Djibouti

There are books recently where I felt Elmore Leonard was mailing it in. Not so Djibouti. This book has the rich, comic-tragic characters that made Rum Punch, Be Cool and Get Shorty, Maximum Bob, and so many other books a treat to read. As the jacket cover reads, no one is who they appear. No one is good or bad. In other words, the characters, although over the top, are true to life.

Dara Barr and her assistant Xavier go in search of modern day pirates for a documentary. On the way they encounter Idris, a successful pirate with his own justification and moral code. They meet Harry (Ari Ahmed Sheikh Bakar), ostensibly a diplomat helping the west, but with his own shady dealings. Then there's Billy Wynn, imposing his own justice, and his show more girlfriend Helene, trying to hang around for the big payout. Their documentary turns Hollywood, as Leonard points out the folly of the current state of affairs in Djibouti and the Gulf of Aden.

If you've drifted away from Elmore Leonard recently, give this most recent effort a shot. Very entertaining. show less

Dara and Xavier arrive in East Africa to make a documentary about Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. They meet a pirate, a guy who's supposed to be talking pirates out of being pirates, a wealthy Texan with a huge shotgun and a new girlfriend and an American Al Qaeda guy who wants to blow something up. Dara and Xavier talk about films and the film they're making and about stuff that happened. Leonard does that a lot, have the characters tell the story for big chunks. They tell each other what happens, they describe people, they describe the setting and the set-up and the whole damn thing.

Like Cuba Libre, it's an atypical setting for Leonard, but Leonard makes it his own, and the story and the action flow nice and smooth and the cool show more dialogue and the cool characters, gauging each other's levels off cool, comparing everything to movies, thinking what they're going to say, how it'll sound, what it'll look like. Some carry it off, and some do not. in a Leonard book, it's a matter of life and death. show less

“Djibouti” (2010), written by Elmore Leonard when he was in his mid-80s near the end of a long and productive life (he died in 2013), may not be his most compelling novel, yet it is still a marvel. Leonard always carefully researched his novels, and he seems to know Djibouti as well as he knows Detroit, Miami Beach and Hollywood in so many other books. This story is about a documentary filmmaker in Djibouti, and it has the realism of a good documentary film with the pace and tension of a thriller.

Dara Barr plans to make a film about the pirates preying on merchant ships around the Horn of Africa and holding them for huge ransoms. But to get the footage she needs for her film, she must get close to the action and to the pirates show more themselves. Yet the pirates seem almost tame in comparison with some of the other characters in the novel.

There's Harry, for instance, a wealthy American auditioning Helene to become his next wife. His objective, other than Helene, heavy drinking and shooting guns, is to blow up a ship laden with liquified natural gas just to see what happens.

Then there's James Russell, an American who changed his name to Jama Raisuli and became a terrorist because he likes killing people. Now he's out to kill anyone who knows his real name, including Dara. Sometimes he tells people his name just to have an excuse to kill them. And he, too, wants to blow up that ship just for the fun of it.

This is wild stuff, sometimes confusing, told by Leonard in brief and vivid scenes. sort of like the cuts in a film. show less

A curious melange of the plot of a thriller with the delivery of reportage. It is years since I last read a Leonard novel and those that I read were so paced as to suck me in like a venturi. Here the pace has gone as we follow a documentary film maker around the piracy of the Horn of Africa. Leornard's flat clipped dialoge is as tight as ever but there is more distance from the characters. Everything is seen though glass; through the camera's lense. The film maker expresses no judgements of the pirates, terrorists, police, politicians, or playboys that she meets. She simply observes, records, and dithers about her work: is it to be a documentary or notes for a feature film? I imagine that this moral indecision is a conscious stance of show more the author — a refusal to judge complex circumstances — but it alienates the reader from the character and the story; we are observing observers. Once I appreciated that is literary fiction rather than a thriller, I began to appreciate its nuances and I would recommend it to anyone who can accept its agnomic amorality about such controversial subjects. show less

Despite the rusting factories and soup kitchens, Detroit still has one thriving industry, namely crime writer Elmore Leonard. America’s Living National Treasure takes a break from his usual petty hoodlums to have fun with an international terrorism thriller-chaser set in Djibouti. Leonard sends his main characters to the Horn of Africa to film a documentary on the pirates operating from the coast. Events go in unexpected directions when the pirates hijack an LNG tanker for which Al Qaeda has other plans. There are lots of characters, all with motives working at cross-purposes, which keeps the pace thumping along. Most of the folks don’t survive until the end. But 85-year-old Leonard lets the guy over 70 get the girl – probably show more time to invest in your local distributor for Horny Goat Weed. show less

I like Elmore Leonard. He has a way with dialogue and settings that put me right into his story in a way not quite like any other writer. That's why the beginning of this book threw me for a loop. Everything seemed a bit off. Having read previous Leonard books, though, I cut him more slack than I might have for another, and was ultimately rewarded for it.

Djibouti of the title is the setting, along with the Somali coast, where a bright young documentary maker and her assistant plan to make a film about the Somali pirates, the men and their prizes. To tell this story, they meet with pirates, rent a boat and sail for a month amongst the pirate-held ships, and meet a couple of al Quaeda terrorists, in addition to a curious billionaire who show more may not be what he seems.

The movie quest soon stands aside for a threat big enough to rival 9/11, and the plot wraps up in typical Leonard fashion.

My problem, interestingly enough, had much to do with the way the dialogue was handled, a sort of broken patois, confusing at times. A fair part of the story was told in retrospect, switching from watching footage of an event to the event itself, and it was a bit jarring for me at times. Still, while I wouldn't call this one of Leonard's best, by far, it turned into an enjoyable read. show less

"Djibouti" has its pleasures and its oddities. The book has a full, or full-enough, quotient of Leonard's strengths: colorful characters; a tale of people of all stripes on the make, in one way or the other; catchy, rhythmic colloquial dialogue; a strong sense of place.

The plot isn't terribly gripping; even when it kicks into gear in the second half, there is a lazy sense of Sunday afternoon torpor to the whole thing, which seems sort of odd given that it is set among pirates, terrorists, amateur intelligence agents, and documentary filmmakers in the horn of Africa. But much of the torpor is due to the decision to narrate a great deal of the book as dialogue, usually between two people, in retrospect, about things that have just show more happened -- casting much of the book as awkward exposition between people who both know what already happened. Sometimes literally, and sometimes figuratively, the book is situated as two people reviewing raw footage they've just shot, deciding what movie to make out of it. I think it is an interesting conceit, but not interesting enough to make up for the problems it introduces.

That said, I found the book pleasant enough. I would not start here, if I didn't know Leonard, but if I were advising someone who is a fan of late Leonard, I'd say, "go ahead." Sitting back afterwards, there is much that is amusing about it, and the greatest accomplishment of the book, in my opinion, is that it convinces me that Djibouti probably really is populated with the same set of half-competant hucksters, swindlers and bad guys familiar from Leonard's American cities. show less