From Publishers Weekly
Known primarily for his travel writing and poetry (In Dr. No's Garden), Shukman offers a skillfully crafted, eclectic collection of a novella and three stories tracking the rueful meandering of an aging British journalist and other hapless travelers. The first half of the book, a three-part novella, follows Charles Mortimerhas, who has enjoyed a terrific career as a far-flung journalist. At age 56, though, he finds himself back in the desert covering a dubious civil war on the Moroccan border. Bitterly encamped with an insurgency, he fills his notebook with self-pitying reflections, addressed to his ex-wife, Saskia, and staggers in a "daze of remorse" pining for French photographer Celeste, a former lover with whom he shared his finest moments. Shukman's other characters are similarly beat up by peripatetic lives: Harry Burton, the privileged solitary British traveler of "Castaway," stuck on the Bahamian island of Inagua, is "a global man, highly trained" and without attachment. Jim Rogers, the rich securities banker of "Darien Dogs," is "a modern-day hunter-gatherer," who arrives in Panama to secure the construction of a new oil pipeline, and gradually succumbs to the snares of a fetching local prostitute. They make for a sad bunch indeed, but in "Old Providence," feted British painter Rothman Case, awash in drink by middle age, recognizes that the moment of bottoming out also affords him his first glimpse of artistic freedom.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Shukman's new collection is a depressing series of stories about fundamentally broken men. Meeting with the results of a lifetime of bad choices, the protagonists in these tales discover--usually far too late--that their life pursuits were not worth the price of the chase. Shukman flexes his descriptive muscles by setting these stories in extreme locations: the heart of the Sahara and the lush tropics of the Caribbean. It is in the face of brash and boldly uncontrollable nature that these men face their demons. Mortimer, of the title story, has been a true globetrotting journalist. He has ridden through world affairs as though they were so many prize racehorses, changing tack when the story gets tired, but his personal life has barely gotten a paragraph. He is finally shocked and forced into introspection when he learns of the death of the only woman with whom he has ever truly connected. The stories Shukman tells are a warning to men who have let their pursuits become too one-dimensional--and seldom are such warnings handed over with landscapes this compelling.
Debi LewisCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
