The Trade Mission [Hardcover]

The Trade Mission, Andrew Pyper's follow-up to his hugely successful Lost Girls, has the look and the premise of a Hollywood-ready Michael Crichton knockoff, complete with jungles, mysterious South American gunmen, high-tech millionaires, and bad sex in Brazilian brothels. Fortunately, The Trade Mission is a more substantial thriller, smart enough (and filled with enough moral quagmires) to be compared to the "entertainments" of Graham Greene but cool and gritty enough to be read in a single, lazy day.

The titular trade mission is one of those travelling economic circuses that are so beloved of the Canadian government. Readers will be happy to learn that Pyper has interests beyond the drunken schmoozing of Liberals on vacation: he focuses on the sideshow, a strange dot-com startup called Hypothesys, an Internet-based "morality machine" that helps users navigate through the thorniest of personal problems. After a brief spate of convention-going, the Hypothesys team--the inseparable wunderkind tycoons Marcus Wallace and Jonathon Bates; a doughy American executive; a fashionable, pregnant Brit; and their frumpy, failed-academic translator, Crossman (who is also The Trade Mission's deliciously wry narrator)--embarks on an ecotour cruise up the Rio Negro, where they are abducted and tortured, seemingly at random, by a handful of anonymous guerrillas. When they make their escape into the jungle, their predicament only worsens.

Pyper has written an extraordinarily sharp and original novel, one with plenty to say about everything from childbirth to the global reception of Canadian culture. The Trade Mission is a fine demonstration of how so-called "literary thrillers" ought to be done. --Jack Illingworth

The ad copy on the back of the proofs for Pyper's second novel (after Lost Girls) points out just what's right, and what's wrong, with the book: "The Trade Mission is a gripping, ingeniously plotted thriller with an underlying literary interest in social criticism...." The novel does grip, and while its plot-two young North American software entrepreneurs and their colleagues visiting Brazil are kidnapped by extortionists in the jungle, then escape for a chase-isn't quite ingenious, it's clever enough; so far so good. The problem is the "underlying literary interest in social criticism." One supposes the copywriter mentioned "literary" as a pointer to Pyper's prose, which is lush and suffused with psychological insight, but which too often draws attention to itself at the expense of the story. The "social criticism" is relayed through character studies-the kidnapped are extremely complex creations, as is their Canadian translator, a woman rapidly approaching middle age, who narrates; her probings into the differences rendered by wealth, class and age among the kidnapped, and between them and their captors, are perceptive and fresh. The novel takes a serious wrong turn, though, when the kidnapped are harbored by a tribe of Yanomami Indians. While giving the narrator plenty of chance to comment on the degradation of the rain forest and its peoples by industrial interests, this turn feels contrived; it leads to the kidnapped ingesting a native hallucinogen, which exacerbates the murkiness of the narrator's perceptions and results in a storytelling muddle that Pyper straightens out only through further contrivances. Pyper is a talented stylist and a masterful psychological portraitist, but his new novel is a slog.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Deliverance comes to the Amazonian rain forest in this verbose suspense tale from the author of Lost Girls (2000). Elizabeth Crossman has been retained as a translator for two 24-year-old dot-com millionaires, Wallace and Bates, who have come to Brazil to hawk their new Internet service. While on a tourist cruise up the Rio Negro, they are abducted by sadistic paramilitary pirates and brutally tortured--with all the gruesome details graphically described. The resourceful (and increasingly unstable) Wallace leads them in a violent escape from their captors, but they end up lost in the jungle without food or water--and relentlessly pursued by the savage criminals. Those looking for a gripping survival yarn will be disappointed in this dialogue-dense opus with literary aspirations, but readers who like erudite description and philosophical discussion will find this an accommodating choice. Recommended only for large fiction collections. Michael Gannon
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

