World Pacific
A Novel
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- 19,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A New Yorker Best Book of 2025
A darkly comic novel of intrigue, adventure, and the perils of self-invention from the author of The Torqued Man, set in San Francisco and the Asian Pacific during the outbreak of the Second World War.
In 1939, just as the clouds of war are gathering, Richard Halifax—boys' adventure writer of manly bravado and the breeziest of prose styles—vanishes in the Pacific. Halifax was attempting to sail a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco as part of the World’s Fair festivities on Treasure Island. But while his disappearance upends the lives of those left in his wake back home, both his machinations and his letters to his young readers live on.
Hildegard Rauch, an émigré painter and the daughter of Germany’s greatest living writer in exile, finds her twin brother in a coma after an attempted suicide. He left a mysterious note that sends her on a search for the truth about her brother’s relationship with Richard Halifax and the dangerous secret he entrusted to the writer before his voyage.
Simon Faulk, a British intelligence officer, has been assigned to ferret out Nazi spies in California. He learns of the arrival of a mysterious American agent from across the Pacific, part of a joint German-Japanese operation.
Told in the alternating voices of these three characters, set against the growing threat of another world war and a World’s Fair dedicated to peace, World Pacific is a madcap quixotic tale that explores the many forms of shipwreck, exile, betrayal, and the stories we tell ourselves in the fight to stay afloat.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
John le Carré meets Evelyn Waugh in Mann's terrific second novel (after The Torqued Man), set mostly in California on the eve of WWII. Adventurer Richard Halifax, a thinly veiled Richard Halliburton, is presumed to have died in a shipwreck in 1939, until he begins sending off-color tall tales to his Junior Adventurers fan club ("Ah, boys, if you come by a sidekick as good as Roderick, think damn hard before you eat him"). His story intersects with those of painter Hildegard Rauch, the daughter of a famous German writer in exile who brings to mind Thomas Mann, and hapless British intelligence officer Simon Faulk, siloed to California to keep tabs on Nazi sympathizers. In a series of letters to her twin brother, Hank, whose apparent botched suicide attempt has left him in a coma, Hildegard expresses her annoyance at the scandal he caused ("to Werther yourself right out of existence? What a horrible cliché"). Before Hank's coma, he sent her a cryptic message about Halifax, and she embarks on a quest to solve the mystery. Faulk, meanwhile, tries to out Halifax as a spy. Mann displays an extraordinary comedic gift for outlandish embellishment, and makes hay out of the incompetence and hubris on all sides of the impending war (as Faulk puts it, "The problem with America... is that everything here is a cartoon"). This is a hoot.
