Saturday fiction - 'lonely, despite a large sexual appetite...'

Baz Bamigboye in his Friday film and entertainment column reports that accomplished Award-winning actress Rachel Weisz fancies a film role as a spy. Someone who is lonely, despite a ‘large sexual appetite’.

To my mind, she would be ideal in the role of Tana Standish in The Prague Papers and its sequel The Tehran Text!

 

Rachel Weisz - Wikipedia commons

The Tana stories begin with Tana in Czechoslovakia in 1975, combatting the crushing Soviet presence. She meets again Laco, an old flame who is younger than her (she’s 38, he’s 25), rekindling a romance begun in 1968. But even in intimate moments, Tana is lonely, because she is psychic and must shut down her thought processes…

And in the exquisite throes of their lovemaking one special private part of her mind saddened, for Laco was right, so horribly right. She had known love, idealistic and physical, and she loved Laco as much as she was capable. But always her psyche must provide an impenetrable barrier between her and her lover.

Once, when she’d let an older man, Paul, talk her into letting him ‘go all the way’, she had absently spread out her prescient awareness as the man she loved entered her. Contrasts of pain and ecstasy, not too dissimilar, threshed in her body. Then she grasped hold of Paul’s thoughts, just at the pinnacle. The soaring onrush of pleasure from him accentuated her own, pushing her into multiple orgasms. But his thoughts had not been of her, nor of their lovemaking: he’d been reliving some lost love of long ago, far away, long-since dead. After that disturbing experience, she always shut down her mind’s receptors at intimate moments.

Rachel Weisz also likes the Angelina Jolie spy movie Salt, which was originally written for a man, and contains betrayal, action and blighted romance. In a similar (but different) vein, Tana is involved in plenty of action, intrigue and tragic loss as she discovers a shattering secret beneath the Sumava Mountains.  

The crowds around them seemed to be aware that something was amiss. The nearest guide was forcefully shepherding her tourists out of the way, towards the Holy Rood Chapel in the southeast corner of the courtyard. Behind them Tana glimpsed a khaki uniform, the soldier wearing a blue hat banded with cerise: presidential guard from the main entrance, with a rifle, the only weapon in sight, which was a blessing, she supposed.

Grishin hurried ahead of the others. Doubtless the fool was anxious for the glory. His weedy face twisted into an evil grimace as he grabbed Demek’s arm.

Demek swore and ineffectually tried jerking free.

Tana’s swift side-kick sank into Grishin’s back just over his kidneys and the force of the blow broke his grip on Demek and sent Grishin cannoning into the fountain.

One of the secret police shouted.

She grasped Grishin’s arm and heaved him round in the path of his oncoming comrades. The weight of the man and the sharp quick movement tore the dressing Laco had placed over her arm’s bullet-burn and she winced with the sudden pain.

“Get out!” she snarled at Demek. “I’ll hold them off. Go on!”

For all his rebellious nature, Demek’s instinctive hesitation was only a second. He scurried across the courtyard and through into the Third, heading for the back of the Cathedral and Golden Lane, to lose himself amidst the numerous stalls along the laneway.

Grishin’s flailing body bundled into the leading StB agent, unbalancing him.

Tana sidestepped them and sank a lightning-fast instep in the other agent’s solar plexus. He doubled-up in time to receive the rigid knife-edge of her hand on his neck. Her bandaged arm was already throbbing as she gritted her teeth and grabbed the man and swung him at the ceremonial sentry. As the two collided, the sentry dropped the rifle he’d been raising.

Grishin, half-supporting himself on the courtyard’s stone flags, called to the onlookers to apprehend Tana, explaining she had escaped from an asylum. But she met no resistance. The bystanders, having no love for the secret police, backed off and Tana raced past them, through the courtyards and out into the square.

Shallow steps, some two hundred of them, fringed the Castle on the town side. She descended them at a jog-trot, conscious of many eyes on her.

At the foot, she caught her breath and turned right by the Red Cross building, and came to a small slope.

Gaining her second wind, she hurried down Kamecka Street, turned left at the end, to find herself in a square virtually divided in two by the imposing church of Saint Nicholas and its adjacent buildings. Franz Kafka was born near here, though the actual house was demolished. He’d have been unsurprised at the schizoid nature of the Soviet mind, she mused, stopping for a moment to ease her pulse.

Well, most authors dream of bringing their stories to the screen.

After all, we’re dreamers.

