I really want to love this book, but I find it hard to. I suppose I like it, but that's all. Here's why:
I absolutely love the whole 1960s/70s African merc era. Every piece of information I can get about it, I devour. I have plenty of non-fiction books about Rhodesia, South Africa, the Congo, and so on. I love The Wild Geese, I've seen Africa Addio. A friend lent me a copy of his DVD of the Dogs of War and I eagerly watched it and had a good time.
Anyways, while that movie isn't an all time classic, this book isn't any better. (Spoilers incoming!)
It starts off great (the mercenaries are escaping doom after losing a war) but then quickly gets bogged down with a description of a man surveying a mountain in Africa. It stays there. Unfortunately, the book never quite picks up until the last few pages. There are a few bits of excitement in between, but it was mostly slogging through details that, while interesting, don't really make for page turners.
About 80% of the novel is spent going from London to Paris to Belgium then to Germany then to Switzerland and back to London. Characters call characters and then hang up to call other characters. End User Agreements. Forgeries. Deposits. Withdrawals. Travelers checks, Swiss bank accounts. See how that's exhausting? The novel is basically all logistics. I felt as tired as Shannon did!
It's certainly interesting. I had no idea what a shell company was, and now I know how to smuggle champagne in between Belgium and France. But it's not very fun.
The final attack takes up the last 30 or so pages of a book that is 436 pages. It's not justified either... the attack wasn't jaw dropping or incredible. It was a little anticlimactic. One merc just gets unlucky and catches a bullet, while another falls victim to friendly fire. I liked when Shannon came out in support of a different ruler to Endean's face, but everything else felt a little weak about the ending and the "where are they now epilogue."
It's fascinating to learn about all the details of the mercenary world. Forsyth did a lot of research for this, and was in the middle of some African civil wars. He may or may not have even been involved with an actual coup!
Ultimately, it would have been better if something went wrong for the gang on the way, or if there was more depictions of combat (maybe flashbacks in the form of the mercs telling stories at the bar) or if the actual attack was longer. It's okay, not great. While I personally enjoyed the descriptions of smuggling (to a point) it definitely gets tedious. I probably wouldn't recommend it to friends, because I know they don't have the attention spans needed for the book.
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Lettore appassionato
Ancora un bel romanzo, nonostante gli anni
Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on December 16, 2015
