Book Review: The Sun is God (2014) by Adrian McKinty

Brevity isn't a quality normally associated with historical fiction. Writers in this field usually measure out their prose in cubits and furlongs, with innumerable bits and bobs of historical detail clinging to their plots like burls on an oak tree. And then we have The Sun is God. Adrian McKinty is a crime/mystery novelist whose stories have always had contemporary settings. This novel (based closely on a true incident) has a crime and a mystery at its heart, and even a detective, but I'd come down on the side of it being historical fiction rather than a mystery novel. And it's quite short.

The setting is the colony of German New Guinea in 1906. A smallish group of Europeans, mostly German, calling themselves "Cocovores" are living on a small island, subsisting entirely on coconuts, bananas and a lot of sunbathing (they're also nudists). The Cocovores are a cult, in fact, and believe that their simple, pure lifestyle will make them immortal. One of their number dies under mysterious circumstances. The local German authorities (it's a very small colony) are forced to turn for investigative help to Will Prior, an ex-member of the British military police who's washed up in New Guinea after being kicked out of the army. Will goes to the Cocovores' island along with a German official and a Miss Pullen-Berry, an intrepid English traveler and journalist. The island reveals some dark secrets, Will faces death and danger, and the mystery is (mostly) solved.

Although the mystery plot gives the novel its backbone, the meat of the story is its look at one of the psychological and philosophical turning points of the modern age. McKinty has managed to pack into this one small, historical incident a lot of the themes that would define the 20th century. Let's begin with Will, who is psychologically damaged from taking part in a massacre of starving black South Africans being held in a British concentration camp. In one horrible moment Will has seen the pointy end of repressive colonialism and industrialized state terrorism, two isms that will metastasize in the decades to come. Will's flight from South Africa is an unspoken resistance to what the British government is doing. And the Cocovores are one of the earliest expressions of the individualism, narcissism, and utopianism that characterize the cults, counter culture, and alternative lifestyles that grew apace over the next several generations. In his descriptions of the Cocovores McKinty nimbly references aspects of future cults such as Jim Jones' Peoples Temple and the Heaven's Gate cult.

The Cocovores are the children of Darwin and Freud and Nietzsche, something that they're very aware of. They are among the first people of the 20th century to take the view that they can and should live outside the control of established states, religions and philosophies; they are the architects of their own universe, albeit one that's demented and reliant on cheap native labour. In the Cocovores we also witness the true believer fanaticism that leads to persecution and murder; on a small scale here, on an epic scale a few years down the road in Europe.

As mentioned earlier, McKinty keeps his story lean and doesn't overindulge in historical scene-setting. Instead, he lets his prose do some that work, as shown here:

Bethman swung a clumsy haymaker at Will's face, which he easily dodged before cleaning Bethman's clock with an upper cut to the point of his prominent chin. The German fell backward, poleaxed by the blow.

The use of semi-archaic words such as "haymaker", "clock" and "poleaxed", and the Boys Own Paper tone of that passage, take us back in time without the addition of distracting historical asides. The Sun is God isn't an exercise in nostalgia or a showy exercise in historical research, it's a sharp, piercing look at an unlikely group of people (for the time) who form a kind of template for the century to come. The only comparison that comes to mind are the Mamur Zapt novels by Michael Pearce (my review), which are marketed as mysteries but are more about colonialism. In any case, McKinty is working at a higher literary level than Pearce. And here's where I contradict myself; as much as I enjoyed the economy of McKinty's writing, in retrospect I wanted the novel to be a bit longer. The back stories of the Cocovores cried out for more detail; these are people who have stepped far, far outside the mainstream so the inner journeys that brought them to New Guinea almost demand a fuller description. That aside, The Sun is God is a refreshing example of historical fiction that achieves a lot without doubling as a cinder block.

Book Review: The Mamur Zapt and the Donkey-Vous (1990) by Michael Pearce

Cosy mysteries are not my thing. In fact, I'm not even sure I've read one unless you count all the Agatha Christie's I read as a teenager. It's been noir and hardboiled for me for a very long time. I make an exception for Michael Pearce. His Mamur Zapt mysteries (17 in all) are sometimes described as cosy mysteries, and he certainly doesn't go in for sex, violence and grisly forensic details, but there the similarity ends. It would be more accurate to say that he writes historical fiction that happens to include mystery elements. His novels are set in British-ruled Egypt just before World War I. The Mamur Zapt is the Egyptian title given to the head of Political Intelligence in Egypt. The job, however, is always filled by a Brit, or in this case a Welshman named Captain Owen. Owen investigates crimes both high and low, but only if they have a whiff of the political about them.

In this novel Owen is called upon to investigate the kidnappings of two tourists from the terrace of Shepheard's, the best hotel in Cairo. What looks like a simple crime for profit soon gets more complicated, with links developing to a terrorist group and the Khedive, Egypt's symbolic head of state. Owen not only has to juggle the political aspects of the case but also figure out something of a locked room puzzle: how did two men vanish in broad daylight from a busy hotel terrace?

The real appeal of these novels is the way Pearce recreates Edwardian Egypt. This isn't a fictional Egypt you'd expect; there are no moonlit, romantic interludes in the shadow of the pyramids; no swarthy villains with knives clutched between their teeth; and there's definitely no ancient curses or ambulatory corpses wrapped in bandages. What Pearce concentrates on are the dynamics and tensions of a colonial power, as represented by Owen, attempting to control a country that is seething with nationalist and revolutionary ambitions. Owen is very sympathetic to Egyptian sensibilities and is never patronizing when dealing with his Egyptian subordinates. Pearce, who was raised in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, also earns praise for his refreshing portrayal of Egypt's working classes. When writing dialogue for foreign members of the "lower" classes, most English writers choose to represent their subject's class by having them speak in pidgin English, broken English, or in some version of a Cockney or Yorkshire accent when they're speaking in their own language. In this novel a good number of characters are humble street vendors, but you wouldn't know it by the way they talk. Since they're speaking in Arabic (Owen also speaks Arabic), Pearce makes their speech grammatical and free of malapropisms, as you would reasonably expect. It's nice to see Pearce, like Owen, showing this kind of respect for his characters. For contrast check out the way David Mitchell wrote dialogue for his lower-class Dutch characters in his bestselling The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

The mystery at the heart of this particular novel is cleverly constructed and revealed, and along the way Pearce effortlessly and elegantly describes the social and political character of Edwardian Cairo. Pearce is a very good writer, particularly of dialogue; like some of the better English writers he has a knack of having his characters speak little but say a lot: a simple phrase like "I see" can have a wealth of meaning in Pearce's hands. And he's also adept at dry, droll humor; in fact, his 1992 novel The Mamur Zapt and the Spoils of Egypt won the won the Crime Writer's Association Last Laugh Award for funniest crime novel. If you normally cringe at the idea of reading a cosy, or being seen reading one, give Pearce a try and tell people you're reading a sharply-written study of colonialism and nascent Arab nationalism. You won't be wrong.