The Ruler has returned with a nod to Jay-Z

I haven’t written for over a month. In the meantime I finished Sacred Hunger on June 27th and was relieved to have done so. About 130 pages from the end there is a dramatic cut in time. The whites and blacks on the ship end up in a mutiny against the captain. Of course, you don’t get the exact details of what happened until the last twenty pages of the book. Meanwhile, Erasmus Kemp, the son of the merchant in Liverpool inherits his father’s debts after the latter commits suicide. So he can’t marry the girl he’s after. He rebuilds his life, becomes wealthy, falls into a sham marriage and then gets wind of the fact that his dad’s ship didn’t sink, that the crew and the slaves set up this sorta free love commune on the edge of the Florida wilderness.

So he decides to head across the Atlantic, break up the party and see his cousin (the ship's doctor) hanged. All because his cousin picked him out the water when he was little, basically saved him from drowning. Kemp makes it across the ocean in no time. It's like when Russell Crow returns home in Gladiator and goes through about four different ecosystems in a ten second sequence. But then we have to learn all about the commune. Not that it's so bad but they speak in pidgin so it's a little slow going. There are a couple of good scenes. One with Billy and Inchebe where they're out fishing and Inchebe slips while pulling up their boat and hurts his hand. He calls kudala, or witchcraft. Billy calls it chance. But Ichebe has a great line: 'Dat anadder ting about you, Billy, same-same all buckra white man, you say dere no answer mean you have no answer.' It's a nice moment that exemplifies a difference in cultures and I wish there were more of it.

I also wish there was a bigger fight near the end. But there isn't. Overall, the book could have been much shorter. It was certainly good in spots, such as aboard the ship. But it's strange. Kemp doesn't realize his folly until the end and you're like, duh, why did you waste 600 pages getting to this bit of enlightenment. If there are so few likeable, read humanistic, characters then what is the point of the story? That everyone is greedy?

Anyway, I finished it and have now almost finished Nature Noir, a non-fiction book which I'll get to next time. Next week I'm off to the beach so I need to pick wisely. The problem is I'm running out of fiction that I'm really looking forward to reading.