I've often wondered about the precept of this book myself. As a translator, how can you stop yourself from using your own experiences and beliefs to colour, or filter, the languages that you are supposed to be interpreting and translating in an objective way? How can they, honestly? How can a Serbo-Croat translator at the Hague cover up their natural disgust for some of the atrocities perpetrated in Bosnia? Is it possible?

Of course, we all think. These people are trained professionals. And then le Carre introduces us to Salvo, a fearsomely gifted linguist specialising in African dialects. Salvo is seconded to the intelligence services for a mysterious summit, and soon discovers that its subject is a country very dear to his heart: the fabulously wealthy (in resources) and ruinously corrupt Democratic Republic of Congo. And as he gradually uncovers the truth behind the summit, and his suspicions about the motives of its attendees and organisers grow, he begins to let his moral conscience guide his actions.

I associate le Carre with Smiley and his Cold War ilk, which is possibly why this is the first of his novels that I've actually read. It's not the formulaic thriller I had expected: from the development of Salvo's character and his gradual shift from the gentrified immigrant to the idealist and crusader, there are subtle undercurrents and themes that make thought-provoking points. One or two of the characters, perhaps, could have benefited from more depth - Salvo's wife seems little more than an upper middle-class cypher, for example - but the novel has a quick pace and presumably the author has had to sacrifice a more rounded world to make way for a few more thrills. That's not a criticism. It's a thriller, albeit one with an absolute minimum of guns, and an enjoyable and thoughtful one.

UPDATE: There is a short article in Publisher's Weekly that Ishmael Beah's account is being disputed in Australia. Read the article here.

I watched the movie Blood Diamond recently and I wanted to learn more about the civil war in Sierra Leone. I remembered seeing Ishmael Beah on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and downloaded A Long Way Gone from Audible.

This is a compelling but unpleasant story. It is made all the more horrible by being true. At 12 years old, Ishmael is a happy child. He and his friends discover rap music, memorize lyrics, and practice their dance moves. Ishmael’s father believed in education and wants his son to become a doctor. They know about the war from refugees that came through town but it seems far away.

One day Ishmael, his older brother, Junior, and some friends make an overnight trip to another town. While there, they learn that the war had come to their village. They try to make in home to find their family but it becomes obvious that it won’t be possible.

What happens next is the first of Ishmael’s battles, the battle for survival. He and his brother and friends keep traveling, for months, looking for refuge. During a rebel attack at one of their stops, Ishmael and Junior are separated and never see one another again. Ishmael and his friends spend months moving from village to village until they think they have found safety in a village with a large army detachment.

It is here that Ishmael’s second battle begins, his time as a child soldier. The army suffers serious losses and the men in the village are given a choice, to join the army or take their chances with the rebels. The rebels represent near certain death so Ishmael, now 13 years old, and his friends become soldiers. For two years, fueled on war movies, cocaine, marijuana, and amphetamines, Ishmael fights the rebels, even becoming a junior lieutenant, leading a squad of other child soldiers. He becomes a cold killer, capable of cutting a man’s throat with no emotion.

After two years, Ishmael’s third battle begins, rehabilitation. One day men from UNICEF arrive at camp and Ishmael is selected to leave with them. He doesn’t realize it at the time but his war is over and he is sent to a rehabilitation camp in Freetown. After many months he released to an uncle and begins a period of assimilation back into society. His troubles are not over though there are happy times.

He is selected to go to New York City on a U.N sponsored trip to highlight the problems of children in the world. There he meets a woman named Laura who will later become part of his life.

Eventually the war comes to Freetown. Fearing that he may be forced to become a soldier once again, Ishmael escapes to Guinea and eventually to the U.S. to begin a new life with a woman he considers his mother, Laura.

The events Ishmael witnessed and participated in are nearly impossible to grasp because of the total brutality and inhumanity. Even in war it is difficult to conceive that human beings could act that way to each other. Ishmael’s story brings home the reality that events in Rwanda, Kenya, Somalia, Dafur, and Sierra Leone are happening to real people, powerless to save themselves.

The narration is plain but well done, fitting for the story told. The print version of this book contains a map showing where Ishmael traveled as well as a timeline of the conflict in Sierra Leone.

The rather odd title of this slender book reflects the fact that it collects two independent novellas, linked only by their intimate connections to Africa and their shared theme of outsiders trying to recreate African societies in their image. Science fiction, as a genre, has always been relatively tolerant of novelettes and novellas, giving them a home in magazines and incorporating them without complaint into collections like this one. It's gratifying for fans, since SF seems to generate its fair share of stories that are best told at lengths somewhere between a short story and a novel. These two by the prolific and talented Mike Resnick are excellent examples.

