by Will Ferguson
Entertaining spellbinder by 2012 Giller Prize winner
File this book under the category of a romp/literary thriller, not exactly a who-done-it, but a how-does-this-crazy-thing-end.
I confess up front, this kind of book isn’t really my thing. The short chapters, almost always ending on a button, as screenwriters say, or a cliffhanger, grow wearisome over three hundred plus pages. Ferguson’s wordsmithing, delectably noirish and hardboiled, is, often to a fault, itching to please. Aren’t all writers trying, at bottom, merely to entertain, even us snotty literary types? We hide the vaudeville under our vaunted observational prose, whereas the thriller writer is unabashed, inviting the reader to sit back and revel as the gears turn.
Ferguson is a winner of a Giller Prize, no less, and his stylish, inventive prose powerfully delves into the humanity of his characters, into the particulars of the book’s many exotic locations. It’s just all at the service of so much nonsense.
What nonsense, you say? An international mastermind, a finder of lost, and therefore immensely valuable, things, who will stop at nothing and who at times may not even exist, ensnares a raft of characters in his diabolical schemes.
Still, all the international settings, the insights into the worlds of travel writing and conflict reporting, all the buttons and cliffhangers did their duty, kept me flipping the pages until the end, however hastily. In the middle of a one-hundred-year pandemic with a seemingly interminable amount of time on our hands, a good romp may be just what we all need.