‘My dear boy, this is Africa.’
(Beaten-up old Brit, Ralph Leggatt, to naive young American, Nick Karolides, in Zanzibar, page 97)

This is a 389-page thriller about the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa:

The 1998 United States embassy bombings occurred on 7 August 1998. More than 220 people were killed in nearly simultaneous truck bomb explosions in two East African cities, one at the United States Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and the other at the United States Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.

Like many a thriller it opens with short, elliptical sections devoted to a handful of disparate characters. Only slowly do we find out more about them and begin to realise that their paths are ‘destined’ to cross. They are:

Khaled al-Kidr, native of Zanzibar who, aged 21, comes home to find his mother and father dead with their throats cut. He wastes his inheritance on drinking and women until an uncle figure, Zayn Mujuj, confides that his father worked for a secret Islamic organisation and was murdered by American-Israeli agents (p.53). At which point Khaled signs up for jihad, travelling to work for ‘the Sheikh. in Sudan and then onto an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan where, after extensive training, he is flattered to be chosen for a special mission.

Jack Queller, a former CIA agent and expert on the Arab world, conduit of resources to the mujahideen in the 1980s (p.306), who had his arm amputated after a firefight in Afghanistan, is now a consultant at the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (known as DS), in his personal life haunted by the death from cancer of his wife who we wasn’t there to support, lives an isolated depressed existence on a seafront property on Martha’s Vineyard (p.141).

Nick Karolides, an American of Greek descent, a marine biologist, taking up a new job on a coral reef protection scheme off the island of Zanzibar. Unhappily haunted by the death of his father who was a keen diver till a shark bit off his arm and he died on the way to hospital, whereupon his mother retreated into (Greek Orthodox) religious fervour.

Miranda Power, keen young American State Department trainee who, as we meet her, has been given her first posting, as an Executive Assistant, Logistical and Security, to the American Embassy at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

By about page 50 we’ve been introduced to these characters and have a strong feeling that their lives are going to intersect.

(Notice how all the western characters are American. So quite apart from the extraordinary range and depth of research demonstrated in the text – about life in Zanzibar or marine biology or al-Qaeda – Foden is also ventriloquising the lives and speech patterns and culture of a range of American characters, a distinct new departure from the British or African characters depicted in his previous novels.)

A book teaches readers how to read it. By about page 70, we’ve realised that Foden is going to be interleaving, interweaving and interspersing narratives about these different characters. It’s going to be very episodic. This leads to several results:

• it creates narrative tension, because you realise they’re going to meet and interact so the interest is in seeing how, and with what results
• it creates dramatic irony i.e. juxtaposing characters who see the same thing but from different angles (the huge example is the completely different interpretation the Americans and al-Qaeda give to the previous 20 years of history)
• this irony can be used for comic effect, as in the chapter which juxtaposes very short, half-page fragments of dialogue of the two enemies: between, on the one hand, Osama bin Laden and his acolytes in their Afghan hideout; and lectures being given about Osama bin Laden by a series of CIA and security experts (we see these lectures because they’re attended by one of the central character, Miranda)

This kind of jumping between scenes featuring characters who are going to eventually meet up in a fateful event is standard operating procedure for many thrillers. Or you could describe the effect as musical, the deliberate counterpointing of different characters, atmospheres and motifs. Or maybe compare it to collage, in art – like cutting out images from magazines and pasting them next to each other in unexpected juxtapositions.

Cast

Page numbers refer to when someone is first introduced, or first speaks, or when a significant fact about them is mentioned. I suppose it’s a kind of index of characters. Or cast list.

