Customer Reviews

The Prince of Bagram Prison

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Alex Carr's "The Prince of Bagram Prison" is a disquieting look at the shadowy world of CIA informants and their handlers. As the novel opens, a woman is about to have her baby under wretched conditions in a prison infirmary. Next, we segue to Madrid, where a CIA agent arranges a clandestine meeting with a jittery young man named Jamal. Although the boy dreams of going to America, his wishes are beside the point. The men who hold his fate in their hands have their own agenda, and Jamal's happiness is the least of their concerns. Another key player is Katherine Caldwell, a teacher of Arabic at a military college in Virginia. When she was an army interrogator posted in Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, Kat took pity on Jamal who was being detained there. After Jamal was sent to Madrid, Kat never expected to see him again. However, the two are brought together under very different circumstances when they find themselves on the run from a group of villainous individuals.

The author's strengths are her vivid descriptive writing and skillful portrayal of character. Carr delineates every scene beautifully, whether she is portraying a fetid and impoverished Moroccan slum, a busy and colorful street in multi-ethnic Brick Lane, a crowded and dank prison in Afghanistan, or a chaotic American base in South Vietnam before the American pullout. The cast is intriguing: Kat and Jamal are smart and spunky, but they are both victims of forces beyond their control; Harry Comfort, is, as his name implies, a compassionate and warm-hearted man who has a proprietary interest in Jamal; Dick Morrow heads a team of operatives whose mission it is to locate Jamal and find out what he knows about the whereabouts of a terrorist named Hamid Bagheri; Susan is the alluring woman whom both Harry and Dick love. Adding to the intrigue are the deaths of key witnesses who were about to testify in a trial involving the alleged murder of a detainee in Afghanistan in 2002; Manar Yassine is a former revolutionary living in Morocco whose deep well of sadness stems from the terrible losses that she has suffered living under a brutal dictatorship.

Readers who prefer a linear narrative may be put off by the novel's confusing framework. The author's dizzying itinerary includes Virginia, Spain, Morocco, Hawaii, and Vietnam, and she frequently travels back and forth in time. Moreover, although some threads are tied up satisfyingly, other aspects of the story remain ambiguous. I admire Alex Carr's sense of time and place and her powerful assessment of both the clash of civilizations and the rampant corruption and immorality that make our world so unstable and perilous. However, "The Prince of Bagram Prison" would have had an even greater impact had Carr fleshed out and organized her narrative more coherently.

This novel begins with loss. One of the "disappeared", Manar Yassini, imprisoned during the brutal reign of Morocco's Hassan II (1961-1991), was an activist working on behalf of the student dissidents until her arrest. After her child is born, Manar is incarcerated for years in the tiny, coffin-like cells of a prison far-removed from the prying eyes of humanitarian organizations. His mother "buried" with hundreds of other prisoners, Manar's son is delivered to an infamous orphanage, where he faces an existence of abject poverty, surviving only through his own cunning. Years later, Jamal is swept up in a raid and delivered for interrogation to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, where assorted military agencies question captives post 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At fifteen, Jamal is too young to keep in the system, although his companions are of great interest to the interrogators. Placed in Madrid by the CIA, Jamal is tasked with reporting actionable information he picks up on the streets.

Then something goes wrong. Although Jamal has no idea why his circumstances have suddenly changed, he instinctively flees Madrid; having supplied only lies to his handler, Jamal is ignorant of the chain reaction unleashed when he tosses out the name of a particular person of interest. Forced into hiding, Jamal commits to the only action available- something he never thought to do again- returning to the place of his birth. Meanwhile, reserve Arab language specialist Katherine Caldwell receives orders to return to the region. It was Kat who first questioned Jamal in Bagram, where he was affectionately named the Prince of Bagram Prison. Believing she may be responsible for Jamal's current situation, Kat hopes to intervene on the boy's behalf, all the more necessary when she realizes the disparate agency forces converging to address what Jamal might know and the need to silence him. In the agency's world, this is a death sentence.