"Bwana" is a long entry in Resnick's cycle of stories about the planet Kirinyaga, inhabited by a band of Kikuyu colonists from Kenya who hope to create a utopia built around their traditional culture. Like the shorter entries in the series (collected in the book _Kirinyaga_), it uses Koriba--the colony's founder, wise man, shaman, and keeper of the old ways--as its viewpoint character. Like the shorter pieces, it presents him with a threat to the integrity of the restored Kikuyu culture that he must resolve without doing lasting damage to the colony or inflicting unnecessary hardship on his people. The threat, in this case, is a professional hunter brought from off-planet to deal with a rapidly growing hyena population. It's a mark of Resnick's skill as a writer that he makes the hunter both an odious adversary for Koriba *and* a thoroughly modern man whose sentiments about the would-be utopia many readers will share. Like the other works in the Kirinyaga Cycle, it reflects Resnick's subtle-but-firm iinsistence that even cultures we might not wish to live in deserve our understanding and respect.

"Bully!" is an alternate history tale about ex-president Teddy Roosevelt going to what was then the Belgian Congo (later Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo) after leaving office in 1909. Accompanied by hunter-trader John Rowe and a colorful company of hunters, adventurers, and ex-Rough Riders, he sets out to take the colony away from the Belgians (on the grounds that they don't really want it anyway) and turn it into a U. S. protectorate where democratic government, Western education, and self-determination can flourish. He wants, in other words, to make it a thoroughly modern but thoroughly black-African nation. The first three-quarters of the story details how he sets these plans in motion, drawing on his boundless self-confidence, bottomless energy, and considerable political ingenuity. Just when you think it's *just* an alternate-history romp, however, the last quarter brings TR face to face with the consequences of his actions. Whether the resolution (and thus the story) "works" for you will depend on your interest in Resnick's ongoing exploration of what happens when vastly different cultures collide.

"Bwana" and "Bully!" are readable and enjoyable as SF stories in their own right, but (as the introduction to this book makes clear) they're also part of Resnick's ongoing use of SF to explore the collsion of European and African cultures. They're of a piece, therefore, not just with the rest of the Kirinyaga stories but also with _Ivory_ and the _Paradise/Purgatory/Inferno_ trilogy, among other work. Read as stand-alone stories, they're good entertainment. Read as part of that larger discussion, they're also thought-provoking.

Lieutenant St. Vincent Halfhyde is a late-19th-century British naval officer with a sharp tongue, a quick mind, and a very low tolerance for fools (regardless of rank). He occasionally exasperates superior offficers who like him, and routinely enrages those who don't. He's the sort of person who's indispensible in time of war, but a square peg in the round holes of the peacetime navy. Even in peacetime, however, there are threats to Britain's security that are best met by an officer of Halfhyde's unique credentials. McCutchan wrote 15-odd books about Halfhyde, of which this is the third (and the first that I've read).

Philip McCutchan was a competent, though not gifted, storyteller. The plot of "Halfhyde and the Guns of Arrest" (involving Halfhyde's pursuit of a British traitor who has stolen top-secret naval documents and intends to turn them over to Germany) is involving without being thrilling, and most of the supporting characters are straight from central casting: the eager young midshipman, the prissy executive officer, the sneering German captain, and so on. The middle section of the book takes place in Africa, but the setting seems curiously underdeveloped. The story's principal strengths are Halfhyde himself, first-rate scenes of action at sea, and a climax that generates considerable suspense before wrapping the plot up in an unexpected and extremely satisfying (if not altogether plausible) way.

Naval history enthusiasts are likely to be fascinated (as I was) by McCutchan's evocation of the late Victorian navy. The 1775-1815 and 1939-1945 eras are well represented in naval fiction, as are the present day and the near future. The Halfhyde stories are virtually the only naval adventures set in the decades around 1900, when coal-fired, steam-driven steel battleships ruled the waves, torpedo boats were new, and the diesel-electric submarine was still on the drawing board. McCutchan superbly captures the technology and the social fabric of the late Victorian era, from the dirty business of "coaling ship" to the art of taking a steam-driven launch through heavy surf to the formality of even casual conversations between officers.

The chronologically exotic setting is, for me, unusual enough and well-handled enough to be worth an extra star in the rating . . . but I've always been fascinated by the steam-and-coal era of naval history. If your taste in naval adventure runs more to Jack Aubrey, Horatio Hornblower, and the rest of the wood-and-canvas gang, you may want to adjust accordingly.