• Khaled al-Kidr, young recruit to al-Qaeda
• Queller, retired badly injured American agent (p.7), now works at the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, known as DS (p.47), first name Jack, used to be top Arabist under Reagan (p.52), full title (p.52)
• Lucy, Queller’s wife who died from cancer and he feels guilty about not having been around to support
• Nick Karolides, marine biologist, born and raised in Florida – tall, tanned, handsome, fit from his daily swim
• his mother (unnamed), who’s become a religious fanatic since the death of his father (p.14)
• Nick’s dad (unnamed), keen diver, who had his arm bitten off by a shark and died on the way to hospital
• Dino, wiry 60-year-old owner of Dino’s Wine Shop, was diving with Nick’s dad when the shark attacked (p.20)
• Inspector Chikambwa, unfriendly and (it turns out) corrupt marine policeman on Zanzibar, the USAID contact for the project Nick goes to Zanzibar to work on (p.27)
• George Darvil, Nick’s predecessor who died in suspicious circumstances, found drowned, his boat riddled with holes (p.28)
• Mr de Souza, proprietor of the Macpherson Ruins Hotel (p.29), very short and extraordinarily beautiful (p.32)
• Leggatt, European clove farmer who also does boat tours, Ralph by name (p.82), made his money in copper and silver then diamonds in Sierra Leone (p.121), runs a clove farm, owns a yacht, the Winston Churchill (p.96)
• Zayn Mujuj, changes Khaled’s life by recruiting him for jihad (p.45), big man, ‘enormous’ (p.230), Palestinian (p.222)
• Ahmed the German, Osama bin Laden’s companion and cameraman (p.45) wears a Sport Team Osnabrück t-shirt, which becomes a leitmotif identifying him as the bomber (pages 143 and 282)
• Yousef, al-Qaeda bomb maker (p.45), last name Mourad (p.295)
• Ayman al-Zawahari, leader of Egyptian Jihad (p.62)
• Muhammed Atef, al-Qaeda’s military commander (p.62)
• al-Qaeda, first mentioned (p.43), described (p.66)
• the Taliban, keeping guard over the al-Qaeda base (p.50)
• Miranda Power, executive assistant, Logistical and Security, American Embassy, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (p.51), Boston Irish, dad a cop (pages 151 and 184)
• Morton Altenburg, Director of Operations, FBI (p.55), young and successful and scornful of Queller’s obsession with al-Qaeda
• General Tom Kirby, Department of Defence (p.56)
• Osama bin Laden (p.62) described by Queller (p.66 and elsewhere)
• Tim Catmull, Brit working for the Department for International Development (DFID) (p.78)
• Sayeed, boy accompanying the thugs who beat up Leggatt and tie him up on Lyly before Nick comes to his rescue; who they coax down from the rigging of Leggatt’s yacht; and who Leggatt gives a job
• Ray Delahoya, American comms guy at the Dar embassy (p.103), cheerfully vulgar, likes junk food and low culture, apparently gay (fancies the tough Marine guards, pages 245 and 249)
• Turtle Mo, a big imposing East African trawler baron, who Nick hires his diving gear from (p.126)
• Olivier Pastoreau, Belgian land reclaimer who works for the European Development Fund, proud owner of a handsome white motor cruiser, the Cythère (p.130), amusingly pessimistic
• Clive Bayard, only African American in the Dar Embassy (p.244)
• Nisha Ghai, Asian employee in the embassy (p.244), killed in the bombing
• Lee Denham, the one intelligence officer at the Dar embassy (p.245)
• Corporal Rossetti, Marine on duty when the bomb goes off, helps badly injured Ray (p.247)
• Juma, gate guard at the embassy
• Dr Macintyre, embassy physician (p.259)
• President Bill Clinton phones the chargé d’affaires’ house where the wounded have been brought to condole with them (p.262), condemns the attacks on TV (p.270), makes an extensive speech on TV (pages 305 to 306), forced to defend himself in the Starr investigation that he perjured himself lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky (p.325), announces retaliation against al-Qaeda (p.331)
• William Cohen, US Secretary of Defence, seen on TV condemning the bombing (p.270)
• Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State, seen on TV (p.270)
• National Security Director Sandy Berger, explaining America’s retaliatory strikes against Sudan (p.332)
• Omar el-Bashir, President of Sudan, calling the American attack on the pharmaceuticals factory ‘a terrorist act’ (p.339)

Part 1

Nick settles into his new post as USAID coral guy in Zanzibar, meeting locals friendly and unfriendly. Miranda flies out and settles into her new job at the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam. Khaled undergoes further training in preparation for his mission to blow up the same US Embassy.

As usual Foden is very, very good indeed, supernaturally good, at imagining these people’s lives and thoughts, and the hundreds of details, interiors, accessories, food and drink, cars and bikes and boats and tropical stuff they interact with. It is incredibly well imagined.

Nick gets to know a raddled, grumpy old Brit named Leggatt via an adventure. He had observed Leggatt’s yellow boat slowly cruising across the bay in the same direction every day. The hotel owner tells him he (Leggat) is visiting a small island named Lyly. Nick decides to go explore in his dinghy and outboard. He finds the island and beaches his dinghy and walks along the shore where, through binoculars, he spots Leggatt digging up turtle eggs. The bastard! But then a native dhow approaches and two men and a boy get out, swim ashore. Nick thinks they must be nature wardens so is astonished when they beat up Leggatt, tie him to a tree, and take all the eggs themselves. The attackers head back to their boat, Nick runs over and unties Leggatt (he’s bleeding from the beating), they run back to Nick’s boat and start the engine and motor round the coast to find the boy up in the sails of Leggatt’s boat, ripping up the sails and rigging with a knife. He has the idea to fire a safety/rescue flare at the bad guys’ dhow, where it sets fire to their sails. Nick and Leggatt get to the latter’s yacht, climb up the side ladder, Nick tying his dinghy to the stern, Leggatt starts the yacht’s motor and they chug away from the island and the burning dhow. Nick corners the boy who is quickly subdued.

