Brazzaville Beach

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Prior to my trip, I had the impression that the Congo was a dangerous, lawless country. While this is a pretty accurate description of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, things are very different in the neighboring Republic of the Congo. Congo Brazzaville vs. Congo Kinshasa

I thought Brazzaville Beach was a thoroughly engrossing book. I loved reading it as much as any book I can remember in the last two years or so. I hated to put it aside even to sleep. It’s not perfect, though, and my small quibbles are the only reason I didn’t rate it 5/5. If you’re a bit adventurous, go instead to the port where the boats leave for Kinshasa. This is officially called the Port Autonome de Brazzaville, but everyone seems to just call it the “beach”. For one thing, I never “bought” that a woman of Hope’s brilliance, single-mindedness and beauty would be attracted to her husband, John Clearwater. His character is somewhat underdeveloped; certainly, the attraction is not amply explored. Admittedly, I am not a “math person”, but the many explorations of game theory, turbulance, catastrophe theory, divergence syndromes and other chaos theory components sometimes left me shaking my head. They seemed just a little too clever.There’s the wonderful detail in the characters and settings and he’s a bit like Hope’s husband in the way he can present what is commonplace in new ways that make it a pleasure to get to know people and place. The easiest but most expensive way would be to hire a motorized canoe at Mami Wata. But they charge between 45,000 and 60,000 CFA, which is kind of a rip off. This large island sits in the middle of the Congo river between Brazzaville and Kinshasa. There are a few villages on the island, where people live a quiet life that seems a world away from the hustle and bustle of the city.

Like his 2012 book, WAITING FOR SUNRISE, Boyd employed a complex structure in this 1990 novel about science and discord, both marital and professional. Structure and the sciences are the glue for connecting the themes and metaphors of his overall story, a device for annexing separate compartments of the narrative and cohering it into a whole. Once you let that be, or let it go, and stop worrying if you are comprehending all the pieces while reading it, you can enjoy this compelling piece of fiction. Sometimes referred to as “dandies” in English, the sapeurs of Brazzaville are men who dress up in stylish, colorful suits and strut their stuff around town. It’s about more than just clothes, though; it’s an identity and a way of life for these guys. The drive of the plot centres around Hope’s work observing chimpanzees in the world’s leading scientific project on the subject of the animals. She’s cottoned on to the fact that strange things are happening within her community of chimps that have taken themselves away from the main group. The chimps from the north are sending patrols into the southern territories and this is the cause for a lot of interest. Unfortunately for her, the more she finds out, the more she realises that her discoveries are contrary to the theories of her eminent bosses and it seems that they’ll go to any length to suppress her findings.During her marital separation, Hope worked on an ancient English estate, dating and describing hedgerows, with detailed specific answers available for her to ponder. However, when her estranged husband comes to visit, her life feels in flux again. He barrages her with his anxiety and failed research attempts. Oh, and if it’s been raining then you’ll be walking through mud pretty much the whole time. I guess I’m not really selling this market very well, huh? Of Scottish descent, Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana on 7th March, 1952 and spent much of his early life there and in Nigeria where his mother was a teacher and his father, a doctor. Boyd was in Nigeria during the Biafran War, the brutal secessionist conflict which ran from 1967 to 1970 and it had a profound effect on him. Why the longish preface about Blake? Brazzaville Beach is, to some degree, about tasting the fruits of knowledge and losing one’s innocence. The main character, Hope Clearwater, will be told later on, “…the pursuit of knowledge is the road to hell…You think that if you know everything you can escape from the world.”

Most of the artwork on display is for sale, with the smallest canvases going for 25,000 CFA. And if you want something even smaller and cheaper, they also have paintings on square pieces of wood that sell for 10,000 CFA.

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The reader knows from the second strand, at Grosso Arvore, that the marriage ended, but doesn't know how or what was the final straw until towards the end of the book. But we see Hope, still young, now researching chimp behaviour in Africa. Her task is to observe a small group of chimps who have broken away from the main group. Eugene Mallabar is about to publish what will be his magnum opus – the last word on chimpanzees – and his reputation is what brings in the grants and donations that make the research possible. But Hope begins to see behaviour in her chimp group that doesn't tie in with Mallabar's research. At first, she tells him about this but he dismisses her – he doesn't want his research threatened. So she begins to conduct her own research and is increasingly disturbed by what she discovers.

The author allows us to follow her thoughts by dividing her narration of them into two voices, one told in the first person and one told in the third. This has the effect of making them both seem immediate as if they were taking place at the same time. She also dwells on mathematics a lot. Her husband was a mathematician, trying to develop a formula or algorithm around turbulence, all of which is difficult for Hope to understand. It's also causing problems for her husband who eventually goes insane with predictably disruptive results. While each strand is told linearly in time, the book cuts between them so that the reader is following them all simultaneously. Hope's marriage to John is happy at first. She is contentedly working as an ecologist mapping ancient hedgerows, while John is immersed in the study of chaos theory – a subject Hope can't even pretend to understand but she does understand John's passion for it. Gradually though, as John repeatedly fails to achieve his own goal to make a unique contribution to the subject, his mental health begins to show the strain. Jumping from one mathematical discipline to another, alternating between heavy drinking and total abstention, John's behaviour becomes progressively more erratic and their marriage comes under ever greater strain. The characters appear warts and all, (robbing me of the chance to hate some of them!) but making the book resonate with truth. Now, though, the controversy seems to have died down, and locals come to take selfies in the attractive, flower-filled gardens. Entry is free, but the guard at the gate will ask for your ID and will keep it until you exit.What is a sapeur, you ask? If you look the word up in the dictionary, you’ll find that it means “firefighter”, but that’s not the type of sapeur we’re talking about here. Brazzaville Beach tells the stories of Hope Clearwater. It covers two periods, telling them in parallel although one follows the other chronologically. Each period comes to a dramatic conclusion. The book builds to deliver both conclusions as close together as the narrative allows. There are themes that recur in Hope's experiences. There is anger, violence, madness, conspiracy. There is violence instigated by academics, and tenderness provided by soldiers. The most dissipative system anyone will ever encounter is war. It is violently uneven and completely unpredictable.” Complicating matters is the fact that guerrilla warfare is going on in the country at the time, making movement dangerous. The guerrilla leader of one of the factions, the volleyball playing “Atomique Boum,” Dr. Amilcar, might possibly be the most likable character is this book. He’s certainly well drawn and one of the most interesting. At any rate, Hope’s story eventually intersects with that of the guerrillas, giving the novel added tension and momentum. It’s quite an impressive feat of engineering, and you may wonder why no such bridge has been built to connect Brazzaville and Kinshasa. But that’s more of a political issue than anything else.