Submergence
A Novel
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4.1 • 27 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A love story, a spy story, and a vivid portrayal of Africa and the secret depths of the sea.
In a room with no windows on the coast of Africa, an Englishman, James More, is held captive by jihadist fighters. Posing as a water expert to report for the Secret Intelligence Service on al-Qaeda activity in the area, he now faces extreme privation, mock executions, and forced marches through the arid badlands of Somalia.
Thousands of miles away on the Greenland Sea, Danielle Flinders, a biomathematician, half-French, half-Australian, prepares to dive in a submersible to the ocean floor. She is obsessed with the life that multiplies in the darkness of the lowest strata of water.
In their confines they are drawn back to the Christmas of the previous year, and to a French hotel on the Atlantic coast, where a chance encounter on the beach led to an intense and enduring romance. James, a descendant of Thomas More, escapes to utopias both imagined and remembered, to fragments of his life before his incarceration, to books read, to paintings and music that haunt him now. Danny is drawn back to beginnings: to mythical and scientific origins, and to her own. It is to each other and to the oceans that they both most frequently return: magnetic and otherworldly, a comfort and a threat.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This beautifully written novel, the second from Ledgard (after Giraffe), a correspondent for the Economist based in Africa, tells two stories in parallel. James More, a British spy posing as a water engineer, is taken captive by jihadists in Somalia; the counterpoint to this viscerally horrific tale is his love affair with Danielle Flinders, a "biomathematician" working in the field of oceanography. The affair is related as a series of flashbacks from a recent vacation in France. The book is told in short, episodic chapters that probably reflect the journalistic sensibilities of the author, who not only captures the enormous barbarity of More's al-Qaeda captors but also manages to convey some of their innate humanity. But there is no sentimentalizing of the evils of the jihadists, "empowered by the prospect of martyrdom" and comforted by a "medieval" fatalism. (In one horrifying scene, a young girl in Kismayo, Somalia, is gang-raped then "convicted" of adultery by the local Muslim cleric and sentenced to death by stoning.) Danielle's milieu, the deep ocean (which "challenges our sense of who we are and where we came from"), offers a contrast to the gruesome and misguided efforts of Islamic fundamentalism. The book is exciting in the way of a thriller, though Ledgard seems uninterested in maintaining or even developing that sense of suspense. What makes the book remarkable is its poetically rendered and remarkably intelligent glosses on Islamic fundamentalism versus the West, on Africa, and on the oceans. This may be more of a novel of ideas than a novel full stop, but it is profoundly readable and unfailingly interesting.