Leggatt explains that he is not the bad guy, he is the one trying to protect the turtle eggs by digging them up and moving them to a secret location. When Nick naively suggests reporting the egg thieves and boy to the USAID contact, Inspector Chikambwa, Leggatt snorts with laughter an says he’s corrupt and commission the stealing of the eggs, among many other scams (p.97).

Leggatt tells him the island’s named Lyly which comes from the Swahili lala which means sleep. It’s 2 miles wide with a lighthouse on the highest point, built by a Brit in the 1930s. Nowadays it’s owned by a rich Saudi. Leggatt tells Nick about the Black African slaughter of Arab civilians soon after Zanzibar became independent i.e. 1964 (p.99).

• Zanzibar: Arabs, Africans and a forgotten legacy of slavery and ethnic cleansing

Leggatt’s an old hand, he’s been fishing and monitoring these waters for decades, owns a house and several boats, made his pile from diamonds. He drops Nick and his dinghy off at the hotel. A few days later Leggatt takes Nick fishing for barracuda, a strong fighting fish. This fishing expedition is a set-piece which makes you think Foden must have done it, and been shown how to do it, in order to produce such a detailed description (pages 112 to 115).

There’s a lovely description of Nick rowing a rowboat back to his oceanside hotel (the Macpherson Ruins Hotel). I used to row at school, so I know exactly what he means (p.100).

Meanwhile Miranda settles into a completely new society. I think we are meant to register the decisions she makes as small moral compromises, accustoming herself to the grotesque poverty of most of the population, while she licks ice cream by the embassy pool. She soon hires a watchman and a ‘housegirl’ for her accommodation in Oyster Bay, as all the other ex-pats do. She falls in with Ray Delahoya, cheerful, fun, not a threat or boyfriend material (only a hundred pages later is it made explicit that he’s gay).

We’re shown security reports she files which are conscientious. If the reader is paying attention they’ll spot that a character described in bin Laden’s entourage is caught on security camera himself filming the Embassy layout, from outside the walls (p.123).

Part 2

Carries on in the same style. Khaled and the al-Qaeda team (Khaled’s mentor Zayn and Yusef the bomber) drive south through Afghanistan into Pakistan, fly to Dubai, to Muscat, then direct to Zanzibar (p.139). The movement of their van is picked up by spy satellites and the message sent to the CIA etc in America. Queller is asked to comment and thinks they’re embarking on an attack and need to be monitored. But his suggestion is shot down by his enemy within the CIA, Alternburg. Queller really hates Altenburg because he a) nixed a spy operation he’d set up and b) has been politicking to get Queller sacked as a consultant.

Nick and Miranda finally meet, as he’s in Dar to pick up the scuba gear he had sent on from the States. She bumps into him, they get talking, they go for a swim. She notices he is tall, dark, fit and handsome, almost like the hero of a movie. She gets into a bit of trouble in the sea; is pulled out by his strong arms etc. She gives him a lift into town and when he says he’s shopping, drives him past security into the Embassy where he fills up at the PX, the American supermarket found in all overseas bases.

Nick goes on a solo mission to Lyly, the deserted island where he and Leggatt had the adventure with the turtle egg thieves, ‘the island of sleep’. Beaching his dinghy he scratches his ankle. He has come surprisingly unprepared, without a toilet bag, for example or, more importantly, sunblock and a sunhat. He explores the small derelict house and abandoned mosque, manages to fire up the lighthouse light using paraffin he’s brought but half-blinds himself in the process. Diving through the spectacular coral, he finds a sea cave which, amazingly, appears to have Arab writing carved into the (slime-covered) walls (p.171). Later, Leggatt explains that it’s part of a whole cave and tunnel network where slaves used to throw recalcitrant or recaptured runaway slaves. Oubliettes. Hence the long-ago writing.

Nick invites Miranda to come visit Zanzibar from Dar for a weekend. He takes her (and the reader) on a tour of the sights. (I wonder if it’s a safe place for a tourist to visit, now, in 2023.) He takes the traditional male role i.e. showing her round, explaining history etc. She takes the traditional female role, passive, deferring to his knowledge. When they dance he has ‘strong hands on her hips’ etc. All very conventionally heteronormative and well mannered. In the refined, polite tone of this book no-one fantasises or masturbates or farts or menstruates, as they do in Leslie Thomas’s vulgar comedies. Makes me realise that the thriller genre is not only serious (obviously) but also, in a strange way, prissy, at some level, respectable. It’s the tiniest details but when Miranda is upset she doesn’t cry, as you or I might, but weeps, like the heroine of a Racine play. Even when it’s at its most gritty, there’s a kind of high-minded decorum about the thriller genre.

