{"product_id":"mortimer-of-the-maghreb-isbn-9781400078516","title":"Mortimer of the Maghreb","description":"In this psychologically complex and darkly humorous debut collection, awardwinning writer Henry Shukman introduces an unforgettable cast of characters, travelers whose certain paths around the world lead invariably back to the uncertain self. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn “The Garden of God” an aging, ailing war reporter reflects on his adventures covering a little-known conflict in the Sahara and the precipitous and disgraced end of his career; In “Old Providence,” a dissolute artist mourns a lost love and the “bloody perfect island” where, through his own callow foolishness, he lost her. In “Darien Dogs” a man goes south to Panama, desperate for a business deal that will restore his finances and sense of mastery, only to find himself on a confounding search for a beautiful, mysterious woman and his stolen wallet. By turns full of suspense, farce and poignance, always alive with energy and atmosphere, these are the stories of a gifted and assured writer.“Immensely entertaining.”—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e“Fearless, brilliantly realized. . . . Henry Shukman is a gifted writer.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Los Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e“A comic gem. . . . The tropical setting, simultaneously gorgeous and debilitating, is expertly evoked.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Independent\u003c\/i\u003e“Shukman’s writing is what marks him out. He’s superb, like Conrad on speed.” —Giles Foden, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Last King of Scotland\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eHenry Shukman\u003c\/b\u003e has worked as a trombonist, a trawlerman and a travel writer. His fiction has won an Arts Council Award and has been a finalist for the O. Henry Award. His first poetry collection, \u003ci\u003eIn Dr. No’s Garden\u003c\/i\u003e, won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was a Book of the Year in \u003ci\u003eThe Times\u003c\/i\u003e (London) and \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e. He lives in New Mexico.Charles Mortimer watched the rippled brown land wheel back to   horizontal. He drained the last drops from the plastic glass of   Johnnie Walker the air steward had given him, and decided: that's it,   no more booze for a week. \u003ci\u003eAu boulot.\u003c\/i\u003e His former life, his real life,   stitched together by the clackety-clack of the typewriter and the   patter-patter of the laptop, and by the roar of jets, was coming back   to him now. Once again he was baptised in the odour of jet fuel   (which still made him sick), born again in the air, the medium of his   real work.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey had been flying for two hours, deep into the desert. As the   plane finished its turn for final approach, one of the MiGs stationed   at the El Zouarte air base sliced through the desert sky like a steel   meteor. His heart tightened. The old feeling came back, the feeling   you almost smelled in your nose which told you this was the one, this   was the right place to be, you would find what you needed here—the   feeling that guided you to the front page. Enough of those blustering   columns on page twelve. How good that he had returned Mohammed   Ahmoud's telephone call and gone to meet him at the Wolf and Whistle,   that he had got away from the little office with its blue carpet and   oversize computer terminal and private fax machine–all the perks   just for him, the grand old man come home to grow fat and die.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Welcome, Mortimer of the Maghreb,\" a man in fatigues addressed him   when he reached the bottom of the airplane steps. Mortimer squinted   at the man, who was grinning broadly, by which Mortimer understood   that he was to take the greeting as a joke. He chuckled back. Like   his compatriot Mohammed Ahmoud back in London, the man looked like he   would weigh very little. He introduced himself as Ibrahim. Mortimer   noted a certain friendly roundness about his face, almost a   clownishness. Men like that could be dangerous, Mortimer thought.   They didn't care about anything.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Welcome to SAR,\" the man said, speaking awkwardly, with excessive   emphasis, as if it was difficult for him to utter each foreign letter   of his spurious nation's name. He hissed on the S. The letters stood   for \"Saharan Arab Republic.\" A seriousness came over the clownish   face as he pronounced them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMortimer followed the man towards a waiting Land Rover. As he moved   across the tarmac, away from the airplane, the wind caught him   unawares. It was an extraordinary wind. He had travelled a great   deal—in the Pamirs, the Balkans, the Caucasus, in South Africa, the   Middle East, in Sri Lanka, all the world's trouble spots over the   last thirty years—but never, it seemed to him, had he known a wind   like this. Strong and steady, and so hot he felt there must be some   mistake, someone had left an engine running, or opened a furnace at   the wrong time. It scalded his face, burnt his neck. It came from   nowhere, from everywhere. Mortimer looked round. Beyond the airstrip   with the one jetliner there was nothing but flat, open desert,   beginning at the edge of the tarmac and stretching away for hundreds,   thousands of miles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat a place to live. It was an unfinished world, not ready for human   habitation. What a place for a war. He remembered his wars being in   beautiful landscapes, among valleys and mountains and rivers. You   would wake up to see the dew glinting on a gun barrel and feel the   sun warming your back. You would eat your porridge overlooking a   gorge. Or you would hike up a trail among fir trees. Or you might be   staying in some dismal concrete city but from the hotel window you   could see splendid dusty mountains. This was different. A   construction site with no construction, an emptiness without end.