From Virginia to Hawaii and to the dark, beating heart of Morocco, where Hassan's years of repression still cast a nightmarish pall of violence and its repercussions, old agency operatives move inexorably toward one another, bitter resentments meant for final settlement. Harry Comfort, Jamal's original contact in Madrid, now retired to Hawaii, receives a desperate call for help in the middle of the night; meanwhile, Kat moves toward the resolution of conflicts that have plagued her since 9/11. This is a world of compromise and deceit, where a mother aches for the son who was taken from her at birth, where all of life is rendered insignificant in the face of poverty, a world sometimes brutal, often heartbreakingly beautiful, humanity reduced to the odd moments of grace as history grinds on. Luan Gaines/ 2008.

Jamal, a 15 year old detainee at Bagram, agrees to inform for the CIA and is relocated to Spain, where his handler, Harry Comfort, is close to retirement. Harry's successor pushes Jamal for information and Jamal responds by inventing a story about seeing a man from Bagram in Madrid. This sets off a flurry of killings. Jamal's Army interrogator, Kat, is sent to Casablanca with an ex-CIA chief to find Jamal after he disappears. The CIA wants to kill Jamal and Kat doesn't want that to happen. There's a whole lot more going on, involving a dead detainee and a coverup of nefarious American shenanigans, but describing it here would risk spoiling the surprises.

Although this is an intelligent, crisply written thriller that creates a strong sense of place, the motivations for the various actions taken by the characters aren't always clear and the plot at times gets a bit muddled. Kat is a reasonably full character but most of the others (particularly the males) are stock military/spook types. A romantic entanglement felt out of place, like it had been added to move the plot along--it didn't feel real. The facts that are being covered up seemed a little far-fetched to me, and the ending seemed contrived. In short, I liked the writing style more than the story or the characters. I'm encouraged to try her other novels (the author, Jenny Siler, wrote this one under a pen name). I'd give this novel 3 1/2 stars, edging toward 4 -- a worthy effort that comes close to succeeding as a solid novel, but doesn't quite get there.

Carr manages to jump around from the war in Viet Nam to the U.S. departure from there, to the early days of the action against the Taliban in Afganistan, to treatment of prisoners, mistreatment of prisoners and murders of British intelligence personnel. Fewer, more developed characters might be an improvement. Why include a map of Madrid and another of Casablanca?

There is some exposure to the workings of a Muslim family within a repressive Islamic government, but most of the book revolves around a young man, Jamal - now 19 - and the pursuit of him by western operatives. Kat, the Arabic speaking American who befriends Jamal, shares an insight about Islamic custom requiring the covering of women. "She felt not defeat but relief. There was, she realized, an unexpected power of anonymity, a freedom that came with the camouflage of the veil ..." Certainly not the main focus of the book, but interesting.

Because she speaks Arabic, US Army Intelligent Agent reservist Kat Caldwell was deployed as an interrogator at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. When she met Moroccan teenager Jamal, she quickly realized he was not a terrorist; just a person in the wrong place at the wrong time during an allied sweep led by the British Special Forces. She gains his trust, but her tour ends and she returns to teaching Arabic in Virginia.

Three years later, retired CIA Chief Dick Morrow has Kat reactivated. Her assignment is to find eighteen years old Jamal, who had been an informer since he met Kat, but vanished in Spain after contacting his handler Harry Comfort that he saw terrorist Hamid Bagheri. The CIA sends a team to retrieve Jamal while Morrow thinks he went home and Kat is the best bet to safely bring him back as the lad trusts her. Kat flies to Madrid but quickly realizes that she is CIA bait. If she finds him in the slums of Casablanca where she thinks he is hiding, she will inadvertently betray him as those on her side of the war on terrorism will kill the teen to cover up the torturous truth Jamal could expose.

THE PRINCE OF BAGRAM PRISON is an excellent espionage thriller that seamlessly shifts between the present and three years ago, and several points of view. Readers will be hooked especially when Kat begins to realize she is being used to lure Jamal to his death; thus the heroine struggles between loyalty to her country and the military, but also knows the Army values include honor. Alex Carr provides genre fans with a great tale starring a stunned heroine, a frightened teen, and an adversary prepared to kill both of them. Newcomers will seek Ms. Carr's previous work (see AN ACCIDENTAL AMERICAN).

Harriet Klausner