Anyway, I didn’t like this lovey-dovey stuff at all. Also the romance dialogue is very stilted and, well, boring. Next day, Nick takes Miranda to a beachfront restaurant then onto a tropical garden where he finally kisses her.

Something had happened, a change had taken place, the needle had swung around in the compass of her heart. (p.188)

Foden is a very savvy writer indeed, capable of deploying lots of different registers and styles. Surely he knows he’s writing Mills and Boon here. For the lolz I googled ‘Mills and Boon top titles’ and found the following: ‘Song of the Waves’; ‘The Emerald Garden’; ‘Tabitha in Moonlight’; ‘Rapture of the Desert’; ‘Whispering Palms’. To which could be added these passages from ‘Romance in Zanzibar’. The only slight fly in the ointment being that we know this is all heading towards a monstrous terrorist attack. I wonder if one or both of them will be killed in it. Or maimed. Both Foden’s previous novels contain scenes of brutal violence and bump off characters you’d become quite attached to. I suppose I should savour the kisses in the tropical garden while I can…

Nick persuades Leggatt to take him and Miranda back to Lyly. He shows her how to scuba dive, they frolic, find their way to an isolated spot of beach and have sex, mercifully passed over in silence and undescribed. Then an incident where they find a huge mamba snake uncovering the turtle eggs with a view to eating them, and Nick catches it with a forked branch and throws it into the undergrowth. More interesting that her being lulled and seduced is the way Nick starts to get on her nerves, a bit charmless, a bit clumsy, unempathetic, and then assuming masculine ownership of her.

The al-Qaeda cell

What happens next utterly transforms the tone and feel of the book. When they’d left Lyly, a powerful cruiser had crossed their path, apparently en route to the island. Miranda had looked at its crew and skipper through the telephoto lens of her camera and nearly taken a photo but then it veered away.

A day or so later Leggatt and Nick had gone back to the island and discovered there were two dhows and a cruiser pulled up. Nick had gone inshore in the diving gear and this section opens with him watching them from a distance, going in and out of the buildings where he slept, apparently Arabs, some sporting sub-machineguns.

Then a huge storm comes up which sinks the Churchill. Leggatt and Nick manage to abandon ship and get into the dinghy and cut the painted just before the big yacht goes down. With heroic strength Nick rows the dinghy through the coral barrier (guided by Leggatt) and ashore. Leggatt says they’ll never make it back to the mainland in a rowing boat; the only thing for it is to steal one of the dhows and to do it now, in the dead of night and while the aftersqualls of the storm are still making bad weather. They wade through the thick jungle, emerge on the side of the island where the Arabs are, try to sneak across the beach but are spotted. The Arabs open up with the machine guns, killing Leggatt and brushing Nick’s forehead. When he comes to, he is trussed up hand and foot and the enormous Arab, Zayn, whacks him with the flat of a machete, asking if he is American, hitting him, insulting him, till he says he’ll be back tomorrow to interrogate him and…throws Nick out the lighthouse window, attached by a rope, so that he is dangling upside down, his head bangs against the outside wall of the lighthouse and he loses consciousness again.

See what I mean by changing the tone of the narrative? We were in the western world of pampered tourists, all ice cream, skindiving and scotch on the veranda. Now we are in the world of jihad and unmitigated brutality.

Thing is, the way Zayn slit their throats reminded Khaled of how he returned home that terrible evening to find his parents’ throats cut. Zayn always told him it was done by Israeli-American agents but…but what if Zayn did it? Plus Zayn has been riding Khaled, pushing him and bullying and belittling him, on one occasion pushing his face right into their campfire. This isn’t jihad. This is sadistic bullying. And so…

So he goes up to the top of the lighthouse, hauls Nick’s unconscious body up and over the window sill, then leans down with a knife…Next morning the American is gone and Zayn angrily kicks and punches Khaled to find out what happened, at which Khaled shows him the American’s ear, says he cut it off as punishment then threw the body in the lagoon. Zayn is angry because he wanted to interrogate the American and also suspicious, as is the reader.

Miranda

Cut to Miranda at the US embassy and we discover that they didn’t have sex that time, on the island. I misread it. They were goofing in the waves, walked up the beach out of sight of Leggatt and lay down…there’s a gap in the text…which resumes with ‘Later, they walked back round to the fire’ (p.197). I misread this as them having sex. No. Because now, in this section, Miranda wonders whether she should have had sex with Nick, and worries whether the kiss she let him give her in the tropical gardens ‘meant more’.

I’m not sure, but I think all this fussing about lovey-dovey is meant to be an indicator of how shallow and naive Miranda is, on a par with her not understanding why America is so hated, and being upset by slavery and African poverty i.e. generally not understanding where she is. Conversely, maybe she is there to bring out the extraordinary distance between the poorest people on the earth and the richest.

