Blood-soaked, lightning-fast, first-person philosophical thriller
that reveals the cynical, self-justifying mind of a political
fanatic in the apocalyptic landscape of Algiers 1959-60, by the
author of The Limits of Vision and The Arabian Nightmare. Philippe
Roussel, an intelligence officer in the French Foreign Legion,
spends his days torturing FLN terrorist Al-Hadi at the Legionnaire
redoubt of Fort Tiberias. At night, he makes love to Chantal de
Serkissian, whose "fascist good looks" reflect her bourgeois
ideology (she adores Petain). No lowbrow lout, Roussel sees his
grisly job, described in excruciating detail, as a necessary form
of "person to person anthropology" - necessary, as it turns out,
for the FLN itself: Roussel is in fact a double-agent, turned
fanatical Marxist as a remit of brainwashing by the North
Vietnamese after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. Nothing stands in the
way of his revolutionary quest, and so what if he was brainwashed:
"Life brainwashes everyone." When Chantal exposes him at a
Legionnaire staff meeting, he slaughters his commanding officers
and escapes into the Sahara. After delirious wanderings, he is
rescued by nomads and brought to Al-Hadi's widow, who first addicts
him to morphine and then turns him over to French patriots. Roussel
escapes again, this time by stabbing his captor in the ear with a
hypodermic - after conducting a surreal debate on the merits of
Marxism - and flees to Algiers, where the nightmare accelerates: he
befriends an ex-drug pusher who worships Queen Elizabeth, invades a
hospital to drain a man of blood, finds Chantal with her tongue
ripped out, and escapes with his right-wing enemies into the
Algerian chaos. Miles removed from the cheeky action of Fleming or
the weary machinations of le Carre, this is espionage down the
rabbit hole, into the pit of hell. Every major character is
convinced of his or her rectitude, and every one is contemptible. A
courageous look at a world of horrors, saved from unbearable
blackness by a spare, energetic style and a fleet-footed plot.
(Kirkus Reviews)
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