I am not sure why I had this strange book on my list of books to read, but suspect that I read a favourable review of it in The Economist a long time ago. There is very limited information about the author except that he is from the Shetland Islands, lives in Africa, and is a political and war correspondent for The Economist. One of my disappointments with that magazine is that their writers are usually not identified.
The action, what little there is, swerves back and forth haphazardly between the Hotel Atlantique in France, various jihadist training camps in east Africa, and the depths of the hydrothermal vents in the Greenland Sea off the coast of Iceland. The two main characters are a male British spy posing as a water consultant in Africa (captured and tortured by jihadists) and a female oceanographer/biomathematician, his casual lover. She provides an interesting alternative to the panspermia atmospheric origin of planetary life, in proposing that life began with the organic compounds and intact thermophilic microorganisms in hot hydrophilic vents deep in the oceans. But what little plot there is is overpowered by scattered random observations on the nature of life and the role of humans in the universe, along with boring history lessons, and ostentatious quotes from the worldwide literati, poets, philosophers and thinkers, some famous and some obscure, from Milton and Donne to Tennyson, Voltaire, the Russian anarchist Kropotkin and the Swede Strindberg. As well, there is extensive reference to some fictions such as the Muslim jinn legends, often mixed in with apparently real historical events to the point that the truth is hard to separate from fiction.
There are no chapter divisions and few references to any particular time, although it is obviously set in modern times post 9/1.
This book is described a a cosmic-scale evocation of the intricacies of life. I can readily admire the author’s broad literary scope and encyclopedic knowledge. But to me the book seemed to serve mainly as a means of displaying that knowledge in a haphazard way, not as a meaningful story or even a unified viewpoint on life, and the negative existential angst becomes unpleasant Not a very enjoyable read.
The Passionate Reader 