Pirate Latitudes, review by David Kamp

Pirate Latitudes, review by David Kamp

DJIBOUTI by Elmore Leonard

279 pp. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99

     What’s up, you might ask, with the Sir David Lean-ish title? For 50 years, Elmore Leonard has specialized in hoodlums who ply their trade in tacky, unexotic locales: guys like Chili Palmer, the Miami loan shark whose moviemaking aspirations take him to ­B-list Hollywood in “Get Shorty” (1990), and Stick Stickley, the Detroit ex-con whose heisting aspirations take him to the gutter-ball precincts of Chili’s Miami in “Stick” (1983).

     Can “Djibouti” really be set in the tiny East African nation that abuts Somalia and the Gulf of Aden? If the past is any precedent, it’s more likely that Leonard is using said nation’s irresistibly suggestive name as the pretext for some leering character’s off-color heinie joke.

     But two paragraphs in, it becomes clear that the African setting is for real. Dara Barr, a documentary filmmaker from New Orleans, touches down in Djibouti in an Air France plane. Dara, too, is a departure from the Leonard norm. She has no criminal past, and the only big score she’s hustling for is a cinematic one: she’s come to the Horn of Africa to make a movie about Somali pirates.

     Though only in her 30s, Dara is an accomplished director with the full complement of her profession’s prestige hardware: a Cannes award for her film about oppressed women in Bosnia, a Sundance trophy for her picture about American white supremacists and an Oscar for her most recent doc, a you-are-there portrait of her hometown as it was swallowed up by Hurricane Katrina.

     Her cameraman and sidekick is a fellow New Orleanian whom she met on the Katrina project, a slender 6-foot-6, 72-year-old black man named Xavier LeBo. Xavier has spent most of his life as a crewman on merchant ships, and thus has both the sailing and life experience to help Dara navigate the region’s choppy waters, literally and figuratively. He also comes equipped with the Leonard penchant for folksy speech that does away with relative pronouns (“Situations can rise up you never been in before”; “Get financin from some rich guy loves you”).

     Dara’s simple goal at the outset is to talk to the pirates, to “get their side, the entire shipping world against them,” as she puts it. But to paraphrase another great documentarian, Marty Di Bergi of “This Is Spinal Tap,” she gets more, a lot more. She makes the acquaintance of a suave pirate, Idris Mohammed, who defies her gritty preconceptions by living extravagantly in a Somali McMansion and a Djibouti bachelor pad while he awaits ransom payments for the ships his men are holding. Not only that, but Idris is also in cahoots with a double-dealing Arab-diplomat type named Harry Bakar, putatively a mediator between the outlaws and the International Maritime Organization.

     On top of that, there’s a fattened Texas oil heir named Billy Wynn prowling the Gulf of Aden in his luxury cruiser, indulging his military fetishism by conducting freelance espionage work with the help of Helene, an auburn-haired fashion model auditioning to be his wife. Billy has his sights trained, as do Idris and Harry, on a huge Somali-hijacked tanker whose highly combustible cargo is liquefied natural gas — and whose crew, before the hijacking, had been infiltrated by two Qaeda operatives.

     In other words, the stage is set for an elaborately interlaced web of cons, crosses, goofs and intrigues; “Djibouti,” for all its travelogue aspects and newsy urgency, is not such a departure from the Leonard template after all. Everyone’s an operator, the overall atmosphere is louche verging on alcoholic (this in a Muslim country, no less) and the principals gab, gab, gab in that meta-conscious, pop-savvy way to which Quentin Tarantino owes such a debt. (Helene reflects that Billy reminds her of Jack D. Ripper, the nutso general played by Sterling Hayden in “Dr. Strangelove”; Xavier, himself a Morgan Freeman character waiting to happen, suggests that Naomi Watts should play Dara in the feature version of their African adventure.)

     Leonard has done this sort of thing dozens of times before, and he still does it well; even in near-equatorial heat, his players keep their hepcat cool. But sometimes “Djibouti” is too cool for its own good, particularly where Dara is concerned. She’s a hard one to figure out. The nature of her curriculum vitae, along with her outdoorsy attractiveness, suggests a pious crusader in the vein of the real-life documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy or the author and Obama policy adviser Samantha Power - someone Leonard might skewer for her earnestness and solemnity, for overly relishing the mouthfeel of the word “Darfur.”

     But Dara, intrepid though she may be, isn’t that kind of do-gooder. She registers no shock, experiences no culture-clash wobbles and evinces no sense of fear about the extraordinarily dangerous circumstances into which she’s been thrust. She provides no counterpoint, no texture; she’s another seen-it-all Leonard wiseacre who mainlines Cognac and speaks in sassy double entendres. (Beggaring our belief, Dara even starts dropping relative pronouns, saying of a particularly prolific terrorist, “I think he’s the kind keeps score.” Come on!)

     Leonard also makes a curious choice to let much of the novel’s first half unfold as a conversation between Dara and Xavier as they review their footage on her laptop: a transparently expository device that occasionally compels them to speak in predigested plot chunklets — as when Xavier says: “Now I shoot Idris changin the channel from Al Jazeera to CNN and we see a container ship flyin the Stars and Stripes. The Maersk Alabama, the first American ship, captain and crew, taken by the Somalis.”

     A result is that the story gets too slack and samey for pages at a time, stalling while the zingers volley back and forth and the waiters bring over another round of drinks. A few years back, Leonard published a slim little stylebook called “Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing,” Rule 10 of which is “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” He’d have done well to heed that one.

     It’s not that Leonard, who turned 85 this month, has lost his mojo. Far from it; he also has a collection just out, Comfort to the Enemy: And Other Carl Webster Stories (Harper, paper, $14.99), that’s as sharp and economical in its storytelling as anything he’s ever done. (The book bundles two recent stories about Carl Webster, the Dust Bowl-era United States marshal who stars in Leonard’s novels “The Hot Kid” and “Up in Honey’s Room,” with a Webster novella that was first serialized in The New York Times Magazine.)

     And once “Djibouti” finally kicks into gear, it becomes a propulsive, bracingly brisk read, almost a different book. The catalyst is the emergence of an American-born Qaeda terrorist named Jama Raisuli, an African-American who converted to Islam in prison, hopped the Atlantic upon his release and has since developed into a top prospect in the bin Laden organization. Like everyone else in Leonardland, Jama is cooler than any counterpart he’d have in real life — he doesn’t do suicide bombings, he says, because “there enough boys can’t wait to go to Paradise” — but he’s as nihilistically evil as a terrorist is supposed to be: a splash of cold water on Dara and company’s floating party.

     It takes some hanging in there, but “Djibouti” winds up being a first-rate Leonard offering, one that will find you pawing your touch-screen reading device in untoward ways to find out what happens next. Just one bit of advice to the author for next time: Get shorter.

David Kamp, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, is the author of “The United States of Arugula.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/books/review/Kamp-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3&pagewanted=print