The African scenes, the secret intelligence stuff with the American establishment predictably turning out to be the bad guys - confirming what we already know from decades of novels and movies - sit awkwardly with the Harvard superficialities, and the Bond-style final shoot-out is, quite simply, a badly judged mistake. It's at its best satirising Harvard campus life, its poisonous academic rivalries and decadent social jockeying. Imagine Jay McInerney trying to write John le Carré and you have some idea of the inconsistent tone of this book, which arrives from across the Atlantic with all sorts of - frankly baffling - plaudits. One of her most promising students, David, who is from Hatashil's territory, is struggling to gain Ivy League social acceptance, while his upmarket white girlfriend Jane wants to make her name as a political journalist.īack in David's village, young Harvard graduate and American intelligence agent Michael Teak meets Hatashil and triggers a massacre that will test all of the characters' loyalties. Professor Susan Lowell has just nabbed a Pulitzer Prize for her book praising Somali freedom fighter Hatashil.
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