Acts of Faith
by Philip Caputo
Knopf, May 2005
688 pp.
Fiction - War; Fiction - Historical
Rights sold to:
Germany - Pendo
Thirty years ago, Pulitzer Prize—winning author and journalist Philip Caputo crossed the deserts of Sudan and Eritrea on foot and camelback, a journey that inspired his first novel, Horn of Africa, and awakened a lifelong fascination with Africa. His travels have since taken him back to Sudan, as well as to Kenya, Somalia, and Tanzania, and from those experiences he has fashioned Acts of Faith, his most ambitious novel. A stunning and timely epic, it tells the stories of pilots, aid workers, missionaries, and renegades struggling to relieve the misery wrought by the civil war in Sudan.
The hearts of these men and women are in the right place, but as they plunge into a well of moral corruption for which they are ill-prepared, their hidden flaws conspire with circumstances to turn their strengths–bravery, compassion, daring, and empathy–into weaknesses. In pursuit of noble ends, they make ethical compromises; their altruism curdles into self-righteous zealotry and greed, entangling them in a web of conspiracies that leads, finally, to murder. A few, however, escape the moral trap and find redemption in the discovery that firm convictions can blind the best-intentioned man or woman to the difference between right and wrong.
Douglas Braithwaite, an American aviator who flies food and medicine to Sudan’s ravaged south, is torn between his altruism and powerful personal ambitions. His partners are Fitzhugh Martin, a multiracial Kenyan who sees Sudan as a cause that can give purpose to his directionless life, and Wesley Dare, a hard-bitten bush pilot who is not as cynical as he thinks he is and sacrifices all for the woman he loves.
They are joined by two strong women: Quinette Hardin, an evangelical Christian from Iowa who liberates slaves captured by Arab raiders and who falls in love with a Sudanese rebel; and Diana Briggs, the daughter of a family with colonial roots in Africa, who believes that her love for her adopted continent might be enough to save it.
Pitted against them is Ibrahim Idris ibn Nur-el-Din, a fierce Arab warlord whose obsessive quest for an escaped concubine undermines his faith in the holy war he is waging against Sudan’s southern blacks.
In a harsh yet alluring landscape, these and other vividly realized characters act out a drama of modern-day Africa. Grounded in the reality of today’s headlines, Acts of Faith is a captivating novel of human complexity that combines seriousness with all the seductive pleasure of a masterly thriller.
Quotes and Reviews:
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Caputo’s ambitious adventure novel, set against a backdrop of the Sudanese wars, makes for a dense, riveting update on Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. The American in this case is Douglas Braithwaite, a "mercenary with a conscience" who founds Knight Air, a charter airline that conveys relief supplies from NGOs to war-torn southern Sudan. Braithwaite launches his service by flying aid to the Nuba, a region in the northern Sudanese sphere of influence that is a no-go zone for U.N.-sponsored airlines. He hires Fitzhugh Martin, a former soccer star and mixed-race Kenyan from the Seychelles Islands, as his operations manager, and soon teams up with Texan bush pilot Wes Dare as well as a shady Somali financier. From Fitzhugh’s perspective, we see corruption ensue from Douglas’s decision to expand his air service—crushing his competitor, Tara Whitcomb, in the process—and to smuggle arms to Michael Goraende, the Nuban militia head. Douglas’s support for the Nuban commander also brings Quinette Hardin, a Christian aid worker from Iowa who marries Goreande, into Knight Air’s orbit. Caputo presents a sharply observed, sweeping portrait, capturing the incestuous world of the aid groups, Sudan’s multiethnic mix and the decayed milieu of Kenyan society. Though this long atmospheric novel offers a very slow build and doesn’t always avoid formula, the understated climax that leads to Knight Air’s demise is powerful in its impact.
