Instruments of Darkness powerfully evokes the atmosphere, politics, and people of West Africa. With Medway's ironic voice, flashes of humor that may recall Raymond Chandler, and unforgettable characters, this compulsively readable thriller is the beginning of a remarkable series.
Price: $11.20
User Reviews about Instruments of Darkness (Harvest Book)
I have found the Bruce Medway novels - this is the second one I read - disappointing. That's largely because they're not nearly as good as his later Iberian novels. The latter embroider complex plots over decades, woven into the fabric of the area's history. The Medway novels are straight-ahead private-eye works, set on the Dark Continent.
His evocation of the latter is pretty good. It's regrettable in one way that West Africa gets used as the backdrop for a noir (no pun intended) book:` Africa has many problems, which this type of book amplifies, while leaving out the good stuff. All the usual pulp-fiction violence and depravity makes the Dark Continent almost too much to bear. But you can feel the heat, taste the dust, see the squalor, and sense the people.
Medway, a Brit in Benin with the usual vague private-eye job - he does odd jobs for people, sort of a fixer - is nearly killed over a multimillion-dollar payment for a rice shipment. Then two people, one of whom he had been asked to find, turn up dead, one hideously murdered in Benin, the other an apparent suicide in neighboring Togo. The circumstances are highly suspicious, but police in both countries are staying away. Only Medway and suspended Benin police detective Bagado seem to care.
As other reviewers note, the plot is highly complicated, although not really much more than in other whodunits, where webs of double and triple-crossing routinely get so tangled as to strain believability.
The writing is spotty. Wilson tries too hard to establish the typical hard-boiled dialogue and photographic-description narrative. At some point I just didn't want another half-page description of someone's appearance, probably because I come from that fraction of humanity that can't tell anything about a person by looking at them.
He also seems stuck about how to apply the American detective-novel style to a British character. Sometimes the idioms are American, other times English and sometimes the style just seems caught in the mid-Atlantic, neither here nor there. Combining drier British humor with the Chandler and Hammett style made for a weird marriage; I often found myself thinking "Huh?" as I read.
Also, as I've complained about the detective genre elsewhere - including a review of Chandler's "The Long Goodbye", just so it's clear I'm faulting them all the way to the top - the endless drawing room conversations, with endless cigarettes being lit and endless drinks being consumed, get tiresome. As does the finding of a sadistic psychokiller hiding beneath the manicured lawns and well-decorated mansions of suburbia.
That said, there was still a fair amount of merit in this. I liked it better than the other Medway novel I read. It does evoke West Africa well, and Medway's relationship with German aid worker Heike renders his character less two-dimensional.
-- One of the better Medway novels
Having read his European thrillers, I'm a big fan of Wilson and I even enjoyed his African novel, "A Darkening Stain". But this book just didn't grab me, for some reason. I loved the description of things African, but the characters weren't very compelling. I quit reading about halfway through the book and it seemed that the characters just kept milling about. Also, the action here takes place between two cities, Coutenou and Lome and I kept getting confused about which was which. The book didn't hold my interest, like his others did. Sorry -- maybe it was just me... -- Didn't Hold My Interest
Robert Wilson has become something of a bestselling author with a series of books dealing with espionage and detectives in the Iberian peninsula, either in Spain or Portugal. Having had some success with this, the author's publisher decided to reissue his earlier work, four books that are set in West Africa. I've never read anything like this before, in terms of setting anyway. Think Philip Marlowe in Heart of Darkness, but set in the modern era, and you'll get an idea of what the book is like.
Bruce Medway is a "fixer" in various countries in West Africa. What this means is that Medway (he narrates the books first person, private eye style) works things out for people, businessmen and travelers through the area. He arranges visas, bills of lading for shipments of cargo, transport, drivers, etc. Occasionally someone hires him to find a missing person, something that the local authorities aren't usually interested in doing themselves unless sufficiently motivated by bribery. In the first installment in the series, Medway's hired to find another guy who's basically in the same business, minus the missing persons. Steven Kershaw works out deals and helps with shipping commodities and so forth. Since Medway has just been double-crossed in another deal, and almost killed, he's wary of taking the job, but needs the money enough that he overcomes his misgivings, and goes to work anyway.
The plot is sufficiently convoluted to defy explanation here, as it should be. Suffice it to say that by the end you're almost rooting for at least one of the villains, and you're definitely happy to see the bad guys go down. The prose is very private eye tough guy, feeling as if the author is trying to immitate Chandler or Hammett the way foreign detective novelists often do. The Australian guy who writes private eye novels (Peter Corris?) has the same effect, it's almost as if they're trying too hard. If you can live with that (I happen to think it's fun, to be honest) then this is a great book. -- Standard private eye stuff with an unusual setting
Robert Wilson is a writer whose other thrillers I've read with interest, but this one took me someplace I've never been before and kept me there for every one of its 300 and some pages. This is an Africa I didn't know existed in fiction and one I can't wait to return to, so I'm personally delighted to learn that there are three other books featuring "fixer" Bruce Medway waiting for me.
The setting is very much a character in the book -- its sounds, smells, heat, colors, and moral equivocation animate every scene. This is a world in which right and wrong are luxuries, and the real dividing line is between survival and destruction. The layered approach and the complexity of the characters puts this in Graham Greene territory, and that's as high a compliment as I know how to pay. (it also reminds me a little of William Boyd's wonderful "Brazzaville Beach, which also has an African setting.)
And it's funnier than hell in places. If you're looking for something fresh, something that challenges you a little but delivers mightily for your efforts, get "Instruments of Darkness." -- Graham Greene Territory
There is no denying that the author knows his stuff. The setting and characters were fascinating. My problem though was that I continually found myself distracted by the overuse of adjectives and misplaced modifiers. The narrative was overcrowded with metaphors and similies. I felt like I was swimming through tangled seaweed sometimes and wanted to edit sentences that seemed to so full of themselves with descriptives. Most annoying about this were that so many phrases were tacked on to the end of sentences without proximity to the nouns they were intended to modified. Other than this, I liked the book and will read another by the author. -- Instruments of Darkness
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