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMortimer had been here once before, over twenty years ago, but he   remembered the terrain quite differently, as a glinting plain of   gravel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Land Rover sped off down a paved road that soon became a   washboard track and finally a set of tire tracks on packed earth.   Beside the tracks ran an intermittent line of old oil drums, each   painted with one white stripe. Finally the jeep passed several rows   of canvas tents. The rows were very long. Mortimer couldn't see how   long because far away the tents disappeared over a brow. This was the   \"canvas city,\" as Mortimer had dubbed it all those years ago, where   the Rio Camello guerrillas and their people lived, the vast tent home   of the \"Nation-in-Exile,\" for whose homeland they had been fighting   for more than two decades.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe jeep pulled into a compound of old buildings covered in peeling   yellow stucco, some French desert post from long ago. Mortimer was   left in a high room with a stack of foam mattresses and a pile of   blankets in one corner. He understood that he was to arrange a bed   for himself, a comedown after the way he had been treated so far, in   Algiers and on the flight. He pulled the top mattress off the stack   and began unfolding one of the thick, hairy blankets.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA soldier interrupted him. \u003ci\u003e\"Venez, monsieur.\"\u003c\/i\u003e Then, not sure if   Mortimer had understood, he added, smiling: \u003ci\u003e\"Vamonos. Yalah, yalah.\"\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne thing about these men: they really knew how to smile at you.   Desert men were the ultimate brothers. Forget old-boy camaraderie. No   men knew how to befriend one another like desert men. They held   hands, they hugged, they sprawled by the fire with arms draped over   one another's thighs like wild animals in repose.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe followed the man down a corridor, across the compound, and into a   canteen. He took a seat at a long bench, along with some fifteen or   so others, most of them local soldiers, but one a man in a pale blue   shirt with a UNHCR badge over the breast pocket. A soldier brought   Mortimer a plate of couscous with some red sauce and a lump of tough   meat. A glass of a sweet pink drink followed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMortimer was halfway through the meal when the man called Ibrahim   appeared beside him, squatting on his heels. \"Are you ready?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMortimer was clearly still eating, but answered, with his mouth half   full, \"Whenever.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Let's go,\" Ibrahim said, as if eating were merely a way of passing time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOutside, another Land Rover, open-top, was waiting.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Bring anything you need. We'll be gone four or five days.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMortimer wasn't sure what he needed. He went into his room and pulled   a toothbrush and a new notebook from his bag.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe men wrapped a headscarf round Mortimer's face, laughing, until he   was left with only a slit to peer out of. The material smelled of   plaster dust.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"You have to,\" Ibrahim explained. \"We drive fast.\" A light chorus of   laughter approved the remark. \"The wind here, the dust. They can make   you ill.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was the most open a Land Rover could be: not even a windshield.   Just the bare bottom half of the body, with two spare tyres and two   giant jerrycans attached to the back. The whole thing was painted a   dusty desert brown, and all bare metal had been coated in matte grey   paint. Mortimer noticed there was no speedometer. No instruments at   all. Just the pedals and the various gear sticks.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Rio Camello fighters were good with their Land Rovers. They drove   excellently and would long ago have had to give up their fight had   they not. They likened the Land Rover to the old Bedouin's camel, to   the corsair's sloop, to Britain's Spitfire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThus, so simply, before he was ready for it, Mortimer found himself   finally embarked on another war story, another front line, back in   business.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCharles Mortimer, chronicler of wars and plagues and ruptured   governments, interviewer of popes and pashas, had had columns set   aside for his use in papers the world over. He had smoked a Cohiba   with Castro, dined on a Maine lobster with Reagan, and had drunk beer   with the mad Billy Fuentes, beer baron of Bolivia, commanding chief   of the death squads. He had been the toast of London and Washington.   Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama had agreed to a joint interview with   him. Noriega in his heyday had bestowed the Order of the Silver Stork   on him, and the queens of Norway and Tonga had awarded him honorary   degrees. For twenty-five years Mortimer had ridden the biggest waves   in the business. Embracer of causes, instigator of hunts, winner of   media coups, Mortimer had redefined his profession.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe had done all these things, but he had done them five years ago,   seven, ten, twenty years ago. Now was different. It surprised   Mortimer, when he thought back, both how long and how short five   years were. That so long a time could go by so swiftly, so emptily.   Or not emptily, but filled with something so uncomfortable, so   different from what had come before. Five years of doubt,   drunkenness, regret. Regret, the great devourer, could swallow half a   decade in one go. Regret was a terrible trap, people said. Stop it,   don't think about it. You must look forwards, onwards.