The Moonlit Earth [Paperback]

Is Rice his own personal anagram Eric? But apart from this enigma the book is a thriller that deals with very serious questions.

First Saudi Arabia, a dictatorial kingdom that imposes such a strict sharia within its borders that the rich are the only ones who can get out and do what is forbidden to everyone else. One of the rare countries in the world that still beheads criminals with a steel saber. This rich country attracts many greedy profiteers. It is difficult to enter the narrow circles of the dominant aristocratic families and princes of all sorts. Those who try to do it are under strict surveillance by one family to which they are associated directly. The description of these greedy wolves is not complete. The main one is never seen or met, and will not be met since he is assassinated at the end.

Then these global American entrepreneurs are ready to do anything to make money, including set up a private security firm that will provide some countries like Thailand with an anti-Islamic militia: the people recruited in this militia are essentially run-away from the Vietnam war, Iraq and Afghanistan wars who want to continue the war against communists and fundamentalist Moslems, and the Islamists in Thailand are a perfect target. These people are shown a little bit too much soaked in whisky: this is a myth in many ways. These people are professionals with a heavy past but alcohol is not their main problem, far from it. Their main and sole problem is the way they see the world cut in white and black, everything that is not on their side is black and since you don't see any shade of grey, you just use a machine gun or a nuclear device and you shoot in the black mass. I chose the color because they are the direct heirs of all the racist movements that flourished in the USA through their history. And for them black is both Moslem and Arab.

That's the main deficiency of the book: the exploration of the psyche of these Western terrorists at times used by the US government and always over-used by the CIA.

But the novel becomes fascinating when it explores the psyche of the main character, Cameron, and his sister, Megan. Megan is a fighter and that's all she is, but Cameron is gay and that's just the beginning. Being a steward in an air-travel company, on luxury planes hired by the rich, in that case Saudis, to travel at their leisure beyond the borders of Saudi Arabia, he is often solicited for special services and he has to learn how to say no without impairing his chances to get the just profit he deserves for his patience.

In this case he is twinned to a young teenager hardly a twink from one Saudi family who is gay and is favored by his own father into some luxurious exile on a yacht. The kid thinks he can buy anything and Cameron is out to teach him a friendly lesson that may cost him his own life. You don't play with these people: too young to have any sense of mature human relationships and of course mature sex. If you let yourself be dragged into their cocoon of money, luxury and perversion you will end up in small pieces. So Cameron will have to learn his lesson too.

But Rice misses something at that level. He sketches another possible dimension and yet does not explore it. Those kids are not rotten to the core. Their rot is nothing but a covering thrown over their nude suffering by their families. Their nudity is their solitude. Of course they can buy a whore in the street and have her, him or it (the object of that transaction) into slices if he wants, but deep inside it is absolute solitude. The core and the heart are shouting for love, friendship and human contact. This level is just set on the paper as a rough sketch. It could have been so much more, it should have been so much more.

A young man like that takes both time and a shock to shift from the money he was before to the heart he may become, but when he becomes that heart, and that can happen as a complete instantaneous split between A and B, he falls in love with the object who becomes the real person of this desire that has shifted from pure carnality to absolute spirituality. But what's more when this transformation happens, the person who causes it is even the first one to be transformed because then he falls in love with that miraculous epiphany. He can't avoid it, resist it. If he steps away it will be in mourning and with a tremendous sense of loss. In other words Cameron could be so much better.

The final point will be about the storytelling technique. A person telling a story of what happened to him or her in the third person without a first person is surprising and bizarre. The first tale that seems to be from the point of view of Majed is artificial when it comes since the main observer, Megan, has not even yet met Majed. The story from the young Prince, Aabid, is in many ways artificial because of that third person storyteller and because the feelings and the emotions of that young man who is telling the story are hardly really described in the total rift they bring in his life: for the first time he discovers love as separated from sex, a revolution for that young man who had a pile of greenbacks in place of the heart. He discovers love and finally feels his heart beating.

But the thriller per se is quite easy to read and enjoy.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID