W. T. Tyler (1929–2008)

This is a love story. Hugh Mathews, a foreign service officer stationed in the Congo, juggles his embassy's embarrassing ineptitude concerning tribal relations while slowly falling in love with the consul's wife. Hugh and Margaret (Blakey to her friends) share a deep appreciation for authentic African art, the older and the uglier, the better.
Hugh is a complicated man of few words. As the African landscape grows more violent he questions the world around him. That inquiry leads to deeper self reflection and soon he questions his own being and motives.… (meer)

This book essentially argues that everything you know about Kim Philby and his associates in the Cambridge Spy Ring is wrong and that these men were very overrated, to the point that the British intelligence apparatus used them for their own deception activities and essentially allowed them to escape once their usefulness had ceased. The problem is that Hamrick does not write in a coherent enough fashion to make his case (largely based on the Venona revelations) ironclad and he seems to have such a number of personal prejudices he wishes to vent (such as a very low regard for the CIA & FBI) that I do wonder if this book is really worth the time to unravel. There is also the small matter that a decade is rather a long time regarding the shelf life of espionage history so that those seeking a contemporary account of the Philby Affair might be better off with the new work "A Spy Among Friends."… (meer)

The Ants of God tells the story of Scott McDermott, a disillusioned former Vietnam War combat pilot now working for hire as a bush pilot among the civil wars of Ethiopia in the late 1970s. I had never heard of W.T. Tyler, but a quick google search revealed that Tyler was a pseudonym for Samuel J. Hamrick. Hamrick's NY Times obituary (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/books/10hamrick.html/partner/rssnyt/) tells us the following:

"Mr. Hamrick, who served in United States embassies in Lebanon, Congo, Somalia and Ethiopia, published his first novel immediately after leaving the State Department in 1980."

This explains why Hamrick/Tyler's description of the people, places and things seems so believable and are so entirely engaging. Without giving us too much confusion details, Tyler delivers effectively the hardness, confusion, apathy and decadence of the various political entities and the people who almost mindlessly serve them. The characters and their motivations, good, bad or indifferent, seem quite real.

The storyline is a problem sometimes, though. Tyler spends about the first 50 pages (of 300 in my pocket book-sized edition) introducing the protagonist to a very annoying young American ex-pat hippy girl. Naturally, since she is young and lovely, she worms her way into our hero's life, if not, necessarily, his heart. The character is believable, if a bit over-drawn. The problem is that the book begins with the dawning of this relationship as we wait and wait for the story to get going.

Once the story does get going, it's pretty good, although there is less plot and action than one normally expects in an espionage novel (which this is, more or less). All in all, it seems Tyler's aim was more to draw a picture of time and place, and of the futility of American/Europeans attempts (from politicians to U.N. peacekeepers to young, altruistic Peace Corps volunteers) to have some effect upon events being played out in the remote spaces of Sudan, Uganda and Ethiopia. Theme-wise in this regard, I was reminded of Conrad. The linked Times obit says that Tyler's cover blurbs often compared him to Graham Greene and John Le Carre. (And certainly there's a famous Greene-Conrad connection). This was a comparison Hamrick evidently didn't care for, since he was an American who didn't care much for the English, and Greene and LeCarre were/are English writers who, Hamrick felt, didn't properly respect Americans.

At any rate, I enjoyed the book, and at the end felt that I'd really been shown a long look at a confusing, infuriating and fascinating world. I doubt that very much has changed over the past decades. The characters, as I mentioned, are believable, the protagonist someone who maintains our interest and whom we don't mind traveling with as we learn more and more about him. I'm not sure I'll go out of my way to look for any of the other books Tyler/Hamrick wrote, but I'm happy to have learned about his work and to have read this book.… (meer)