Peace Corps Botswana Norman Rush's thrilling new novel well worth the wait
Read and comment on this review from the News Observer of Peace Corps Botswana Norman Rush's thrilling new novel Mortals. Rush draws on the five years he spent in Botswana for the Peace Corps to tell a rich and densely textured story. He adds a thrillerlike plot that sends the book into a new dimension. Weighing in at 715 small-print pages, the book features several maps; a glossary; enough plot lines that this reviewer had to chart them on a separate notepad; and a dazzling array of intermingling thematic movements. Indeed, the sheer energy and ambition of "Mortals" seems to mock its creator's earthbound status. Read the review at:
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A thrilling novel well worth the wait
By JOHN FREEMAN, Correspondent
Conventional wisdom holds that the American public has the attention span of an untrained flea. In response, publishers push hot writers to deliver fresh product to market every two or three years, lest these literary lions be forgotten.
However, the wide review coverage and strong sales of two second novels a decade in the making -- Donna Tartt's "The Little Friend" and Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex" -- suggest a different truth: for literature, absence makes the heart grow fonder. This maxim is being proven once again with the most highly anticipated second novel of them all: "Mortals" by Norman Rush.
The good news is that Rush delivers on the extravagant promise of his National Book Award-winning debut, "Mating" (1991). Once again, Rush draws on the five years he spent in Botswana for the Peace Corps to tell a rich and densely textured story. He adds a thrillerlike plot that sends the book into a new dimension. Weighing in at 715 small-print pages, the book features several maps; a glossary; enough plot lines that this reviewer had to chart them on a separate notepad; and a dazzling array of intermingling thematic movements. Indeed, the sheer energy and ambition of "Mortals" seems to mock its creator's earthbound status.
"Mortals" begins in 1991, the year that "Mating" ended. The collapse of Communism is sending ripples throughout the Third World, and the AIDS epidemic is teetering toward a full-blown crisis across Africa. In the middle of it all is our narrator Ray Finch, a CIA operative working undercover as a private-school teacher whose specialty is the poetry of John Milton.
It's a fitting pairing, as Ray is feeling like he's lost a bit of paradise himself. With the Cold War over, he's been bumped from freelance intelligence-gathering to a rather low-rung assignment investigating the relatively harmless populist leader Samuel Kerekang. At the same time, Ray's wife of 17 years, Iris, with whom he is utterly besotted, develops a powerful attraction to a black American missionary and holistic-medicine guru named Davis Morel -- who Ray believes is much more dangerous than Kerekang.
Rush's melding of political and emotional plot points will be familiar to readers of "Mating," the tale of an American woman in Botswana who falls for a charismatic American anthropologist. But whereas "Mating" was a novel of courtship -- between the West and Africa, between a man and a woman -- "Mortals" is a novel about marriage, and as one might expect, it's got a distinctly darker and less rapturous flavor than its predecessor.
To begin with, Ray is a bitter and anxious hero. Like the covert intelligence agency that employs him, Ray is grasping after things -- a job, a wife -- things he's had purchase on for so long he's only now begun to realize he doesn't deserve them. Snippets of Milton filter into his head during the day like hallucinations. Although love is always just beneath the surface with him, there's something more violent and explosive a little deeper. You sense that his kindnesses cost him dearly.
With all this tension building up, it's not surprising when "Mortals" takes on the shape and tenor of an old-fashioned spy novel. Like the old hero with an unfaithful wife, it's up to Ray to take matters into his own hands and prove wrong his disbelieving bosses, winning the girl back in the process. So, after Ray is sent to the Kalahari Desert in pursuit of Kerekang, he backs his way into a brutal uprising staged by an alliance of Boer and Namibian forces that the CIA wants to repress.
There are some hiccups in how Rush goes about scripting this triangulation between Kerekang, Morel and Ray. As in "Mating," there is something a touch obvious and overstated about the political beliefs in play here. With its slow buildup and long periods of silence, the novel occasionally feels like a global political chess game that the author is playing for our instruction and benefit.
In the end, a patient reader will be justly rewarded for persisting to the explosive climax that rips this novel's civilized veneer wide open. In this fashion, "Mortals" concludes what has become a loose trilogy about this small African nation, beginning with Rush's debut collection, "Whites" in 1986. "Mating" chronicled the debacle of good intentions. "Mortals," shows that even when man is armed with good intentions -- well, he's only mortal.
Postscript: A mini-interview with Norman Rush
Arriving at the Skylark Cafe in Nyack, N.Y., Norman Rush proclaims, "I love this place." The author presents a hot-off-the-press copy of his second novel, "Mortals," to the cafe's owner who tells him, "You can stay forever."
Rush almost did. For an entire year, the vigorous 69-year-old author sat in a back booth of the '50s-style restaurant with his wife, Elsa, and meticulously trimmed away at the "Mortals" manuscript, which at one point totaled 1,600 pages (the final count is a mere 715). All told, Rush worked on the book for 11 years. "I'm not one to rush," he says with a chuckle.
In "Mortals," the collision between American and African power-politics takes Rush in a tantalizing new direction: the spy novel. Its hero is sent to the Kalahari Desert in pursuit of an African leader, being watched by the CIA, and finds himself drawn into a brutal uprising. If this sounds like something out of Tom Clancy, Rush won't disagree. "I wanted this book to deal with the consequences of the collapse of socialism as an option," he says. "It's been touched on in spy novels, but it hasn't gotten the whole literary treatment that I thought it deserved."
As in his previous book, Ray is based on someone Rush knew while stationed in Botswana with the Peace Corp. "We were really State Department employees," he explains. "As a result of that, we got to see the inside of authority. We knew CIA people, and they were all extremely interesting characters. There was a -- I can't say too much about him -- a man who inspired this character of Ray."
After this book, Rush thinks he is done with Africa, but not with global politics. He says his next novel will be set in America during the buildup to the recent war in Iraq. "It will be about our plunge into empire," Rush says. Will it take him another dozen years? "No!" he says, with a belly laugh. "After this one, they'll all be 250 pages long."
John Freeman's book reviews have appeared in various publications including the Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe. Click on a link below for more stories on PCOL
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