Dreamers who transpose those images from mind to the page.

 
The Prague Papers

 
Amazon UK here

Amazon COM here

Film of the book: The Constant Gardener

As yesterday’s book release Catalyst is about a fictional pharmaceutical company, Cerberus, and Catherine Vibrissae’s vendetta against its head, it seems appropriate to look at another work about pharmas: The Constant Gardener.

This is a faithful adaptation of John Le Carré’s novel and, even with the constant flash-backs, it delivers.  The 2001 book was an angry indictment of certain pharmas – big pharmaceutical companies - and their dubious practices in getting drugs tested and approved.  Since then, certain controls have been put in place yet somewhere we can be sure that poor people are still being used without their consent as drug-testing guinea-pigs.  Not all pharmas are wicked.  But the one in The Constant Gardener definitely is.

The music matches the haunting and ravishing views of Africa and was composed by the Spaniard Alberto Iglesias.

The film starts in Kenya with the off-screen murder of Tess (Oscar winning Rachel Weisz), the campaigning wife of diplomat Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes).  Normally, I don’t like stories that begin with a major character’s murder and then persist in giving us flash-backs, but it worked well in the book and it does in the film too. 

Tess was an activist-humanitarian working with African physician Arnold Bluhm (Herbert Kounde). She upset the tightly-knit diplomatic community with her passion for speaking out, particularly against Three Bees Pharmaceutical which ostensibly provides jobs, aid and money. 

The quiet widower, Quayle, slowly digs around the edges of his late wife’s past and unearths uncomfortable mysteries and a few home truths.  Fiennes’s performance is understated and is particularly moving when he finally breaks down in his garden to weep for his lost love.

If this had been a Hollywood film, doubtless Quayle would have gone out for vengeance with a gun or two. Instead, he simply pokes around, unsettling the hidden powers behind the shadowy pharmaceutical company, including Sir Bernard Pellegrin (Bill Nighy) who is in the Pharma’s pocket and just happens to be Quayle’s boss at the Foreign Office. 

It’s an unnerving film, because it tells us that, unless things change radically, the beautiful continent of Africa is doomed by commercial greed and despotism. Nothing new there, then. Worse, though, the incidence of tuberculosis is increasing and will spread into Europe as the mass migration of illegal immigrants continues; prophetic, it seems, since that is the case now in UK. Yes, there is hope, but it is slim. The ending, for me, was unsatisfying, which was the same emotional response I gleaned from the book.  See this powerful and at times emotional film, by all means, but it isn’t really entertainment as the message dominates too much.

Le Carré can get away with switching tense and POV because he’s such a good writer. Within a short space of time, the reader is immersed in his characters’ worlds. I haven’t yet read all his books, but I’ve read the majority, including all of the spy novels. For me, outside his spy fiction, The Night Manager is one of his suspenseful best. Still, you’d be hard-pressed to find a bad Le Carré book; it is soon to be filmed as a TV series.

***

Note: You can read about my fictional pharma, Cerberus Worldwide, in my ‘Avenging Cat’ thriller series, beginning with Catalyst.

 

Amazon UK e-book here

Amazon COM e-book here

Paperbacks are also available at a good price!

Or try getting the paperback from The Book Depository post-free worldwide!

 

 

Torn from the news – living in slavery

About 880,000 people in the EU are living in slavery, according to the October figures from the European Parliament’s Organized Crime, Corruption and Money Laundering Committee (CRIM). These include children who are forced to beg, men who are forced to work for pitifully low or no wages, and women who are forced to work as prostitutes.

CRIM has urged the EU member states to eradicate trafficking in human beings. Considering that it’s estimated that organised crime nets around 25billion euros each year, crime lords are not going to give up their hold on their luckless human assets.

The aim to eradicate this modern form of slavery is not going to be easy, since there are thousands of corruption cases registered in the public sector of the EU. There’s no telling what the actual damage this causes, either, but it must be considerable. Forlorn hope, but if organised crime could be radically reduced, imagine how improved living standards would be!)

There are relatively new crimes being organised today, too. A booming trade in human organs and wildlife and the rapid spread of cyber-crime take their toll.

In Europe, there a total of 3,600 international criminal organisations operating across the EU, according to the report. This is one reason why the British SOCA (and parts of the Border Agency, and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, as well) have been replaced by the NCA (National Crime Agency) to tackle the 40,000 individuals in 5,500 criminal gangs in UK; the NCA will have a big presence abroad, too, with 130 officers in excess of forty countries.