7 August 1998: the bombing

Miranda is going about her normal day when, on page 252, the bomb goes off. It was 7 August 1998. The Wikipedia article gives forensic details about the make-up of the explosives then states that at Dar es Salaam 11 were killed and 85 wounded (p.260), considerably less than the bomb which went off at the Nairobi embassy, killing 213 and wounding about 4,000 (p.261).

Part 3

Hundreds of FBI, CIA, medical and forensics experts fly in from the Sates, including the prick Altenburg and kindly old Queller. These personality traits are on display when Miranda finds herself being given the third degree in an interview by Altenburg, and then horrified to find he has gotten her suspended for dereliction of duty for not inspecting the van which is now thought to have been carrying the explosives. Distraught, her world in tatters, her self confidence shot, she goes home weeping.

Queller sees all this and takes steps, calling up his old buddy Madeleine Allbright to ask for Miranda to be reinstated and assigned to him as his personal assistant. Which is what happens.

I thought the buildup to the explosion might be tense and exciting but it isn’t. It just happens, out of the blue, while Miranda’s going about a mundane morning’s work. If ‘grip’ or excitement there is, it comes from a completely different direction, which is The Hunt For Nick Karolides. Miranda becomes increasingly obsessed with the way he hasn’t been in touch, hasn’t replied to phone calls or emails. So flies from Dar to Stone Town (capital of Zanzibar) then taxis out to the Macpherson Ruins Hotel whose owner, Mr de Souza, is just as perplexed by Nick’s prolonged absence.

When she goes out to Leggatt’s farm she finds him also absent, but persuades the boy Leggatt hired, Sayeed, to organise a boat to take her back to Lyly. On the beach at Lyly they find the rotted body of Leggatt with an ear missing. So the reader realises it wasn’t Nick’s ear that Khaled cut off.

This happens on page 302. The book is 389 pages long. In these last 90 or so pages the interest focuses on two things: Miranda’s search for Nick; and the bitter contest between the two American intelligence operatives, Altenburg (who thinks the al-Qaeda connection is poppycock) and Queller, who is sure of it.

In a flashback we learn that Queller not only helped the mujahideen in Afghanistan but met Osama bin Laden several times, helped channel funds which not only armed the fighters but built airstrips, the cave complex in the Tora Bora mountains etc (pages 306 to 315). And then, extraordinarily, that it was Osama bin Laden himself who shot Queller in the elbow at their last meeting, as a warning to him, and all American ‘crusaders’ to get out of Muslim lands.

Where is Nick?

On page 317 (of 389) we discover what happened to Nick. We haven’t seen or heard of him since page 236, so he’s been absent for 80 pages or a fifth of the text. Presumably, one aim of this is to build up suspense about his fate, amplified by Miranda’s growing concern.

We find him cast adrift in a rowing boat without oars on the open ocean. He vaguely remembers someone bundling him into the boat then throwing away the oars and himself jumping overboard – presumably Khaled, saving his life. Over several pages we watch the effects of exposure, heatstroke, sunburn and dehydration. Nick has both ears and is unharmed except for the rope burns and where the bullet grazed his head but he quickly degenerates after a few days into a burned, blistered, hallucinating wreck.

Until he is picked up by a passing Greek cargo ship. He sees it emerge from the blurred horizon, stands up, waves his arms and shouts etc. The Greek crew wash him, slowly give him water, then soft food and restore him to health. Lucky, eh? Big ocean, the Indian Ocean.

Nick is of Greek heritage so when he starts speaking Greek, the crew and captain rally to his support. Presumably this is thrown in to explain/justify why the captain lets himself be persuaded to sail close to Zanzibar and not to dock in the main port – where he’d incur ruinous charges – but get close enough to the Macpherson hotel to be rowed ashore.

Which explains why, on the night when Miranda has flown to Zanzibar and taken a taxi to the hotel to enquire about him, and persuades the manager to let her sleep in Nick’s room…she hears the chalet door opening and…Grand Reunion! He staggers into her arms, tries to explain, she makes him have a shower while she gets a first aid kit from de Souza, makes him lie on the bed, tends his wounds like a good nursey, they lie facing each other, they touch, they make love.

His pains forgotten for a while – loving her for that mercy, and for the adventure of her body – he gathered her into his arms once more. (p.330)

Well…’Romance in Zanzibar’. Apparently, Mills and Boon novels are organised into sub-genres, one of which is ‘Heroes – Enjoy a thrilling story filled with danger and finding love no matter what.’ Well, these passages are a fine example.

He moved down her body, covering her stomach and pelvis with subtle kisses till, like a hummingbird over a flower, he began flicking his tongue over her. (p.330)

I’m not sure this is what a man who’s just returned from days in an open boat, who’s still suffering from wounds to his head and knee, which are still bleeding, would be up for. But the conventions of the thriller genre override any kind of realism.

