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Red over Blue
A mystery thriller, and love story of hallucinogenic, mind-blowing intensity set in post-colonial Africa.
Sudan in the turbulent months before President Nimeiri, stooge of the West, was overthrown by his own people; a time when the CIA could still, under pretext of containing communism, move in and act out the American government’s neo-colonial fantasies; a time when the US believed ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ and played footsie with Muslim extremists like Osama bin Laden.
Against this background causing increasing civil unrest and impending famine, London film director Charlie Moon arrives in Dawawa, a city on the Blue Nile, central Sudan, having heard that his missing friend, the actor David Lawton, has been seen there. What he finds is David’s body in the mortuary and a set of photographs which seemingly link him to a beautiful Sudanese girl. Believing the girl might hold the key to the mystery as to how and why David died, Charlie resolves to find her and uncover the truth.
When Charlie gains access to the journal David kept of his life in Sudan, a story unfolds of a passionate love affair between David and the Muslim girl, Sadia; a dangerous forbidden love defying all the laws and taboos of Sudanese society. The journals also reveal that both Sadie and David had become enmeshed in the religious and political conflict threatening to tear the country apart. As Charlie, like David before him, finds himself falling under the spell of Sudan and its people, he too becomes involved in the struggle to bring the country back from the brink of civil war.
Erotic, violent, passionate, profound, Red over Blue lifts the lid to reveal a world of strong emotions where the three great subjects of politics, religion, and love, intertwist.
‘Breathtaking magnificence. Like the river Nile itself, where most of the story is set, “Red over Blue” awes and spellbinds us with its vast scope, its twists and turns, the sense, every inch the journey gives, of its gradually accumulating, massive power. “Red over Blue” is, moreover, a hugely entertaining and intensely moving human experience. A towering achievement: here at last is the long-awaited, “Great British Novel”.’
Red over Blue is a magnificent tale that is operatic in its range and depth of emotion. A complex tale of psychological realism, terror and courage, passion and temptation, greed, deceit, obsession, repression, transgression, dark perversion, sensual gorgeousness, breathtaking beauty and cruelty, filth and lust; religious and political intrigue, possible murder, tragedy, punishment, suffering, sacrifice, and redemption.
Volunteer English teachers in Britain’s former colony Sudan…in the surreal heat of the Sahara desert, against a background of the river Nile, roach-infested hotels, boredom, brothels, dirt, dust, booze and drugs, three raw recruits meet in the capital, Khartoum. Killing time awaiting their postings, they mingle their destinies. One of them, sleazoid film director Charlie Moon, has a secret he’s too scared to share: his real reason for coming to Africa’s largest country is to solve the mystery of his friend David Lawton’s disappearance and death. He’d discovered Lawton’s diary scribbled in a dozen school exercise books at Heartbreak Hotel, the house in the desert where David lived, then they were stolen before he could read them. He’d also removed a film from the dead man’s camera and got it processed.
Who is the hauntingly beautiful Sudanese Muslim girl in the photographs? What is her connection with David? Was it because of her Lawton was murdered? With the civil war and famine closing in, Charlie tried to learn the language, and get to grips with the cultural, social, racial, political and religious forces that control life in Sudan in order to set about his enquiries. At first he is met with silence, evasion, contradiction, ambiguity, violence, lies…then with his recovery of David’s diaries, Red over Blue takes on a new and tragic dimension as it becomes a story about espionage, forbidden love and its brutal consequences.
It’s told with unflinching honesty, at times not sparing readers the lurid details. Red over Blue therefore, is not for the squeamish or narrow-minded. For the rest it will be compulsive reading.