{"id":49658,"date":"2013-07-12T08:19:42","date_gmt":"2013-07-12T07:19:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/african-and-arctic-spaces\/49658\/"},"modified":"2013-07-12T08:19:42","modified_gmt":"2013-07-12T07:19:42","slug":"african-and-arctic-spaces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/african-and-arctic-spaces\/","title":{"rendered":"African and Arctic Spaces"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you read The Economist<\/i>, no doubt you have read J. M. Ledgard\u2019s unsigned reports from East Africa. He\u2019s the newspaper\u2019s correspondent in Nairobi, but he\u2019s also a skilled novelist. His earlier novel, Giraffe<\/i>, was about the slaughter of forty-nine giraffes in a Communist Czechoslovikia Zoo. Before East Africa, Ledgard was a correspondent in Eastern Europe. No surprise, then, that much of his second novel, Submergence<\/i><\/a>, is set in East Africa, specifically Somalia, where the author has spent meaningful time, talking to clandestine operatives from the West as well as jihadists who play a major part in his story. There\u2019s also a parallel story set in Europe (significantly near Greenland) involving an oceanographist.<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s two threads are drawn together by an earlier love affair of the main characters (James More, a descendant of Sir Thomas More, in East Africa; and Danny Flinders, a biomathematician, in Europe, preparing for a dive in a submersible to one of the remotest areas of the ocean\u2019s floor.) If this sounds like a bit of a stretch, forget that immediately. Ledgard\u2019s novel is an erudite exploration of going down in space\u2013not only into the watery depths of the unknown but also into equally fraught human relationships on land and man\u2019s longing and capacity for sustaining love. As Danny muses at the beginning of her affair with James, \u201cLife is never neat, it is made up of doors and trapdoors. You move down baroque corridors, and even when you think you know which door to open, you still need to have the courage to choose.\u201d<\/p>\n

James\u2019s situation in Somalia involves plenty of courage but no choice at all. He\u2019s an English intelligence operative, who\u2019s been using water for his cover, that is, sustainable water for developing areas. As the novel begins, he\u2019s locked in a tiny, fetid cell which appears to have once been a shower, though no water comes through the pipe. He\u2019s been taken by jihadists who assume he\u2019s a spy, though they have no precise evidence, so he\u2019s dragged along with them as they move from camp to remote camp. The jihadists (or, perhaps more accurately wannabe jihadists) are a motley group\u2013high or rhetoric and low on expertise. Still, they scare him with a mock execution, soon after they capture him, staged in the sea\u2013an ironic counterpoint to Danny\u2019s own work in the depths of the oceans.<\/p>\n

Ledgard is wont to pontificate but in an ironic way, capturing the jihidists\u2019 na\u00c3\u00afve worldview: \u201cThe strategy of the jihadists allied to al-Qaeda in Somalia is to create chaos in order to establish a supreme Islamic nation pure in its religion: a caliphate of Greater Somalia at the forefront of the global jihad. Local and foreign fighters will strike at Christian Ethiopia and Kenya, seeking to liberate the Muslims in those countries, thereby dragging America, Europe and the other Crusaders into the fray. The goal of the global jihad is to replicate itself through force of arms, creating a Muslim superstate: intercontinental, without borders, adjudged by the same laws and united by prayer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Good luck. At one camp, Yusuf, the leader of the group, who excoriates American movies, makes an exception for classic Disney films, especially Bambi<\/i>. He stands up and tells the others that they should identify with the fawn. \u201cThe Crusaders were man. The forest was the mangrove in which the believers were safe. It did not trouble Yusuf that they were watching an American narrative. To him, it was pure. It had religious worth.\u201d There are also \"Submergence\"<\/a>uplifting video games, \u201cincluding one where you got to fight Christians in the sixth-century Holy Land.\u201d Somewhat later, after months at a remote camp without enough food, James will observe, \u201cThey had ambitions of dominion, but they could not feed themselves. They were like the hyenas in an African story who stack themselves up into the sky, one atop another, because they had been told the moon was a sweetmeat they could reach up and eat.\u201d<\/p>\n

Danny\u2019s world is equally fraught with danger, \u201cconcentrated on the estimation of microbial life in the deepest layer\u201d of the ocean. \u201cShe was bound for the largest uncharted hydrothermal vent field in the world, far below the plunging icebergs and the blue-black top, in a part of the Hadal deep whose unlit clock ticked at an incalculably slower speed.\u201d \u00a0The depths are oozing with microbial life, most of it unidentified, of great potential for future medicine. But the risks of the descent are overwhelming, enough to make the most hearty scientist think twice.<\/p>\n

Ledgard his done his homework, consulted authorities at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution at Columbia University and in Europe. The passages describing Danny\u2019s descent are lyrical, detailed with beauty and apprehension. Moreover, the parallel stories are linked by recurring images\u2013especially of water\u2013and, of course, the passion that James and Danny share for one another. The result? A strangely haunting love story, leaping across geographical distances, careers, geopolitics\u2013replete with interesting factoids and details of each character\u2019s idiosyncrasies and fears, a rare work of beauty in the face of such risk and terror.<\/p>\n

\n

J. M. Ledgard: Submergence<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

Coffee House Press, 218 pp., $15.95<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Charles R. Larson<\/strong> is Emeritus Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C. Email: clearson@american.edu<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Republished with permission from: Counterpunch<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you read The Economist, no doubt you have read J. M. Ledgard\u2019s unsigned reports from East Africa. He\u2019s the newspaper\u2019s correspondent in Nairobi, but he\u2019s also a skilled novelist. His earlier novel, Giraffe, was about the slaughter of forty-nine giraffes in a Communist Czechoslovikia Zoo. Before East Africa, Ledgard was a correspondent in Eastern […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-49658","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}