Bill Clinton

It’s a funny mix, this text, because it goes from ripe Mills and Boon-type soft porn to our newly committed couple watching President Bill Clinton on TV explaining why he ordered US air strikes on the al-Qifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and a complex of training bases near Khost in Afghanistan (p.332). Nick and Miranda consume the TV news in puzzlement at the randomness of this target.

Passages describing the process whereby the targets were listed, assessed and agreed, and then the process of launching the missiles, read like magazine journalism, possibly from a military magazine. At one point Foden directly quotes a US Navy press release describing the operation of Tomahawk cruise missiles (pages 335 to 339).

Foden gives a roundup of responses to the US cruise missile attacks which reads like a Wikipedia article, giving quotes from the President of Sudan, the Taliban government, Arab newspapers etc, all of which describe the Americans as war criminals operating outside the law. Tony Blair gives Clinton his whole-hearted support. This is all very interesting but a) not really a novel and b) was all to be swept away in the vast tsunami of 9/11 and the War on Terror. The US retaliation prompted Foden to snide and snarky remarks about America being ‘one nation under God, indivisible etc’ which feel like cheap sarcasm, unworthy of his extraordinary gifts.

A passage describing Osama bin Laden’s thoughts as he rides a horse, far from where the missiles struck, with his closest lieutenants – Ayman Zawahari and Muhammad Atef – and personal bodyguards.

Khaled

A passage describing Khaled al-Khidr, praying in the mosque in Jambangona, on the island of Pemba where his parents came from and his jumbled thoughts, containing an impressive number of quotes from the Holy Koran and Khaled’s theological speculations, in particular whether Zayn, with his bullying and murder, led him from the path of righteousness.

The passage quoting Bill Clinton describing America as ‘one nation under God, indivisible’ (p.337) is deliberately paralleled by Khaled thoughts about the redeemed in Islam, ‘one nation, indivisible’ (p.345) – just one of many examples where Foden juxtaposes the value systems of ‘the West’ and ‘the Islamic world’ to bring out how their belief systems are so similar and yet so different.

Khaled is giddy with guilt, confused, wanders the streets of his home town in utter confusion, falls to his knees.

Cut to Zayn Mujuj, the big strong killer. He and Khaled had escaped after the bombing and gone to meet the cargo ship appointed to pick them up but it never showed. Instead they moored off the island of Pemba for a few days, Zayn calling the Sheikh for daily updates. We learn that Zayn, himself, is motivated by revenge, namely the wiping out of his family in Beirut, by the Israeli air force and the Christian phalange. Maybe he’s talking about the Sabra and Shatila massacre in September 1982. This is the source of his burning hatred. And now we learn Khaled was right to suspect that Zayn killed his (Khaled’s parents); he did, as punishment for embezzling al-Qaeda funds (p.348).

Now the boy has disappeared. Zayn phones the Sheikh on the sat phone. They speak in light code. Zayn says the boy (the finch) knows too much and must be eliminated. He takes a dinghy from the boat up the creek to Jambangona.

Exciting climactic chase

Foden reverts to small snippets giving different characters’ points of view: this is meant to jack up the tension. Thus, Queller gets a call from Altenburg back in Washington telling him SIGINT has picked up those sat phone calls off Pemba: could he go and investigate. He asks Nick and Miranda (instead of, say, some US marines or security forces) to help him. They putter off to Pemba in the Belgian guys’ boat (seeing as all the others have been lost earlier in the story). Meanwhile the killer Zayn has arrived in Jambangona with a big knife in his long boots. Who will get to Khaled first? Will Khaled recognise Nick as the American he saved? Will Nick recognise Khaled as the boy who saved him, dragging him half-conscious into the rowing boat and casting it adrift back on Lyly?

Zayn doesn’t find Khaled in Jambangona and so chugs upriver to Chake Chake, roaming the streets with murder in his heart. Nick, Miranda and Queller arrive at the map reference given by Alternburg to find nothing so they, also, chug upriver to Chake Chake, and here they spot the same motor cruiser they saw an age ago cutting them off as they returned from Lyly, the terrorist’s boat.

The climax comes when our heroes discover that they have arrived in town at the exact same moment when an annual festival takes place, the mchezo wa ngombe, the game of the bull, when brave youths taunt and try and jump onto two enraged bulls (named Bom-Bom and Wembe, I thought you’d like to know) in an arena. Lucky coincidence. Also improbable is that, at this moment of peril for his life, Khaled, throwing caution to the winds, tries his luck in the arena against the bulls. And that Zayn, attracted by the hullabaloo, sees him. And that Nick, amid the pressing crowd, sees both of them, tells Queller, and starts elbowing towards them. You can see how this has the logic more of a move than a novel.

