Ali Karim was a Board Member of Bouchercon [The World Crime & Mystery Convention] and co-chaired programming for Bouchercon Raleigh, North Carolina in 2015. He is Assistant Editor of Shots eZine, British correspondent for The Rap Sheet and writes and reviews for many US magazines & Ezines.
Reading this novel is akin to voyaging on a hallucinatory dream, one that requires you take a life-jacket and notebook for it is a tempestuous journey that spans not only several continents but also traverses time.
Opening in Portugal’s capital Lisbon in 1954 inside a historical archive, the mysterious Nuno Bárbaro de Castro is in the process of tracking down the last will and testament of the relative Garoto Bárbaro [de Castro]. The document is dated 1874, and unconventional as it is actually a series of vignettes split into thirteen sections denoting items and their beneficiaries. The fragile manuscript is a deathbed confessional recounting the adventures of the dying former slave. Garoto began his servitude as an infant helper to a blacksmith and then as a young boy had his teeth extracted for his entry into bare-knuckle boxing. Following the collapse of his father’s plantation due to gambling debts, he is taken to sea on the slave ship Ana-Margarida. The journey is harrowing, with misadventures in the Portuguese colony of Goa [in India], through to the adventures in the Caribbean Gulf Coast with the Vessel’s master an expatriate former pirate from Wales, Captain Francis Davies and the Commodore. In Cuba, we are introduced to the brothel and gambling den - The Pink Corsair owned and operated by the colourful former prostitute Mamzelle Guzman.
From this set-up, The Wreckers, crosses continents and time, to detail a surreal journey threaded by the slave trade from the ‘lost’ city of Mbala, on the African gold coast to Angola through to Cuba, and finally the islands in the Mississippi Delta arriving at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which was historically named as Angola Prison [the ‘Alcatraz of the South’].
The novel becomes at times a confusing chase adventure, with relatives of de Castro, and Guzman searching for artefacts from long forgotten history, and the location of the Last Kingdom of Mbala. The path is littered with artefacts including brass dentures, illegally smuggled African blood-diamonds, bogus business cards, the questionable skull measurements of slaves [phrenology], as well as murder, deception and a map hidden in the contours of dried human skin.
The legacy of the transatlantic slave trade is a horrific one, though there is a bawdy sense of the surrealistic in the telling of the story, which converges in the 1990s in the archives at Baton Rouge in Louisiana, for the embargo placed on the importation of African slaves in 1807; however there were ways and means of bypassing the slavery embargo which became exploited by instruments of the Louisiana State Prison, whose name descended from the African country that the slaves were imported from.
The Wreckers is a fascinating and wild narrative that should be read in chunks, for its imaginative texture and literary exoticism becomes overwhelming to the senses if read for long periods. There is confusion from an ill-defined progression of characters, which is exacerbated by equally bizarre interludes and misadventures - but at no time is the narrative boring. The writing is vibrant and electric with a unique pulse and timbre that sweeps up the reader in its wake.
It is of little surprise that the author, George Makana Clark is an academic, who has travelled and taught in Africa, North America and Europe.
The Wreckers is part historical crime thriller, and part literary adventure.
Though at times it is frustrating and not entirely successful in its narrative structure - however it is unlike anything I have read and will haunt your dreams and will fuel nightmares.
