One could be forgiven for picking up a 700+ page tome detailing a white CIA agent’s musings about, among other things, liberal guilt and the impenetrability of Botswanan culture to a western outsider and thinking, “You navel-gazing ass,” but it would be mistake to discard this book so quickly. This is an easier book to admire than to love, but I liked it very, very much.While this is perhaps the single most masculine novel I’ve ever read – even aside from the guns and competition for labia rendered in (unnecessary?) great detail, Ray’s penis is all over it, and I apologize to men everywhere but the scatological, too, is your special province, and there’s plenty of that -- it is self-consciously so, and not in an unduly arch way. Rather, it offers a serious examination of the way being a good old boy (our protagonist, Ray) can mute one’s perceptions and occasion real moral anguish. Rush effectively gets out in front of speculative postcolonial and gendered readings by allowing his narrator to directly formulate some of his more apt-to-offend thoughts (Ray used to think the problem of women was solvable by marrying someone – no more, with all this women’s lib! Ray does not like the way the what he thinks is the gift of western technology is being squandered in Africa). No reader need to torture the text to find the problems with Ray’s worldview.As other reviewers have noted, this is of a piece with Ray’s general narcissism, but part of what makes this a great read is Ray’s complexity, because anyone reading it by choice will likely hate some of his cluelessness even as she identifies deeply with Ray’s abiding faith in literature. Part of what makes this book remarkable has to do with the way literature figures in it in ways that should seem absurd, or at least coyly postmodern. But Rush isn’t playing games. Rush has a knack for making the preposterous seem plausible, without screaming “LOOK! THIS IS A FICTION, THIS IS WHY SOMETHING SO CRAZY CAN HAPPEN!” as many of his contemporaries seem to do. A lot of the best absurdities can’t be revealed without also giving away huge plot developments, but it’s fair to say that at one point a character recites “Dover Beach” out of politeness to his foe, to mask the sound of that foe’s defecating – and somehow, this scene is not ridiculous. Similarly, an unpublished manuscript winds up saving lives, and Rush manages to present this plot twist with a kind of touching earnestness. Ray’s love of literature makes him sympathetic, but his succinct disses of Joyce and then Flaubert endeared him to me in spite of his many failures. I hope that Rush hates them too.Perhaps the most important evidence that this is a novel premised on the idea that literature is a serious business is that, even though it does much to present warring ideologies and is full of gross sex and literary flourishes, it finally feels like the portrait of a moral awakening. I read this in part because of James Wood’s How Fiction Works and would like to restate one objection I had to that book (also voiced in my review of that book.) Wood says that readers too often demand “moralizing niceness” and take authors to task when they don’t present us with likable characters. I believe that he misunderstands readers’ objections, which generally have to do with the frustration of being implicitly asked by an author to have sympathy for an unsympathetic character; we love/hate Humbert Humbert because Nabokov doesn’t ask us to like him. It is interesting, having read this essentially at Wood’s recommendation, to find that Rush does what I and so many Amazon and Goodreads reviewers ask of our authors: he gives us a not wholly likable character and does not try to coax us into greater sympathy than the character deserves. And the novel is ultimately a moralizing one! At least, in my reading. And it is a moralizing novel in a very satisfying and even subtle way.This book requires attention in a different way than other books of similar length and difficulty, and it took me forever to read, but it was worth it. It does things that I thought twenty-first century authors had given up. I will certainly check out Mating.
Ray Finch is a contracted CIA man working under cover as a school teacher in Botswana, neighbour to South Africa and the ANC, considered the most significant communist battleground after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the USSR. Botswana is a country which, in American eyes, "was working, in a continent where almost nothing else was." Things are about the stop working for Finch though, both in his work and his home life, as he loses respect for the methods of his superior and starts to suspect that his wife might be having an affair.Finch wants to investigate Dr Morel, a man with a mission to destroy the influence of religion in Africa, Christianity in particular, which is a powerful source of the white man's control. But his superior wants him to focus on an engineer called Kerekang, who Finch sees as a moderate socialist and not a genuine POI (Person of Interest). The plot thickens when Finch's wife, Iris, starts seeing the Dr, becoming both evangelized and attracted to him. The spy story is interesting, in an unusual setting, with a culture and history mostly new to me. But my oh my, the love story! Ray and Iris are probably the most nauseating couple a novelist ever puked up all over a mountain of pages. They are forever telling each other about how "beautiful" they both are whilst in bed, basking in how wonderful their love is, making ridiculous references to each others prowess. Perhaps this is unfair to Iris because, though it's not strictly a first person narration, it may as well have been because the book only follows Finch, spending most of the 700 pages inside his ridiculous head. So much of this bloated novel is crammed to bursting with his internal thoughts, which are largely either inane or infantile, occasionally enlivening the narrative but much more frequently cluttering it, effectively ruining the plot and even, criminally, the action scenes, which left to themselves were well written. Why did Rush make Finch such a congenital clod? Well, I guess he never thought he was. He gives pointed thanks to his editor in the books acknowledgments. What for, going on holiday? I usually love books like this, meaty, literary, sprawling, but not this time. It brought to mind another book cut from the same thick cloth I had read recently, Denis Jonson's Tree of Smoke. However, Jonson's doorstep, though it had even less of a plot, had a crazy power coursing through it, whereas Rush's endless noodling merely had the power to infuriate.At one stage, about 2/3s through, Finch suddenly realises that he "had to concentrate, to get away from the extraneous". If only Rush could have done the same!
Do You like book Mortals (2004)?
There's some pretty great descriptions of being in love in here, both the good and the bad parts of it. Rush also has a habit of including more terrible puns than the plot necessitates. I found the book more emotionally engaging than I expected and also almost shockingly traditional in terms of literary style. Rush's depiction of Botswana is an interesting one but, with the exception of Kerekang, it mostly evades having to delve into much characterization of the locals. It's a fast read at 700 pages, which embarrassingly almost made me suspicious—"wait, is this a John LeCarre novel?" To be fair, it's a very smart book that has plenty of interesting things to say about the history of Christianity, masculinity and the possibilities for revolutionary action. Also, almost all of the physical details in the book seem thoroughly imagined in a way that's very satisfying. I'm told his other novel Mating is better.
—Ben Bush
Another interesting psychological exploration by Rush... however the plot really gets in the way, at times. There is a 300 page digression of questionable value and relevance. My impression of this section is that it was included to position the book to be made into a movie. It is possible I didn't appreciate this part of the book b/c I skimmed it so fast-- but it was very hard to get interested in it given the other things happening. The portrayal of the breakdown of the marriage is compelling and well-written-- with the exception of the narrator's perseveration on his wife's perfection. The worshipful passages about her physical attributes got old, fast, but kept coming. At one point, I think he actually describes her breath as delectable.
—umang
I read Mating a few years back and thoroughly enjoyed it, so was looking forward to Mortals. I didn't make it. After 300-400 pages, I had to return it to the library. It's heft made it a bit of a drag to read in bed (my only reading place apres le bebe)--but I could have overcome that if the narrative had pulled me along. It had occasional amusing shades of Our Man in Havana (small time spy, expat experience, funny), but was mostly a lot more information than I needed to know about the protagonist's fervent attraction/love(?) for his wife.
—Wendy Mathewson
