VANILLA REPUBLIC

A novel of political intrigue focused on a fictitious African island nation.

Richard Furman, a middle-aged Peace Corps educator, awaits his turn at testimony during an inquest regarding the death of his girlfriend Caroline, a native of the exotically fictitious–yet very believable–Islamic Democratic Republic of Moanjouan-Sembeke. The mild-mannered Richard stands to answer any and all questions posed by the three intimidating judges that also act as jury in the Sembeke justice system. This starts as a narrative device, with the judges as surrogates for the reader, but is abruptly abandoned for other methods. In a three-page blitz of exposition, readers learn that after Richard’s wife and daughter died in a car accident, Richard left his administrative position for the state of New York, deciding he could finally be a teacher. The subtext for many of his other actions is conspicuously missing–even for a genre thriller–but these are the psychological jungles that the novel prefers not tread. Richard joins the Peace Corps, and through the machinations of diplomacy is assigned to Sembeke, a country with a French colonial past and a complex Islamic future. Sharing some similarities both geographical and agricultural with Madagascar, Sembeke is just exotic enough to not make its sensuous trappings too distracting from the political facets. These are the novel’s reigning strengths, and the author is palpably most comfortable when juxtaposing two ideologies, as in a memorable scene in which Richard and the Imam discuss what literature is appropriate for the nation’s children. The dialogue between the radically juxtaposed ethics of American conservatism and Sembeke’s Islamic conservative reads authentically and objectively. But the jumpy narrative skims over the basic romantic developments that the affair and intrigue demand–with Caroline’s telegraphed death taking much of the mortal suspense out of the novel. There is real value, though, in Fisher’s (Crippled at the Starting Gate, 2010, etc.) deft translations of the immense cultural and geopolitical forces into the realistic consequences affecting a late-blooming educator and a school nurse with a sealed fate–just the stuff fans of political thrillers yearn for but so rarely receive.

A redeeming novel about the difficulties that nations and individuals face when making a future out of difficult pasts.