In the strictest sense, Andrew Pyper’s The Trade Mission is not a mystery. It is a gritty literary thriller. As with That Sleep Of Death and Dreadful Waters Shows Up, a computer figures into the plot. Unlike those two novels, however, the computer is simply a catalyst for a novel that also examines heady topics like greed, ethics, and individual choice.
Two hot-shot dot-commers, Marcus Wallace and Jonathan Bates, both 24 years of age, have been joined at the hip, heart, and brain since they were inseparable companions as boys at school. Bullied by everyone, including the prefects, they were once left to survive as best they could during an Outdoor Orientation Exam in the middle of the Canadian woods in winter with “marbles” of snow around them.
Years later, as “boy geniuses of Canada’s Great White Web,” Wallace and Bates travel to the heat and steamy rain of the Brazilian rain forest in the trade mission of the title to pitch their “vaporware”, a software that doesn’t do anything. Their package is called Hypothesys; it “helps you make the best decision of your life!” They are accompanied on their business and moral journey by a world-weary managing partner, a pregnant lawyer, and the narrator of the novel, Elizabeth Crossman.
Crossman is an inspired choice for narrator. An enigmatic character, she is the translator for the team. The only one who speaks Portuguese, she is both overqualified (with a Ph.D. in Economic History) and “chronically underappreciated.” Crossman’s version of the events that happen to the Brazilian 5 contributes to the darkly ironic temper of the novel.
The Trade Mission reads like a three-act film script. There’s the initial sales pitch for Hypothesys. There’s a suspicious sort of kidnapping—an eco trip down the Reo Negro river goes badly awry when the team of five is captured by pirates. And there’s an ultimate escape from a tribe of “secret people”, the Yanomami, which turns the whole novel into a life-altering experience and moralistic adventure tale.
The motives for the kidnapping aren’t clear. Is it to get information about a “perfect bomb” that Bates whispers about to a brothel queen? Or is the horrific sequence of torture predicated on a mistake? Were the pirates meant to capture a Canadian envoy which included the Prime Minister on another boat on the river?
It hardly matters. Pyper uses allusions to Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness to explore the moral dilemmas winding beneath everyone’s skin. Wallace, Bates, and Crossman end ure the jungle’s “body of lush malevolence” and learn about misplaced values, greed, and the promise of the discovery of the true self.
The Trade Mission is a compulsive read about a devastatingly grueling physical and mental journey.
Robert Allen Papinchak (Books in Canada) -- Books in Canada

Marcus Wallace and Jonathon Bates are Canadian dot.com wunderboys, on a trade mission in Brazil to sell their intriguing concept for a new website -- Hypothesys is a virtual "morality machine" that promises to take the agony out of making choices, helping people to make the "best decisions of their lives."

But the decision that the Hypothesys team makes to take an eco-tour boat ride up the Rio Negro River into the Amazon Jungle -- accompanied by a band of leech-like Canadian trade bureaucrats -- will determine their future lives -- and deaths. Their boat is captured by unknown assailants who brutally kill the crew and kidnap the Hypothesys team, now led blindfolded to a stinking jungle pit prison. Except for the odd omission of Crossman, the team’s enigmatic translator, one by one the team is tortured and tested beyond reasonable understanding. Have their captors confused them with government officials from another boat? Has one of them secretly sold out? No one knows, but when an opportunity to escape presents itself, the team flees back to the river -- each one embarking on their own desperate journey into the heart of darkness.

Like Lost Girls, Pyper's first international bestseller (over 300,000 copies to date), The Trade Mission is a unique hybrid novel. It's a story for the Virtual Age that takes psychological suspense to an almost unbearable new level.

ANDREW PYPER is the author of Lost Girls, his highly acclaimed first novel that was a bestseller in Canada, in the Top 10 on the TimesUK paperback list and in the Top 30 of The New York Times paperback bestseller list. The novel was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by The Globe and Mail and The New York Times and is currently being adapted for the screen. His second novel, The Trade Mission, was selected as a Top 10 Best Book of the Year by the Toronto Star and was published in Canada, the US and the UK to great acclaim. Pyper is also theauthor of Kiss Me, a collection of short stories. While researching and writing The Wildfire Season, he spent three of the past five summers living in the Yukon. His home is in Toronto.

