Tangled Web UK Review January 2009
The Prince of Bagram Prison by
Alex Carr
hbk out March 08
Published by Orion
at £12.99
Alex Carr is the pseudonym of Jenny Siler, who after an unsuccessful time in higher education decided to write a bodice ripper. Fortunately she soon moved on to writing popular thrillers. This is her second book as Alex Carr, following on from An Accidental American.
The story opens on a woman called Manar, who we learn is a political prisoner in Morocco. Her newly born child, a boy, is taken away from her. Moving into the present, we encounter Jamal, who though still young, has been set up in Spain as an informer for the Americans. Based on a claimed acquaintance with a terrorist called Bagheri, Jamal makes a hand-to-mouth living. But suddenly it seems people want him dead, and Jamal is on the run. Katherine ‘Kat’ Caldwell is an Arabic specialist and army reservist who interrogated Jamal when he first turned up at Bagram. Now the shady American agency that wants him are asking her to find him for them. She is teamed up with an unsavoury character called David Kurtz, with whom she has a history. In the days of Jamal’s arrival at Bagram, she has spurned Kurtz for a relationship with a British Special Forces soldier called Colin. But Colin has recently died, and as others die around her, Kat is forced to reassess who are the good guys and who the bad. Jamal himself is desperately trying to contact an older American agent, now retired, called Harry Comfort. He has been good to Jamal in the past, and now wants to help the boy again. Can Jamal be saved from those who would prefer him dead?
The story leaps around from place to place, taking the reader from Madrid, London, and Tangier to Bagram, Oman, Hawaii and even Saigon. Sometimes it is impossible to realise where we are in time, as Carr jumps dizzyingly from Kat’s past to the present with few markers to help the reader. And not only do we leap into the recent past, but the distant past of a Vietnam that Harry Comfort shared with the dying wife of Kurtz’s present boss, Dick Morrow. Carr seems to be trying to link together the evils of the Vietnam horror and those of the Iraqi war using a character who would otherwise seem peripheral to the main story. The nature of the American agency is puzzlingly obscure too. Is it the CIA? To an outsider, their power to act in quite unclear. Nevertheless, Carr tells a powerful tale of corruption and political manoeuvrings around the innocent life of a young Moroccan, who has been accidentally dragged into the mess that is the Middle East. And as a by-product, we learn of the nastiness that is Morocco’s past also. Too many separate threads? Or a clever weaving together of the persistent evils that can dog the footsteps of the powerful of all cultures? Whatever you think, Carr has taken the North African experience and given us a fast-paced and thought-provoking thriller.
(
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger)
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