Long story short: Zayn chases Khaled across the arena; one of the bulls gores and tramples him; Khaled escapes over the arena fence, through the crowd, and down backstreets, pursued by Nick, Miranda and Queller. First he’s cornered in a tourist shop, then escapes, then Nick tackles him, Queller steps forward with a gun, but Khaled grabs a dagger from a stall and Miranda and puts it to her neck, backing away as in ten thousand American movies. He drags her down to the quayside and into the terrorists’ boat, finds the key, powers up, casts off and motors away, hotly pursued by Nick and Queller, suddenly feeling his age, feeling tired, overcome by a sense of depression and failure.

Out of the crowded streets emerges Zayn, bleeding and furious to see his boat cruising away so he cuffs a white tourist off his jet ski and sets off in hot pursuit. Now the narrative has gone full James Bond.

Showdown on Lyly

Khaled steers out to the island of sleep, location of quite a few nightmares by now. Nick and Queller watch him beach and drag Miranda up the sand into the jungle. Queller shoots a way through the coral breach and they, also, beach their boat. Nick tells Queller to stay behind and guard the boat, takes Queller’s gun and sets off in pursuit. God, the excitement!

Khaled drags terrified Miranda through the caves at gunpoint. Nick gets lost pursuing. Queller investigates various jungle trails and on returning to the beach notices a jet ski lying on its side. Zayn is clearly badly injured, needs a stick to lean on. Queller, binocular distance away, takes a marlinspike out of the boat and slowly sets off in pursuit.

It’s called ‘suspense’ but what it boils down to is, Who is going to die? Khaled and Zayn, I’d guess, and possibly Queller, for his sins in aiding bin Laden. But it’s anyone’s guess; Foden is a brutal writer and hasn’t hesitated to wipe out sympathetic characters in previous books.

In the slimy caves Khaled undergoes a crisis, becomes hysterical , tells Miranda about Zayn killing his parents, admits involvement in the bombing, no longer knows what is jihad, what is righteous, drops the knife, pulls out a gun he found on Zayn’s boat, then disappears into the darkness.

On the beach Queller gets to the lighthouse then loses the trail. Turns round just as Zayn smacks him in the face with a plank of wood, grabs the marlinspike, lifts it to skewer Queller.

Nick finds Miranda cowering, shivering, in the caves.

Queller looks up at the man about to kill him when there’s a gunshot and, as in a thousand American movies, a hole appears in Zayn’s forehead, he shudders, and falls dead across the terrified American. Khaled appears, explaining – to Queller – who shot Zayn. He then delivers his Speech the speech which explains his Change of Heart. It is time for him to stop killing, to turn to do good work for Muslims. Queller asks him to come back with them but Khaled very reasonably says, just because I stop trusting al-Qaeda doesn’t mean I start trusting America. Then he’s gone.

Soon afterwards Nick and Miranda appear and pull the big heavy dead Zayn off Queller. Khaleed steals the Belgian’s very expensive cruiser and shoots holes in his own one, so our guys are stranded. Nick and Miranda wash the slime off themselves in the sea, they all sleep in the lighthouse, next morning helicopters find them.

The end

Nick, Miranda and Zayn’s body are choppered back to the mainland where they find themselves celebrities, the story of their chase and shootout somehow all over CNN. Then in a convoy of those huge black FBI SUVs which appear in all the movies, to some local base.

Miranda stares blankly out the window, Nick falls asleep and Queller has last thoughts about bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Will he ever be tracked down? (Yes) Can such an organisation be defeated? (No) Queller reflects that globalisation only entrenches local elites, often working hand in glove with multinational corporations, to maintain most of their populations in resentful poverty, from which are spawned endless fundamentalisms (p.377). Improbably, he has an old man’s hope for a better world, more equality, defusing violence etc. Pipe dream. There are 8 billion humans alive today. In 20 years it will hit 9 billion. More crushing poverty. More grievance. More violence.

All improbable as it is an American security service official wishing for the end of capitalism or its superseding by a fairer system. Not very likely. Sounds more like the thoughts of some Limey pinko novelist.

(Oh, I spotted Foden’s placing of a micro-joke; the SUV convoy roars past a hoarding advertising ENVI skin cream (p.377). Now a hoarding advertising this same product plays a role at the end of ‘The Last King of Scotland’ when Idi Amin, his regime overthrown, asks the novel’s protagonist, Dr Garrigan, to meet him at the ENVI hoarding to drive him to safety. Garrigan doesn’t go. I wonder if there are other sly echoes I didn’t spot.)

Coda

Miranda’s in Washington. Queller’s being investigated, for some reason. Nick didn’t want to stay, asked her to come back to Zanzibar but she didn’t want to leave, so they’ve split up and she wanders round Washington’s memorials feeling soulful.

