Tag Archives: Christopher Bollen

Gabriel’s Moon & Havoc

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Pack your traveling clothes. These two books will take you on adventures far afield.

In Gabriel’s Moon, the new espionage thriller by William Boyd, a brief prologue tells how thirty-something Gabriel Dax is haunted by the house fire that took his widowed mother’s life and destroyed his childhood home. Gabriel has become a book author and travel writer, speeding off to one destination after another, trying to outrun the flames.

Now Gabriel is in Léopoldville (Kinshasha), capital of the newly established Democratic Republic of the Congo. A friend arranges a spectacular journalistic coup: an interview with the prime minister, the controversial, pro-Soviet Patrice Lamumba—a poor political choice for a leader sitting on a “gold mine” of uranium. Gabriel works hard on the Lamumba article, but his editors spike it. Lamumba, apparently, is old news. Kidnapped in a coup.

Rumors say Lamumba is dead. His editor says that’s not true, and if it were, he’d know it. Of course, it is true, and Gabriel slides into a mirror-world of truths, half-truths, and lies, delivered most convincingly of all. Someone desperately wants his interview tapes, in which Lamumba claimed US, British, and Belgian government operatives were out to get him. He named names.

It’s an exciting read as Gabriel zooms from one assignment to the next, from one strange encounter to another, and develops the self-preservation skills he seems increasingly likely to need. The story is packed with interesting, richly developed characters. Aside from Gabriel, there’s a Spanish artist whose star is falling; a young American woman with a dubious agenda; a CIA operative who uses a minor French author for his nom de guerre; his louche, hard-drinking, and slippery contact in Cadiz; an irritating Liverpool journalist; and a dogged insurance investigator who decades earlier doubted the official story about the deadly fire.

London, Warsaw during the Cold War, Spain, the Congo—Boyd captures them all as effectively as travel writer Gabriel himself might. It’s no surprise that award-winning Scottish author Boyd’s writing is top-notch. He’s a two-time finalist for the Booker Prize.

Christopher Bollen’s protagonist in the new psychological thriller Havoc is Maggie Burkhardt, an 81-year-old widow from Milwaukee, residing at a somewhat unfashionable hotel in Luxor, Egypt. She’s lost everything—husband, daughter—and is making up for their absences by trying to become a presence in other peoples’ lives and “fixing” their problems. Truth told, she’s an interfering busybody, and you may wish she’d get her comeuppance.

Probably you won’t expect her nemesis will turn out to be an eight-year-old boy. Otto Seeber is cunning, fearless, and the orchestrator of much of the havoc that descends on the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel. (This fictional hotel was in part inspired by Luxor’s Winter Palace Hotel, where Bollen got his first notion for this story and Agatha Christie wrote part of Death on the Nile. I’ve been there myself and can attest to the loveliness of the garden with its exotic birds, a frequent meeting place for Bollen’s characters.)

Only Maggie—and her archaeologist friend Ben—see through Otto’s mask of childish innocence to the demonic personality underneath. Ben’s husband, Zachary, having a belated stirring of paternal interest, draws the boy into their circle, and Maggie cannot avoid Otto. He has her in his sights and keeps her there.

Maggie attempts to arrange situations that will prompt Otto’s mother to return with him to Paris. Her plots only succeed in drawing her deeper into a cycle of retribution from Otto. It’s a chess game between them, with a core of malevolence that has prompted comparisons to Patricia Highsmith’s writing.

Bollen’s vivid descriptions seem exactly right. Egypt is a distinctive, “romantic” place, but an unfamiliar world. The rules are different there. Things can go wrong. And do. Maggie is a completely believable, if not completely likeable character. I thought I understood her and her flaws, but in the end, Bollen has some revelations in store that may lead you to reevaluate her. In short, Havoc is a beautifully stage-managed trip to another world.

The Lost Americans

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If you’ve ever traveled to Egypt, Christopher Bollen’s fast-paced new thriller, The Lost Americans, will take you back there. And, if you’ve never been, when you finish this book, you may feel as if you’ve made the trip. The Sahara dust settling on everything, the smells of baking bread and dirty camels, the competing cries of the muzzeins, the golden, dust-laden light of late afternoon, and the vicious, inches-to-spare traffic.

Manhattanite Cate Castle has never visited Egypt, so it’s all new to her, overlaid with a pall of grief and anxiety after the shock of her older brother’s death in Cairo. He reportedly died in a fall from the balcony of his room in the Ramses Sands Hotel. In the country on business, Eric was not yet forty and working for a boutique international arms supplier called Polaris. Egypt is one of Polaris’s best customers.

Back in New York before this trip, Eric’s death doesn’t sit right with Cate. She doesn’t believe the emerging official line that Eric committed suicide and insists on asking questions. She even enlists a retired forensic pathologist to examine his body. Defensive wounds. Injuries on both sides of his head, which a fall wouldn’t produce. Not to mention that his hotel room was only on the third floor. A fall from that height would likely be survivable. If you think Cate is becoming a little obsessed, you’ll also agree she has plenty of reason to be—especially when Polaris offers her family a multi-million-dollar settlement.

Thus, the trip to Egypt. She’s a fundraiser for an arts organization, not any sort of investigator, but what she lacks in experience she more than makes up for in motivation. Where to start that won’t get her in trouble? Let’s just say that she doesn’t need to go looking for it. From the moment she sets foot in the Cairo airport, it seems she’s in danger, and the pace of the novel never slackens.

Everyone seems to be lying to her, including Eric’s former work colleagues, his boss’s wife, the hotel staff, Eric’s embassy contact. It’s a cinch they’re not telling her everything. Cate stays busy finding people to interview and doesn’t spend much time sightseeing. But the sights and exoticism of Egypt are all around her. Her Grand Nile hotel is on the banks of one of the world’s longest and oldest rivers, which not only cleaves the country, it makes it possible. A few miles east or west is basically desert. To someone like Cate, who grew up in the sylvan Berkshire mountains of Western Massachusetts, the compression of so many people, so much living, and so much history into this narrow strip of land feels almost claustrophobic.

Bollen has an admirable literary writing style. He conveys ideas and feelings in ways that are both inventive and quite on point. From that standpoint and the fact that he’s willing to assume some cultural awareness on the part of his readers, the writing stands out. On the negative side, from time to time, he goes on too long with backstory.

I’ve been asking myself whether Cate is a plausible female protagonist. She’s certainly plucky and determined. Perfectly likeable. A little irrational, in that she broke up a good relationship back home through her own infidelity. But does she act like a woman would act when she wants information someone doesn’t want to share, or the way a woman would act in a tight situation? Or does she act more like a man with a woman’s name? I can’t put my finger on what bothers me about her, but just the fact that the question occurred to me makes me think she doesn’t exactly ring true, but it’s a small point in an otherwise well-conceived, extremely evocative thriller that respects the reader’s intellect. I liked it a lot.

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