Rumbled in the jungle

This book is a mess. Simon Mann may have been brought up on John Buchan, educated at Eton and Sandhurst, and taken Conrad and the Iliad with him on his African travels, but his style is appalling — a sort of demotic militarese. Short sharp sentences. Few verbs. Acronyms sprinkled like confetti. The third sentence reads: ‘Rock-crag fingers claw my arse.’

And we skip all over the place, between Angola, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa and Sierra Leone, with flashbacks and fast-forwards and no index. The publisher’s boast that identities would be revealed and the mighty shaken on their thrones turns out to be empty. ‘The Boss’ goes unnamed, as does ‘the Croc’. And other names are changed for— says an apologetic note — ‘legal reasons’.

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James Delingpole

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So the book lacks charm.