Queller is being called for questioning in Washington about his links with al-Qaeda in the 80s. He knows he’s being set up as the fall guy. He writes a complete documentary account of his actions and sends it to Miranda. Tries on the latest spiffy prosthetic limb that’s arrived through the post. Has a drink. Reaches for his pistol and shoots himself in the head.

Nick after toying with staying in the States, has come back out to Zanzibar, done up the derelict cottage on Lyly and made it into a home. He is going to protect the turtles as homage to Leggatt. He is trying to be mindful. He is trying not to live in illusions. But he can’t help missing Miranda. It wasn’t true love but it was a lot.

Thoughts

Moral debate?

Because of the focus on the main characters at the start, because we are given such privileged access to Khaled’s life, tragedy, training and motivation, and because the book’s blurb says that Nick and Miranda become ’embroiled’ in a terrorist conspiracy – I thought they might have met Khaled, got to know and like him, then found out what he was going to do and there might have been some kind of agonising moral debate and so on when they try to talk him out of it, he goes ahead anyway… But no.

Inventive structure?

Again, Foden writes that ‘the event’ as the Americans quickly take to calling it, messed with people’s sense of time and place and identity, severely traumatising all involved, and so it crossed my mind that Foden could conceivably have run with that idea and created a postmodern jumping back and forth in time. At a few moments when Nick or Miranda were dazed and disorientated, the psychotic fictions of J.G. Ballard briefly came to mind.

But no. The narrative is much, much more straightforward than that, almost totally vanilla. This happened then this happened then this happened then this happened. The characters do stuff then there’s a big explosion then they rush off to catch the baddies. However brilliantly imagined and vividly written every scene is, and despite a few passages of tricksy juxtapositions, for the most part, structurally, it’s a very conservative book.

Al-Qaeda

The book contains several set-piece passages where the kindly old Queller gives straight explication about al-Qaeda’s history and aims, bin Laden’s speeches, the group’s structure and bases in Afghanistan. He describes how the US government funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of training and munitions to the mujahideen, building secret hideouts, training them in guerrilla warfare etc, all skills and weapons which, with world-class irony, once the Soviets had finally quit Afghanistan, bin Laden and al-Qaeda turned against their western backers.

I’m guessing that at the time Foden drafted the book, all this was relatively specialist, niche stuff, and his up-to-the-minute research was news, and it was cutting edge to include it in a novel.

Unfortunately for Foden, before his book could be published along came 11 September 2001 and the entire world’s media suddenly overflowed with everything known about bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who became the subject of hundreds of books, thousands of documentaries, millions of articles – and the novelty of Foden’s book, its claim to shed light on a little-known terror organisation, evaporated overnight.

Must have been very galling. Then came the US invasions of Afghanistan then Iraq and the chaos they caused, covered on the telly and across all the media every night for years. So for the modern reader, the passages where Queller carefully explains bin Laden and al-Qaeda to Miranda (like pages 290 to 293), interesting refreshers though they are, can’t help but feel somewhat quaint and dated.

The risk of writing about contemporary politics or world affairs is that your text will be overtaken by events even as you write it. Compare with anyone half-way through writing a novel about Ukraine when Russia invaded and rendered the whole thing academic. Imagine you were just putting the finishing touches to your book about the current situation in Israel when Hamas attacked. It’s a high-risk strategy for a novelist. Safer to go that much further back in time, to when events are settled, complete, assimilated and contextualised – which is precisely what Foden did in his next novel, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika, set during the First World War. Can’t get more past, finished and over than that.

And yet…

For all my nitpicking, it’s an awesome book, an epic book. You really feel like you’ve been through the wringer, on a long journey, had an epic adventure. I felt quite shattered by the end of this long, dense book – informed about al-Qaeda and bin Laden, thrilled by the plot, and delighted by the thousand and one precise descriptions Foden encodes in his prose.

Swahili phrases

• chamchela – hurricane squall (p.210)
• chibuku – the local beer (p.252)
• dar es salaam – haven of peace (p.243)
• mlango – door
• mnara – lighthouse (p.224)
• mpuga za peponi – the gardens of paradise (p.220)
• muzungu – white man
• mchezo wa ngombe – the game of the bull (p.355)
• pole-pole – slowly slowly
• papabawa – Zanzibar vampire
• twende! – let’s go (p.295)
• zinj el-bar – coast of the black people (p.153)

Credit

Zanzibar by Giles Foden was published by Faber and Faber in 2002. References are to the 2003 Faber paperback edition.

Giles Foden reviews

• The Last King of Scotland (1998)
• Ladysmith (1999)
• Zanzibar (2002)
• Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika (2004)
• Freight Dogs (2021)

Africa reviews

• Africa reviews