Zanzibar

What is most impressive about this novel is Foden's knowledge and the additional research he must have done for this book. He knows a great deal about East Africa, and there are sensuous descriptions of skies, seas and flora. He knows about marine life, about boats and diving apparatus, about the structure of the United States intelligence services and some of the methods they use, and about Al-Qaeda. The first 200 pages (about half the novel) are a rather leisurely but very readable display of all that knowledge, and an equally leisurely introduction, in separate sections, of the principal invented characters who will be brought together later on and who will be involved in the real historical events of the 1998 Al-Qaeda bombing of the American embassy in Dar es Salam. In the meantime, knowing that we are reading a thriller, there are in that first half a couple of episodes which raise expectations in us that something dramatic is imminent. It is not imminent; but when it comes, it comes suddenly and ferociously, and lasts for some forty pages. After that, for the next 70 pages, the pace slackens again, and the plot narrative is interrupted by long political passages, detailing the past history of Al-Qaeda (all a lot more familiar to us since 9/11 than they were when most of the book was written) and the American response to the embassy bombing. Then, before some didactic musing near the end of the book, there are some 30 pages in which a variety of characters stalk each other; and these will be the climax of the film that is likely to be made of the book. It is unlikely to be as good a film as they made of the author's first novel, The Last King of Scotland; but then that was also a much better book.

In 1998 Al-Qaida terrorists attacked the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. In this book Giles Foden, who specilizes in turning African historical events into 'faction' novels, takes these attacks as the basis of a thriller in which a number of apparently unconnected stories, in which the protagonists (a Greek-American oceanologist, an intelligence veteran with only one arm, an ambitious young civil servant and and African boy whose parents are murdered) are finally all part of one big story that cost the lives of more than 200 people. Giles Foden gives a good description of the wheelings and dealings of African (and American) bureaucracy, but also a very interesting and not much known insight into the birth of Al-Qaida, when it was still an American-sponsored resistance movement in Russian-occupied Afghanistan. Not exactly an episode of history that is very fondly remembered by the American government. Definitely worth a read.