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

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)