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Giles Foden Mimi and TouTou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika
At the start of World War One, German warships controlled Lake Tanganyika in Central Africa....
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£8.99
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Faber and Faber The Last King of Scotland
No, we're not talking Bonnie Prince Charlie here. The title character of Giles Foden's debut novel, <I>The Last King of Scotland</I>, is none other than Idi Amin, the former dictator of Uganda. Told from the viewpoint of Nicholas Garrigan, Amin's personal physician, the novel chronicles the hell that was Uganda in the 1970s. Garrigan, the only son of a Scots Presbyterian minister, finds himself far away from Fossiemuir when he accepts a post with the Ministry of Health in Uganda. His arrival in Kampala coincides with the coup that leads to President Obote's overthrow and Idi Amin Dada's ascendancy to power. Garrigan spends only a few days in the capital city, however, before heading out to his assignment in the bush. But a freak traffic accident involving Amin's sports car and a cow eventually brings the good doctor into the dictator's orbit; a few months later, Garrigan is recalled from his rural hospital and named personal physician to the president. Soon enough, Garrigan finds himself caught between his duty to his patient and growing pressure from his own government to help them control Amin. <P> From Nicholas Garrigan's catbird seat, Foden guides us through the horrors of Amin's Uganda. It would be simple enough to make the dictator merely monstrous, but Foden defies expectation, rendering him appealing even as he terrifies. The doctor couldn't help feeling awed by the sheer size of him and the way, even in those unelevated circumstances, he radiated a barely restrained energy...I felt--far from being the healer--that some kind of elemental force was seeping into me. And Garrigan makes a fine stand-in for Conrad's Marlow as he travels up a river of blood from Naiveté to horrified recognition of his own complicity. As if this weren't enough, Foden also treats us to a finely drawn portrait of Africa in all its natural, political and social complexity. <I>The Last King of Scotland</I> makes for dark but compelling reading. --<I>Alix Wilber, Amazon.com</I>
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£3.99
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Penguin Books Ltd Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika
Pages: 256, Paperback, Penguin Books Ltd
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£6.39
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Penguin Audiobooks Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika
Audio CD, Penguin Audiobooks
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£8.56
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Faber and Faber Zanzibar
<I>Zanzibar</I> is Giles Foden's ambitious, if somewhat flawed third novel. Like his previous books, its setting is beautiful but abused Africa and its backbone is provided by real events, in this case, prophetically, the 1998 bombing of the US Embassy in Tanzania by Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaida network. (In an author's note Foden explains that most of the novel was actually completed before the events of September 11, 2001.) <p> <I>Zanzibar</I> is ostensibly a political thriller-cum-romantic adventure yarn. An ageing maverick CIA agent, Jack Quiller, a motorcycling, marine biologist, Nick Karolides, and a young, ambitious American embassy staffer Miranda Powers, become, as the book jacket says, embroiled in a terrorist conspiracy. It's not however, a simplistic heroes versus villains story. The Clinton/Lewinsky scandal provides an omnipresent backdrop, bin Laden puts in an appearance and the book's overriding theme is the nature of moral responsibility. As with his impressive Idi Amin-centred debut <I>The Last King of Scotland</I>, Foden is interested in exploring the grey area between good and evil. Quiller, for instance, helped train bin Laden--or Mr Sam as he was once affectionately known by the CIA. Betrayed and scarred for life by bin Laden, he is the only agent who believes that he poses a serious threat. Khaled al-Khidr, an islander who joined al-Qaida after the murder of his parents, realises, unfortunately too late, that terrorism is against the teachings of Allah. Fragments of the island's troubled colonial history, liberally distributed throughout the tale, also help broaden the ethical tapestry. <p>Unfortunately, much of <I>Zanizbar</I>'s power is diluted by a completely unconvincing love story. Quiller and al-Khidr are marginalised by the unprepossessing Nick Karolides and Miranda Powers, who, although they drive much of the narrative, are little more than stock thriller characters. Powers is a feisty female who adored her late father. Karolides, also mourning the loss of his father, is a sensitive yet hunky environmental scientist. Their emotional range is further hampered by the fact that Foden equips them with Mall Rat-style--Man, she looked good, big way, the old guy, he was really nice--American parlance. It's almost as if a cigar-chewing Hollywood mogul with an eye on the film rights has demanded a love interest and Foden has duly obliged. Despite its faults it's good to see a writer at least attempting to wrestle, if a little didactically, with Islamic fundamentalism and American Imperialism. --<I>Travis Elborough</I>
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£6.39
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Faber and Faber Ladysmith
In the dying days of the 19th century, the world's eyes turned to the small South African town of Ladysmith, whose inhabitants spent 118 days under siege from Boer forces, waiting for General Buller's relief forces. Giles Foden tells <I>Ladysmith</I>'s story through a host of characters. There's the Irish hotelier Leo Kiernan and his daughters Bella and Jane; the barber Antonio Torres, from Portuguese East Africa; the various British war correspondents, including a young Winston Churchill; the Indian stretcher bearers, among them Mohandas Ghandi; a Zulu named Muhle Maseku, his wife Nandi and son Wellington; and two young English soldiers, Tom and Perry Barnes, whose letters home were apparently inspired by those of Foden's great- grandfather. It's a busy book, and it's not always clear what's going on. But that's Foden's point. At heart <I>Ladysmith</I> is a novel about the writing of history, set on the verge of modernity, where old ways of assessing historical truth were being cruelly questioned. So correspondent George Steevens still reads his Greek historians and Gibbons, while messages are being sent(and censored) by the new-fangled heliograph. Sieges are out of date, Steevens realises. To the man of 1899, with five editions of the evening papers every day, a siege is a thousandfold a hardship. We make it a grievance nowadays if we are a day behind the news--news that concerns us nothing! With such pressures to provide news, news, news, it's no surprise when the correspondents end up producing the <I>Ladysmith Lyre</I>, full of fake news. And on the margins, there's the unnamed Biographer, eschewing words in favour of visual images with his Biography, but soon finding that he too can't tell the whole story. <p> Foden visits the pitfalls of historical fiction. Like Annie Proulx's <I>Accordion Crimes</I>, there are moments in <I>Ladysmith</I> when research overpowers narrative. Like Sebastian Faulks' <I>Birdsong</I>, Foden's love story convinces far less than his war story. In its attempted range--Churchill and Ghandi's encounter prefiguring events of the 1940s, Bella's personal rebellion standing in for the advance of women, the place of Ireland in Britain's colonial plans, Wellington's experiences informing his work with the ANC-- <I>Ladysmith</I> sometimes falls short. But in his evocation of the town's drawn-out suffering, Foden is very good, producing some startling images such as the mockingbirds who take to imitating the whine and buzz of shells. This is never anything less than a fascinating, ambitious novel, and to see a young author taking on the huge question of how to write history is inspiring indeed. --<I>Alan Stewart</I>
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£5.59
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Alfred A. Knopf Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika
Pages: 272, Hardcover, Alfred A. Knopf
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£11.33
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