Chapter 1

"Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Marcus Wallace, and I'd like to personally welcome you to your futures!"

This is in Brazil, but it could be anywhere.

A long conference room lit by dimmed halogen spots in the ceiling, a dozen rows of chairs, potted ferns circling the lectern. The front reserved for photographers, whose flashbulbs explode like distant artillery fire whenever one of the two people on stage makes a face or gesture of any kind. Behind them, slouching journalists scribble in notepads as they always have, or tickle laptops, as they do more and more. Then the rows of money: suits, silk shirts, Swiss watches of a price equivalent to an entry-level American sedan.

The person speaking to them is a boy. The other person on stage is a boy as well, although he hasn't spoken yet, and doesn't appear interested in starting any time soon. Instead, he sits at a small desk made out of a single sheet of clear, molded plastic (beneath it, his knees visibly jiggling within their cargo pants). He keeps his eyes squinted at a computer screen in front of him, and from time to time makes stabs at its keyboard, as though a cockroach were running back and forth across it. They are far enough apart that even from the back of the room you can't take them both in at once, so you move your eyes from one to the other. Decide that your first impression was wrong. They aren't boys at all. They are young men. But the word continues to cling to them, nevertheless. It seems right. You feel certain it will never leave them.

"Before we move on to this afternoon's presentation, I would like to introduce my partner -- God, it sounds like he's my wife or something whenever I say that! -- the real brains behind the success of Hypothesys, Jonathon Bates."

The young man at the clear plastic desk jiggles his knees more violently and raises his hand over his head in a kind of wave. A smile fractures across his mouth without him appearing to be in control of it.

"This is going to be one of the first public demonstrations of our product," the standing one says, "so we're pretty excited up here -- or down here, I should say, seeing as this is South America."

A giggle escapes from his lips, which in turn initiates a round of chortles and cleared throats from the audience. He's cute. Everyone wants to like him. They already do.

"Why are we excited? Well, it's pretty simple. We feel that Hypothesys is something that is truly going to change the way we conduct our lives. And that's not just more of the same hype you guys have no doubt been served plenty of all week. Because this isn't like the stuff you've seen all week. It's not another Internet site where you can buy groceries or books or watch porn broadcast live from a rented room in Amsterdam or get twenty-four-hour webcam coverage of some Joe Nobody arguing with his girlfriend or brushing his teeth. Hypothesys isn't about any of that. In fact, it can literally be anything you want it to be. Something you need. Your confidant. Your best friend. Your nondenominational spiritual advisor. Night or day, it will be there to help. To offer guidance about life's most diYcult questions, or even the easy ones you just feel you'd like a second opinion on. As the banner over our stall in the convention hall says, 'Hypothesys helps you make the best decisions of your life!'"

At this, the dimmed lights dim further, and at the rear of the stage a large screen glows blue. Gradually, the word HYPOTHESYS comes forward in white, a cloud taking shape in a clear sky. A jet streaks across with a roar, leaving "New Human Ethics Technologies" formed out of the dissolving exhaust behind it. Even from the back of the room you can see the encircled c asserting copyright over every one of these words.

Now the two young men are silhouettes against the perfect blue, except for pancake circles of light on their faces, spotlights following them wherever they go. They look like ghosts in a high-school play.

"Some have called our project a morality machine, but that isn't quite right," continues the young Wallace's disembodied voice. Only now, in the new darkness, do you notice how full it is, at once boyish and suggestive of experience. "Hypothesys doesn't deliver morality per se, nor is it a machine, strictly speaking. What it is, however, is a library of contemporary ethics. The process behind its development is known as collaborative filtering, but it's not as complicated as it sounds. It's just a survey, really. A big survey. One that has resulted in a collection of data that, once it has been thoroughly cross-referenced, can tell us something about the way we behave. So far, collaborative filtering is a process that has been employed for the most predictably commercial purposes. You know, the old 'If you liked that movie or CD, chances are you'll also like this movie or CD' based on the stuff other people have bought before you. Hypothesys is considerably more ambitious. It has nothing to sell but ourselves. It is who we are -- all of us together -- right now. It forms, in effect, a universal human mind."

