FLIGHT OF THE DIAMOND SMUGGLERS

Frank chronicles his trip to South Africa to conduct a “funeral ceremony of sorts” at a vast diamond mine.

As he did in Preparing the Ghost (2014), the author creates an intriguing and unusual blend of genres. Here he mixes natural history with anthropology and a twist of true crime in a tale of small-scale theft. Along the Diamond Coast, he met Msizi, a young man who works belowground to harvest diamonds—and who smuggles in a pigeon to whose legs he ties tiny bits of the precious stone in an act of “quiet—but punishable—piracy.” Msizi’s thefts are tiny given a diamond harvest that, Frank notes, can be more than 176 million carats per year. A small army of men monitor the workers, who have devised many clever ways to sneak out diamond fragments, including using catapults to “shoot hollowed-out steel bolts, packed with diamonds” into the surrounding desert. Getting caught can mean torture and death. The army is led by Mr. Lester, a would-be chemist who instead joined the South African army and then went into security work; by Frank’s account, he’s a thoughtful but dangerous man. The pages are stuffed with notes on how pigeons live their lives, drinking with their heads down and carrying complex maps in their minds that enable them to locate their homes. The author’s prose is mannered, with a hint of the MFA workshop to it, as when he writes, “Perhaps it’s not God who has the answers to our seemingly unanswerable questions about ourselves—as Newton may have believed—but the loaded-up pigeons, some of whom, in a crisis of weight, will unexpectedly land and offer us a clue into the circulatory map of all the things we wish to hide from the rest of our species.” A little of this overwriting goes a long way, and there’s a lot of it. The overall story, however, is interesting.

Not without merits, but it might have worked better as a long-form magazine piece.