CRIM recommends the abolition of European tax havens and increased prison time for thos caught and convicted of money laundering or corruption. To help in the fight against corruption, the committee calls for further legal protection for whistle-blowers within the EU.

Excerpt from Blood of the Dragon Trees

The week was a long ordeal of starvation rations, hard labour and a few minor beatings, but Jalbala stoically accepted his lot. His body ached in every muscle, mainly from work, but he was determined to fit in.

Including him, there were twenty-two in the new group, so Mustapha had been accurate on that point, too. It seemed that the rest of the group hadn’t noticed the switch. They were probably – and understandably – wrapped up in their own fate at the time.

Some days he was put to work in a field, picking melons. The open air was preferable, but the sun quickly sapped his strength and gave him a pounding headache, the first signs of dehydration. In the fields, Jalbala got to know the woman he’d pulled out of the water. Her name was Nadira. She was twenty-four and had left her two young boys with her parents. Her husband had been killed and she wanted to fend for herself. ‘Europe is where I will make money and bring my children up,’ she told Jalbala with conviction.

Other days, he worked under immense sheets of plastic. Within these greenhouses, he found it difficult to breathe in the very humid 140^oF. Light and heat seemed to radiate from every surface. The days melded into an amorphous mass of time within Jalbala’s surreal world, where the sky was white, suspended by arched wooden ribs, just inches above his head.

Toiling in the suffocating greenhouses, Jalbala made friends with one of the men who’d been landed from the ship. Talking made them even more breathless, but Jalbala needed information and Jope was glad to pass the time while doing monotonous work.

Jope spoke French. He was Senegalese, with a wife and a five-year-old daughter. He’d been an electrician, earning £25 a month.

‘Why talk in British pounds?’ Jalbala queried. ‘Your currency is francs, isn’t it?’

Jope shrugged. ‘I don’t know why, but they preferred discredited pounds, rather than our francs or euros.’

He went on. He’d been enticed by a friend who said that in the Canaries he could earn at least £1,000 a month. ‘I decided to improve my family’s lot. I spoke to my wife and we agreed. I took our family savings and went to the coast.’ He eventually caught a ship sailing from Dajla in Mauritania. ‘I want a house and I want to educate my children,’ he told Jalbala. ‘The journey cost £800. I worked for three months to add the wages to our savings.’

Jalbala felt for the man. The money that ruled – and ruined – Jope’s life was peanuts to the majority of people in the UK or the States. Everything was relative, he supposed. Both the States and the UK were still hurting from the credit crunch and massive borrowing. Yet he’d seen in England that large sections of the workforce were still intent on striking for higher wages. What planet were they on?

‘Why do you ask so many questions?’ Jope said.

Really good question, Jalbala thought. ‘I’m a reporter. I want to expose the people who put you through this.’ He only wished that was true; maybe some aspects of it could be.

Somewhere near, guard dogs barked and Jalbala knew that not far from their side strode sadistic men with pickaxe handles and baseball bats. (p84)

 

BLOOD OF THE DRAGON TREES

Amazon.co.uk - http://goo.gl/fsLk3X

Amazon.com - http://goo.gl/wHQpQp

Laura Reid likes her new job on Tenerife, teaching the Spanish twins Maria and Ricardo Chávez. She certainly doesn’t want to get involved with Andrew Kirby and his pal, Jalbala Emcheta, who work for CITES, tracking down illegal traders in endangered species. Yet she’s undeniably drawn to Andrew, which is complicated, as she’s also attracted to Felipe, the brother of her widower host, Don Alonso.

            Felipe’s girlfriend Lola is jealous and Laura is forced to take sides – risking her own life – as she and Andrew uncover the criminal network that not only deals in the products from endangered species, but also thrives on people trafficking. The pair are aided by two Spanish lawmen, Lieutenant Vargas of the Guardia Civil and Ruben Salazar, Inspector Jefe del Grupo de Homicidios de las Canarias.
            Very soon betrayal and mortal danger lurk in the shadows, along with the dark deeds of kidnapping and clandestine scuba diving…

Note. The film The Whistleblower (2010) is a searing indictment of institutionalised corruption that condones people trafficking, with a superb performance from Rachel Weisz. This film is at times brutal, uncomfortable viewing and not for the faint-hearted. It’s based on actual events.