Bates begins to work furiously at his laptop, and an animated brain appears on the screen, huge and pulsing with white bolts of electricity.

"Over the course of the past several months, we have conducted one of the most extensive studies of individual sensibilities ever undertaken," Wallace says, his spotlit head floating from one side of the stage to the other. "And we weren't asking about what color of sneakers people most like to wear, or what kind of car they drive, or whether they live in a house or a hole in the ground. In short, this was not the dead-tired market research you've all heard too much about already. We weren't interested in the market at all, as a matter of fact, but only in people's answers to hypothetical questions. Scruples. The way we decide to live our lives. Bates?"

As a buzzing swarm of static on the screen nibbles the brain away from stem to lobe, it is replaced by a shot of a crowded city street. People moving in undulating waves, half heading north, half south. It takes a couple of seconds to recognize the scene as computer-generated (it's only the slight over-vividness of digitized color that gives it away). Then you notice something else not-quite-right about it. The people are made up of men, women, old and young, skin of every graduated pigment between black and albino, a cross around one neck, a Star of David around another, a turbaned head and a veiled face. A street that had to be made by a computer because none could possibly be this perfectly representative anywhere in the real world.

"There is, needless to say, no single law that guides our actions. Our different religions, cultures and experiences shape our ethical orientations in a million discrete ways. But Hypothesys is indifferent to those distinctions. It's about what we have in common, not what sets us apart. And because the data we have collected does not take into account the identity of those who participated in its collection, it is a system that can be applied with equal effectiveness in any nation, and be relevant to any way of life. We have, in a sense, created an electronic Everyman. Or Everywoman."

Now the street scene blurs into a palette of brilliant colors that reassembles into a vision of the earth viewed from space. Different strains of shimmering, twinkly music seem to come from every corner of the room to converge between our ears. A chorus of synthetic human voices coming from the inside out. Home, they sing. Home!

Gradually, though, the planet's blues and browns and benign cloud masses become more detailed, hostile. Soon we are hurtling toward the surface.

"So how does it work?" Wallace's question cuts through the soundtrack, which has built up into a Wagnerian climax of swirling synthesizers. "Well, my friends, let's go straight into the mind of Hypothesys and find out!"

The earth entirely fills the screen in bulging 3-d and with a clap of thunder we crash somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, plummet down into the depths until the shafts of sunlight from the surface whither away and the entire conference room goes dark.

Somebody blows their nose. A goose honk in the silence.

Then a woman's face appears on the screen. As we watch, her features -- hair color, skin tone, nose length, lip shape -- subtly change so that she is never fixed. Never one woman, but an infinitely revolving carousel of women.

"Meet Camilla," Wallace says, softer now. "She has a problem. She knows something that her husband doesn't know, and she can't decide whether to tell him about it."

The woman's face fluidly morphs into that of a man. Of men.

"Camilla kissed Stephen last week. Stephen and Camilla's husband are friends, they play golf on the weekends, get together for family barbecues. But last week Stephen called Camilla and asked her to lunch. Now, this is important: Camilla felt something was strange about this. Camilla and Stephen had never had lunch alone together before. And the fact is, she's caught Stephen looking at her strangely lately. You know, giving her the old Latin lover eyes. But this is Brazil -- you all know about that!"

There is appreciative laughter at this, along with a lusty whoop from somewhere among the journalists. Hoo-ha!

"But Camilla met up with Stephen anyway. They had some wine. They had a nice time. Then, over the tiramisù, Stephen drops the bomb. 'I love you,' he says. 'I won't get in the way of your life if you don't want me to. But I just had to let you know.' Camilla feels like a kid. She feels her cheeks get hot." (The women's faces reappear on the screen, all of them blushing.) "They pay and step out of the restaurant. And right there on the sidewalk, before she knows what she's doing -- although she does, of course, she knows perfectly well -- she kisses Stephen like he was about to head off to war. We're talking passion here, people."

The face of the men returns and the women and men kiss on the li...