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From Booklist
Few people give to charity without expecting something in return, whether it’s a tax break, publicity, ego gratification, or even cold cash. And in Africa, the chances to gain by giving are like those nowhere else. Reporter, novelist, and nonfiction writer Caputo (The Ghosts of Tsavo, 2002) sets this fascinating tale of aid workers against Sudan’s civil war, where the Muslim government in the north fights the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) for control of the Christian and animist south. The Kenyan town of Lokichokio, just over the border, serves as a staging area for relief organizations sending aid to the war zone. Quinette Hardin’s WorldWide Christian Union tries to save souls by buying slaves back from their Muslim captors. Douglas Braithwaite’s Knight Air takes risks the UN will not, defying Khartoum’s "no go" zones to fly aid into the rebel-controlled Nuba Mountains. But Quinette wants more than to love--she wants to be loved. And Braithwaite wants more than two planes--he wants a fleet. Quinette marries an SPLA commander, and Braithwaite starts running guns, their rationalizations setting a series of extremely bloody events into motion. When those who give want so much, it gives us a powerful lens with which to view the heartbreaking problems of Africa, where temporary relief has become a permanent industry. This is a big novel, old fashioned in the best way, full of intrigue and a large cast of sharply drawn characters. And with a Sudan cease-fire recently in the news, it couldn’t be timelier. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
“Philip Caputo, from Vietnam onwards, has understood the hardest truths of the modern world better than almost anybody. Acts of Faith is a stunningly unflinching novel. On the surface it is set in Africa, but in fact its true landscape is the ravaged soul of the twenty-first century. Philip Caputo is one of the few absolutely essential writers at work today.” –Robert Olen Butler
“In Acts of Faith Philip Caputo has fashioned a gripping cast of characters and placed them in a spellbinding story. You can’t get any better than that.” –Winston Groom
“Caputo’s ambitious adventure novel, set against a backdrop of the Sudanese wars, makes for a dense, riveting update on Graham Greene’s The Quiet American . . . Caputo presents a sharply observed, sweeping portrait, capturing the incestuous world of the aid groups, Sudan’s multiethnic mix, and the decayed milieu of Kenyan society.” –Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Acts of Faith offers an image of Africa deserving comparison with Conrad, Hemingway, Peter Matthiessen, and Jan de Hartog’s forgotten near-masterpiece The Spiral Road.” –Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Philip Caputo is a splendid, muscular story teller who possesses the crucial power to make endearing ordinary men from diverse fragilities and stubborness.” —Gloria Emerson, Los Angeles Times
“For the past twenty years, Caputo has written parables of hubris upbraided, populated by outsiders whose defects lead them into trouble as unerringly as does fate.” —David Haward Bain, New York Times Book Review
“Caputo lets no one and nothing off the hook.” —Richard Bausch, Washington Post Book World
“Caputo takes on most of the hot-button issues of our time–racism, random violence, disempowerment, the decay of social fabric, even the nature of evil itself–and more than lives to tell the tale.” —Roget L. Simon, Los Angeles Times
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http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/booksmags/chi-0505200424may22,1,1838439.story?coll=chi-leisurebooks-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true
Philip Caputo’s vibrant tale of war in Africa
By Art Winslow. Art Winslow, former literary and executive editor of The Nation, is writer-in-residence at Western Michigan University this spring
Published May 22, 2005
Acts of Faith
By Philip Caputo
Knopf, 669 pages, $26.95
Yes, the snows of Kilimanjaro appear in Philip Caputo’s new Africa novel, "Acts of Faith." He points to them glancingly more than once, most prominently at the novel’s end, and not only alludes to Ernest Hemingway’s famous story elliptically but invokes its author directly elsewhere.
Lest we miss the hints, understand that Caputo has resurrected not the story but an echo of its forlorn circumstances and cynicism in "Acts of Faith." The tale he has to tell is every bit as gangrenous as Hemingway’s, also, with many of his characters festering under the weight of their own idealism as personal and political terrains shift. The hyenas, literal and figurative, make an appearance too.
"Acts of Faith" is set in Kenya and Sudan, on the frontier and across the lines of the civil war that has been raging in Sudan so long that one of Caputo’s characters, a German doctor, asks of another, " ’Do you suppose that it is an event, with a discrete beginning that will proceed to a discrete middle und so weiter on to a discrete end? No! It is a condition of life.’ "
With the war, then, as backdrop and foreground (it varies by character), what Caputo lays out is a testing of ideals in various forms. We are warned at the outset--as we are again at the end of "Acts of Faith"--that in Africa there is God in the devil and the devil in God, "a majestic duality who offers neither judgment nor mercy, neither reward for virtue nor penalty for sin."
The clash of religions, Islam and Christianity, plays out at the individual level and in the larger social and military context as well. The defrocked Roman Catholic priest who runs one of the primary relief organizations, International People’s Aid, is among those Westerners who "thought the war was an extension of the Crusades." And the government in Khartoum, with the National Islamic Front in power, is waging a quasi-religious war employing Arab militias against rebellious tribes in the south, whose blackness makes it also a race-based war of ethnic cleansing. (Reporting out of Sudan in recent months has centered on the western Darfur region, where the Arab militias are called janjaweed; Caputo’s account arises from a more-southerly region, the Nuba Mountains, where the marauding Arab fighters are known as murahaleen and war against the Dinka.)
