THE BLOOD LATITUDES

Harrison braids several themes from his earlier fiction into one plot that unwaveringly pulls us into the most profound

philosophical questions of the past century yet keeps the human drama knitted tight. Harrison’s The Theologian (1965) started his lasting interest in theology, and Roller Ball Murders (1974, filmed as Rollerball) his interest in murder as sport. His rich biographical novel Burton and Speke (1982), about Sir Richard Burton searching for the source of the Nile (filmed as Mountains of the Moon), reaffirmed a lifelong fixation on Africa as birthplace of the blackest and brightest of human passions. A journey into the serpent areas of the brain, Harrison’s fifth book on Africa now dips us in blood up to our necks while exposing the horrors of genocide as the Hutu and Tutsis slaughter each other in Rwanda. Retired American journalist Will Hobbs, a widower settled in London, must go off to Africa to chase down his missing son, Buck, also a journalist. Buck left his lovely wife Key and their young son with Will to go off into the gory fields of tribal warfare in chase of stories that will rival those of his highly respected father—and is now quite likely dead. Marlow’s journey after Kurtz in Heart of Darkness leads to no greater horrors than those Will meets as he retraces his son’s footsteps, especially after he’s taken prisoner by a roving band of five Hutu militiamen out to murder anyone they feel like murdering, not just Tutsis but "everyone to whom you might owe money, your nagging wife, the obnoxious acquaintance, anyone." The militia chief is Papa Ngiz ("Father Darkness"), once a student of theology at the Union Seminary in Manhattan, who kills people for breakfast, lunch, and dinner while spouting marvelously well-spoken and not easily denied justifications of evil. Harrison’s most deeply pondered work, masterfully restrained in style: adult novelizing, closest, perhaps, to the ambiguities

of darkness that so intrigued Graham Greene.