Djibouti shows vintage Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard: Djibouti proves that after all these years, there’s still nobody who does it better. Or even half as well
10 April 2012
Djibouti
by Elmore Leonard
(Weidenfeld, £18.99)

Born in 1925, Elmore Leonard began publishing fiction in 1951. So he's been at it for 60 years and we are, we might say, into late Leonard now. One characteristic of his later style is fascination with multiple levels of narrative - so that, for example, his characters are not just having their story told but they themselves are trying to make a film telling that same story, too.

Leonard used this device brilliantly in Get Shorty, as small-time Shylock Chili Palmer successfully pitches the story of one of the people he is trying to collect from to another, a movie producer ... In the hands of any less fluent a writer, such tricksiness might be irksome, but Leonard's storytelling never falters.

Then again, as they age, most novelists get stuck in their own era, usually remembering steadily less even about that. Djibouti, though, is about Somali pirates and al Qaeda terrorists on the Horn of Africa right now, an extraordinary endeavour for an author of Elmore Leonard's age, even one with a full-time researcher. Whether or not anybody who knew this world at first hand would find the novel authentic doesn't matter: it works perfectly as an Elmore Leonard, just as his tales do when they're about cowboys, bank robbers or ex-cons, none of which he has probably ever been either. His true subject - how people act on each other, pitch themselves to each other indeed - remains constant.

Dara is a documentary film-maker in her thirties who's won prizes for her movies about Bosnian women, neo-Nazis and Hurricane Katrina. Now she's come to Djibouti to try to film modern-day pirates, taking a boat out to see what she can find. Her cameraman and fixer is Xavier LeBo, 72 years old, a slim, 6ft 6ins black man she met in New Orleans, as cool as they come.

They connect with a bunch of oddballs, all pursuing their own agendas. Billy Wynn is a Texas billionaire, in his fifties, cruising the world on his sailboat with a redhead half his age. Billy, toting a fearsomely powerful rifle, is also keeping track of possible terrorists, perhaps for the security services.

Idris is a stylish Somali pirate, though he claims never to have lost anyone in the process. Jama, on the other hand, a black American who has assumed a new identity and joined al Qaeda, has been busily killing people whenever he thinks they know his real name.

As always in Leonard, you have to pay close attention to everything these people say and do in order to work out what they're like, what's going down and where it could end. Out at sea there's a tanker full of liquefied natural gas that could destroy a town if it explodes. Perhaps it's just been hijacked; or perhaps it's part of an al Qaeda plot...

The first part of this book is quite distantly narrated, as Dara and Xavier review the footage of their planned documentary, wondering if they should actually make it into a feature, commenting on people and events, rather than presenting them. But as the story hots up, the storytelling becomes more direct and exciting. Violence is conveyed with an understatement that takes you by surprise every time, hitting you harder than full description ever could.

The guy who holds it all together here, the one who doesn't try too much but makes all the difference, is Xavier - and Leonard has such a soft spot for him that he lets him (once he's acquired the needful supply of Horny Goat Weed) get it on with lovely Dara, a development requiring all the author's skill to make plausible. Not that such a pro ever lets the book go out of shape, even then.

Famously, Leonard constructs his thrillers by leaving all the boring bits out, even at the level of a single sentence. It can't be as easy as he makes it look, because, after all these years, there's still nobody who does it better. Or even half as well. Ridiculously enjoyable book.

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