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFive and a half years ago Mortimer had risked everything on his   biggest story. He had succeeded in gaining an interview with the   Soviet president, and after exhaustive consultation of every source,   he syndicated a story on the impregnable primacy of the Supreme   Soviet. Contrary to all reports, he declared, the writing was not yet   on the Kremlin wall. Everyone took the story—\u003ci\u003eLe Monde\u003c\/i\u003e, the\u003ci\u003e Zeitung\u003c\/i\u003e,   the \u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003e, the\u003ci\u003e Times\u003c\/i\u003e. It was the coup of a lifetime. Except   that just five weeks later the Berlin Wall came down, and six months   later the Soviet Union was coming apart at the seams.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMortimer had not just been spectacularly wrong, he had risked   everything. It was as if every editor and source he had was   implicated in his shame. A \u003ci\u003eTimes\u003c\/i\u003e leader referred to him as a   curiosity, an American paper alluded to his \"disgrace,\" and the   \u003ci\u003eSpectator\u003c\/i\u003e cancelled his retainer. Of course most people were too   caught up in the excitement of the new events to think about him; but   he wasn't. After such a debacle, a man needed a change of identity.   He needed to start all over again. Which was out of the question at   the age of fifty-six.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSaskia, his wife, had argued with him about it at the dinner table.   She had told him again and again that he was wrong, and she took   their differences personally. Which was unlike her. Also unlike her,   after his great misjudgement she started minding about his   peccadilloes--the publicity girl at the magazine where he was an   honorary editor, the assistant at the \u003ci\u003eTimes\u003c\/i\u003e news desk. Their marriage   had long been pragmatic, accepting of human weakness, elastic enough   to contain his work, his erratic urges, his sudden departures and   returns. But now Saskia talked to him only in public, at dinner.   Otherwise, she slammed doors, left the house without goodbyes, and   forsook for the spare room the matrimonial bed that he often forsook   himself. Eventually, eighteen months after his great embarrassment,   she left him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    By then he was already caught in a swift stream of forgetfulness. It   wasn't that he stopped working—he dabbled with foolish columns in   the \u003ci\u003eStandard\u003c\/i\u003e and the \u003ci\u003eMail\u003c\/i\u003e, long inches in which he was free to   scribble himself hoarse on any matter that piqued him: waiters no   longer wearing ties, wine lists in which the Australian imports had   squeezed the clarets into an appendix; the new \"Metro\" taxicabs. The   brash new world springing up around his ankles was ripe for stomping   on. At three in the afternoon, with copy due for the evening   editions, it provided an inexhaustible supply of annoyances for a man   with a keyboard in his lap and a bottle of Pauillac in his belly, a   man who would much prefer to have remained before his Camembert and   gleaming glass than to have hailed a Metro cab back to the   grey-walled warehouse of an office where you were no longer even   supposed to smoke. At least they allowed him that: a little box of a   room all to himself, regarded, incredibly, as a privilege in that   open-plan arena, where he was permitted to smoke up a fog as long as   he kept the door shut.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOccasionally, in the office, Mortimer would look up from his   column—\u003ci\u003eMortimer's Monday; Mortimer on the Movies; Metropolitan   Mortimer\u003c\/i\u003e—and sniff the air, test the ground: still foul, still   tilted. When life went wrong, why didn't it right itself like   everything else on God's earth? Five years on, the ground was still   skewed. And while you waited for it to recover, the weeks turned into   months, and once seven months had gone by, you saw that seventy-seven   could do so, and before you knew it they nearly had.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe rushing chaos of these years could have gone on and on, he knew,   until he found himself collapsed in a hospital ward with two weeks to   live. Did you blame the drink? But he had drunk before, he had always   drunk, except in Saudi or when he caught hepatitis. Was it Saskia's   leaving? But he had never depended on her for his sanity or purpose.   Things had gone wrong before she left, anyway. Was it really just his   hideous error, then? But all men made errors. Editors knew that. They   were willing to give him a second chance. He had only to indicate   where he wanted to go, what war, what famine. Was it all these things   combined? Why, every time he checked the weather, was it stuck on   Stormy? All storms blew over. When, in short, would he no longer find   himself churning out furious columns about newfangled menu items like   arugula and pecorino (\"What the devil is wrong with good old   Parmesan?\" he watched himself typing, like some foolish old colonel)   and instead be back at work?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut it was a desperate not a hopeful question.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen Mohammed Ahmoud telephoned and reintroduced himself, they not   having spoken for well over ten years, Mortimer had felt a stirring   of old, good feelings—that simple enthusiasm, almost joy, of sensing   that someone was about to do you a favour, and you would be able to   return it, and together you would advance one another's causes. Over   twenty years ago Mortimer had first brought Rio Camello's war to   international attention, though since then the story had stagnated   and dropped from the papers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChuckles of reacquaintance down the telephone line. It was morning,   fortunately. Mortimer was more or less sober.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Something important,\" Mohammed Ahmoud said. \"Can we meet?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMortimer and Mohammed Ahmoud met in the Wolf and Whistle in Pimlico.   That was something new—lunch in a pub, not at a white-cloth   establishment. It felt good. It felt like things ought to feel.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302833508581,"sku":"NP9781400078516","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400078516.jpg?v=1767732984","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/mortimer-of-the-maghreb-isbn-9781400078516","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}