The principal narrator is Robert Poley, a writer of airport thrillers who inexplicably receives a laptop computer containing material written by Mercer. And so the chase is on. Mike Nicol has placed his novel on that uncomfortable divide between political writing and escapist fiction. It soon becomes clear, however, that broad political disclosure enjoys a much higher priority than disclosure of the limited violent event that explains everything else in thriller language. If this is a thriller, the chase is pure wild goose.
Enjoyable reading depends in part on being absorbed in the flow of narrative.
I felt jarred by the constant digressions, such as Poley s research notes, Professor Khafulo s literary commentary on the unfolding text itself, and the disembodied voices of Poley s live sources in the form of Mercer s friends and associates. The research notes slowly build a picture of Mercer s activities, and sketches the social and political background. The learned professor s commentaries on the nature of the text within the text, or on magical realism, or on the effects of cultural colonialism, present a different kind of difficulty. Nicol constructs Poley, Poley constructs Mercer, Mercer constructs Salma, and Salma constructs Sarra. Finally, Salma constructs the tapestry of an ibis that is a central trope of the book s own construction.