by Sonia Gomez

Most Americans would be hard-pressed to find even the most prominent African nations on a map, let alone begin to account for the complicated, somewhat horrifying reasons that poverty, disease, and political chaos continue to plague some of the most culturally diverse and resource-rich countries in the world. Thankfully, out of this wasteland of ignorance, Norman Rush's second novel, Mortals, gallantly rises to the task of portraying contemporary life in a small African nation, and does so with brutal honesty, intelligence, and invigorating complexity.

Mortals, like its predecessor, Mating, is set in Botswana, which may by now be familiar to readers as somewhere between G. W. Bush's recent stop in Gabarone and the literary sensation of Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, featuring the wonderfully judicious Mma Ramotswe. The tome of a novel (it's 712 pages long) is set against the pivotal early 1990s, when South Africa's imminent independence from white rule had the whole region simmering with political tensions. Rush's novel is expansive and vast. It has the scope that most contemporary novels leave you starving for. It is fantastically panoramic, taking the reader from the minutest inward details that constitute intimate relationships to the schemes of dirty politics, and further out into the elemental struggle between idealism and corruption. Rush's style is utterly literary: The importance of language and texts weaves through the novel, and his overdeveloped vocabulary casts the simplest observation into live precision.

Rush's protagonist is Ray--an American instructor at a college in Gabarone, and also an informant for the "agency," headquartered at the U.S. Embassy--whose job it is to monitor radical elements that threaten to disturb the status quo. Anyone who knows Rush's first work, Mating, knows what an amazing hand he has for powerful and fascinating female characters, and Ray's wife, Iris, is no exception. The delicate machinery of intimacy between husband and wife and their respective problematic siblings takes up a good novel-length of the book. Added are the building tensions between Ray and "the agency," and the complicating factors of two more key characters, another American with his own mysterious agenda, and a young, Western-educated Botswanan, Kerekang.

The second half of the book turns into a kind of literary action thriller, which unfolds dramatically, if a little bogged down by excessive detail. It's this section of the novel that displays Rush's astute grasp of power relations in this part of the world, and the ham-handed destructive influences of foreign intervention. He explains, if you attend carefully to what he describes, why, and how easily, progress is thwarted in developing countries by a continuous process of destabilization sponsored by outside forces (like the United States, for example).

While I've chosen to highlight the political content of Rush's novel, rest assured that his agenda is never heavy-handed. In fact it is the universe of ambiguities and complexities that really demonstrates Rush's tenderness for his characters, and for Botswana. Unlike so many whites writing about Africa, his African characters are fully realized, dynamic figures, and most remarkably he avoids patronizing his setting--he writes about Africa always with a great sense of equity and generosity. Indeed, the one flaw of this book is excess. It is really just too long. But when you consider the literary effort required to finally begin to undo the racist, reductive lens through which we view the still Dark Continent, you might allow Mr. Rush a few extra pages.