, eccentric archaeologist Pieter Van der Voort, another typical Innes obsessive, this one convinced he can prove his eccentric and garbled theories about the origin of Man, changing Ice Age sea levels, the destruction of Atlantis and so on. Much sailing around the Aegean, feelingly described by Innes, before the climax in a vast subterranean cavern covered in prehistoric rock paintings, in an atmosphere heavy with timeless evil, where his father admits to being a murderer.
1973 Golden Soak – Alec Falls’ mining business in Cornwall goes bust so he fakes his own death and smuggles himself out to Australia to take up an invitation to visit a rancher’s daughter he’d met in England. He finds himself plunged into the mystery and intrigue which surrounds the struggling Jarra Jarra ranch and its failed mine, Golden Soak, a mystery which leads him on a wild chase out into the desolate hell of the Gibson desert where Alec discovers the truth about the mine and the rumours of a vast hill of copper, and witnesses archetypal tragedies of guilt and expiation, of revenge and parricide.
1974 North Star – One-time political agitator and seaman Michael Randall tries and fails to escape his treacherous past as he finds himself embroiled in a plot to blow up a North Sea oil rig, a plot which is led by the father he thought had died decades earlier.
1977 The Big Footprints – TV director Colin Tait finds himself caught up in the one-man war of grizzled African hunter and legendary bushman Cornelius van Delden against his old friend, Alex Kirby-Smith, who is now leading the Kenyan government’s drive to cull the country’s wildlife, especially its elephants, to feed a starving population and clear the way for farmers and their cattle. It’s all mixed up with Tait’s obsessive quest to find a remote mountain where neolithic man was said to have built the first city in the world.
1980 Solomon’s Seal – Property valuer Roy Slingsby prices the contents of an old farmhouse in the Essex countryside and is intrigued by two albums of stamps from the Solomon Islands. He takes up the offer of a valuing job in Australia and finds himself drawn into the tragic history of the colonial Holland family, whose last surviving son is running machine guns to be used in the coup and bid for independence of Bougainville Island. Though so much of the detail is calm, rational and business-like, the final impression is of an accursed family and a fated ancestral house which burns down at the novel’s climax.
1982 The Black Tide – When his wife dies blowing up an oil tanker which has hit the rocks near their Cornwall home, ex-merchant seaman Trevor Rodin goes searching for the crew he thinks deliberately ran her aground. His search takes him to Lloyds of London, to the Nantes home of the lead suspect and then on to the Persian Gulf, where he discovers several ‘missing’ tankers are in fact being repurposed by terrorists planning to create a devastating environmental disaster somewhere on the coast of Europe. With no money or resources behind him, and nobody believing his far-fetched tale, can Rodin prevent the catastrophe?
1985 The High Stand – When gold millionaire Tom Halliday and his wife Miriam go missing, their staid Sussex solicitor Philip Redfern finds himself drawn to the old gold mine in the Canadian Rockies which is the basis of the Halliday fortune, and discovers that the illegal felling of the timber planted around the mine is being used as a front for a gang of international drug smugglers, with violent consequences.
1988 Medusa – Former smuggler turned respectable ex-pat businessman, Mike Steele, finds his idyllic life on the pretty Mediterranean island of Minorca turning very nasty when he gets mixed up with mercenaries running guns onto the island to support a violent separatist movement and military coup.
1991 Isvik – Wood restorer Peter Kettil gets caught up in a crazy scheme to find an old Victorian frigate allegedly spotted locked in the Antarctic ice by a glaciologist before his death in a flying accident. His partners are the nymphomaniac Latino wife of the dead glaciologist, Iris Sunderby, a bizarre Scottish cripple, Iain Ward, and a mysterious Argentine who may or may not have been involved in atrocities under the military junta.
1993 Target Antarctica Sequel to Isvik. Booted out of the RAF for his maverick behaviour, pilot Michael ‘Ed’ Cruse is hired by Iain Ward, the larger-than-life character at the heart of the previous novel, Isvik, to fly a C-130 Hercules plane off a damaged runway on the Antarctic ice shelf. There are many twists, not least with a beautiful Thai woman who is pursued by the Khmer Rouge (!), before in the last few pages we realise the whole thing is Ward’s scheme to extract diamonds from the shallow seabed, whose existence was discovered by the sole survivor of the frigate found in the previous novel.
1996 Delta Connection An astonishing dog’s dinner of a novel, which starts out reasonably realistically following the adventures of Paul Cartwright, scrap metal consultant, in Romania on the very days that communist ruler Nicolae Ceaușescu is overthrown, before moving on to Pakistan and the Khyber Pass where things develop into a violent thriller, before jettisoning any attempt at realism and turning into a sort of homage to Rider Haggard’s adventure stories for boys as Cruse and his gay, ex-Army mentor, battle their way through blizzards into the idyllic valley of Nirvana, where they meet the secret underground descendants of Vikings who long ago settled this land, before almost immediately participating in the palace coup which overthrows the brutal ruler and puts on the throne the young woman who Paul fell in love with as a boy back in Romania, where the narrative started. A convoluted, compelling and bizarre finale to Innes’ long career.
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