Trade Mission
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Marcus Wallace and Jonathon Bates are Canadian dot.com wunderboys, on a trade mission in Brazil to sell their intriguing concept for a new website -- Hypothesys is a virtual "morality machine" that promises to take the agony out of making choices, helping people to make the "best decisions of their lives."
But the decision that the Hypothesys team makes to take an eco-tour boat ride up the Rio Negro River into the Amazon Jungle -- accompanied by a band of leech-like Canadian trade bureaucrats -- will determine their future lives -- and deaths. Their boat is captured by unknown assailants who brutally kill the crew and kidnap the Hypothesys team, now led blindfolded to a stinking jungle pit prison. Except for the odd omission of Crossman, the team’s enigmatic translator, one by one the team is tortured and tested beyond reasonable understanding. Have their captors confused them with government officials from another boat? Has one of them secretly sold out? No one knows, but when an opportunity to escape presents itself, the team flees back to the river -- each one embarking on their own desperate journey into the heart of darkness.
Like Lost Girls, Pyper's first international bestseller, The Trade Mission is a unique hybrid novel. It's a story for the Virtual Age that takes psychological suspense to an almost unbearable new level.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The ad copy on the back of the proofs for Pyper's second novel (after Lost Girls) points out just what's right, and what's wrong, with the book: "The Trade Mission is a gripping, ingeniously plotted thriller with an underlying literary interest in social criticism...." The novel does grip, and while its plot two young North American software entrepreneurs and their colleagues visiting Brazil are kidnapped by extortionists in the jungle, then escape for a chase isn't quite ingenious, it's clever enough; so far so good. The problem is the "underlying literary interest in social criticism." One supposes the copywriter mentioned "literary" as a pointer to Pyper's prose, which is lush and suffused with psychological insight, but which too often draws attention to itself at the expense of the story. The "social criticism" is relayed through character studies the kidnapped are extremely complex creations, as is their Canadian translator, a woman rapidly approaching middle age, who narrates; her probings into the differences rendered by wealth, class and age among the kidnapped, and between them and their captors, are perceptive and fresh. The novel takes a serious wrong turn, though, when the kidnapped are harbored by a tribe of Yanomami Indians. While giving the narrator plenty of chance to comment on the degradation of the rain forest and its peoples by industrial interests, this turn feels contrived; it leads to the kidnapped ingesting a native hallucinogen, which exacerbates the murkiness of the narrator's perceptions and results in a storytelling muddle that Pyper straightens out only through further contrivances. Pyper is a talented stylist and a masterful psychological portraitist, but his new novel is a slog.