This book drew me in almost despite myself and I'm glad it did. Set in London and Zambia, it is the story of Memory, an African girl, and her English adoptive mother Elise. The author sets the scene with a glimpse of events that happened when Memory was just a girl, and then tantalisingly reveals the full story little by little, while we learn about its effects on the principal characters twenty five years later.

The book is described in the blurb as a 'romance' and a 'love story', but I don't think this does the book justice. In a way, it is a love story, but it doesn't just focus on romantic love- in fact, I found the portrayal of this to be rather cliched- but encompasses love for parents, children and even the love one can feel for a stranger, just because they are a fellow human being.

While reading this book I had a sense of foreboding, feeling that dreadful things were awaiting the protagonists. And as I like a happy ending, that often causes me to put a book down. But I kept reading and found that the story did not end with notes of despair or gloom but rather of hope- I was left with the sense that people, although weak and selfish at times, can also be wonderfully generous and triumphant in life.

I'm not generally a reader of biographies, but when I saw that Ayaan Hirsi Ali had written one, I just had to read it. 

Ali came to international prominence in 2004, with the murder of film-maker Theo Van Gogh. He was killed by a Muslim fanatic for daring to making a film with Ali about women and Islam. A long letter, addressed to Ali and stabbed into his chest with a butcher's knife said, among other things, "You're next". Initially, the Dutch government swung into action and gave Ali full protection, moving her around from safe house to safe house, country to country, much as the UK did for Salman Rushdie. But then political interests in Holland stripped her of her Dutch citizenship and forced her into hiding at her own expense, eventually resulting in a move to the USA, where she currently resides, speaking out against Islam and for the rights of Muslim women.

This book is the story of her life and the events leading up to Van Gogh's murder, from her early childhood in Somalia to her teen years in Kenya and her flight to Holland as a refugee. Throughout, she never flinches from including the most graphic details, from a harrowing account of her genital mutilation (or circumcision, or excision, or whatever politically-correct culturally-relativist euphemism you want to use for it) to the Muslim teacher who beat the Q'ranic teachings into her so hard she nearly died of a fractured skull, to the moments of joy and love she experienced with early boyfriends and friends and protectors in Africa and Europe. 

Initially, Ali tried hard to be a good Muslim woman and to follow the dictates of the Prophet to the letter - but as she matured, both physically and in her ability to reason, she found that she could not reconcile Islam with what she knew to be true about the world, so gradually she became an atheist - and earned, thereby, the rejection of her family and the condemnation of Islamists all over the world, culminating in the murder of Theo Van Gogh and the threats to her own life.

As an account of a remarkable life, this book stands out; but it is even more powerful as an indictment of Islam, and in particular Islam's attitude to and teachings about women. If you care about women, and the future of the world in the face of the threat of Islam, you really need to read this book.

The book of chameleons was recommended to me by my friend Ruth.... a woman whose opinions I respect even though we don't always agree. This time we do. I was bowled over.

As the name implies, (and anyway, the secret is revealed on the back cover) the narrator of this strange and entrancing tale is a lizard. The lizard lives in the house of Feliz Ventura, an albino who specializes in creating a new past for people who have acquired a little bit of money and now wish to invent some respected ancestors, complete with sepia photographs of their "fore-fathers" who, having been skillfully invented by Felix, are all descendants from the Portuguese nobility who came as conquerors and colonists in previous centuries.

The lizard is a silent witness to the conversation between the albino and a mysterious visitor who declines even to give his name, instead insisting that Felix should give him a new one to go with his new past. Well, not quite silent, since this type of lizard has a laugh which sounds disturbingly human. The mysterious visitor admits only to being a photographer specializing in documenting wars around the world. He insists on being given an Angolan identity, and the albino points out that this is implausible.

-Why? asks the visitor.

-Well, because you are white. The albino tells him.

-Nonsense, you are much whiter than I am.

-No, no. I am black. The albino argues indignantly.

The plot thickens with the arrival of two other characters... the girl Lucia, who is also a photographer, but who only photographs sky and light in its different hues and moods, and an old tramp who lives below ground, and emerges from a man-hole to scavenge for something to eat.

It is a short work, but with a pleasing architecture, as slowly the drama unfolds, and we begin to understand the relationships of all these characters to one another. It is beautifully written and translated. I found it enjoyable, stimulating and refreshing.