Many of the characters in "Acts of Faith" are disaffected Americans who seem to represent a kind of global affliction, or at least one that gravitates to the world’s trouble spots, full of naivete and know-it-allism at the same time. Some are mesmerized by Africa, others are out to proselytize their faith, a few are there simply to make a buck flying relief aid and personnel for UN agencies and non-governmental organizations, or NGOs. The first major character we meet, Fitzhugh Martin, calls his former UN employers the "High Commissioners of World Largesse" and sees them and the gaggle of NGOs as conducting the "recolonization of Africa by the imperialism of good intentions."
The juxtaposition of worlds is stark, and vibrantly detailed by Caputo. The "mob of ambitious bureaucrats" who staff the UN and NGO offices at the outpost at Lokichokio, on the barren, northwest Kenyan plains just south of Sudan, "drove around like conquerors in white Land Rovers sprouting tall radio antennae; they lived and worked in tidy blue and white bungalows, drank their gins and cold beers at bars that looked like beach resort tiki bars, and ate imported meats washed down with imported wines." For rest and relaxation they’d flee to Europe or rent villas outside Nairobi, and Martin "grew to loathe them as much as he loathed the old-time imperialists who had pillaged Africa in the name of the white man’s burden and the mission civilisatrice."
Caputo shuttles us between the center and the periphery of the war, as if we were the ones being transported by the assortment of bush pilots who ferry in relief supplies, and eventually weapons, to the beleaguered southern tribes of Sudan. His writing wavers between the sort of combat reportage we saw in his penetrating memoir of fighting in Vietnam, "A Rumor of War," and a fictional skewing of news reports from real-life Sudan.
While Caputo’s characters are creations, their motivations are usually complicated enough that in its specifics "Acts of Faith" reads like first-hand observation. Occasionally, his characters and events do exude a sense of emotional and situational cliche, but mostly that occurs when Caputo pairs them romantically. Partly, too, that seems an unintended consequence of the scope of the book, which attempts to be panoramic and mostly succeeds.
Because Caputo is a former foreign correspondent (for the Chicago Tribune), he is also sensitively attuned to the political influences on reporting. This allows him to give us a sharp account of how the various groups--the rebels, the Khartoum government, the missionaries and NGOs--try to manipulate news coming out of the war zone, using access and potential stories as bait, and how the media in turn operate on motives of their own.
Phyllis Rappaport, the Nairobi bureau chief of CNN, is a straight-shooting reporter, something of an exception with her highly developed sense of ethics, and her inquiries figure heavily in Caputo’s plot. If a single character could be said to be Caputo’s mouthpiece, she’s it. At one point, in conversation with Quinette Hardin, a religiously motivated Iowan who is in Africa to redeem (buy back) captives from the Arab raiders, she elucidates the focal point of "Acts of Faith":
" ’[Y]ou know how it is with true believers,’ " Rappaport tells Hardin.
" ’No. How is it?’ "
" ’Their belief gets in the way of their brains. . . . Belief is a virus, and once it gets into you, its first order of business is to . . . keep you from having any doubts, and the way it keeps you from doubting is to blind you to the way things really are.’ "
This motif crops up in various guises, tending to pit the committed against the self-interested, and also calling into question which is which. Wesley Dare, partner in a small airline that ferries supplies and then, inexorably and secretly, weapons from Kenya into Sudan, represents the opposite polarity of Hardin:
"The past twenty-five years had taught him that it wasn’t avarice that filled the public squares with corpses; it wasn’t envy that pulled the triggers of the world’s firing squads, nor lust that set the timers to the terrorist’s bombs; it was faith in some particular creed, sect, ideology, cause, or crusade. Having seen what true believers are capable of, Wesley Dare had turned disbelief into a kind of belief in itself."
Dare is out for himself, but the driving forces behind his partner in Knight Air Services, Douglas Braithwaite, are constantly in question. Dare sees Braithwaite as a " ’true believer and a smart businessman at the same time,’ " which is " ’double trouble.’ " Braithwaite tells a competing pilot, " ’Sometimes neutrality is just another word for cowardice.’ " He talks Martin into joining the partnership " ’flying on the dark side’ " (blockade-running) by saying, " ’It’s a place where a few people can make a big difference.’ " Martin thinks the plan has "the quality of a behind-enemy-lines operation that seemed to call for commandos, not a cargo pilot and an aid worker with a bum knee," but joins anyway.
Knight Air begins surreptitiously running supplies and personnel into a no-fly zone without Khartoum’s permission. The pilots start out carrying humanitarian aid and members of foreign, religious-based groups bent on releasing captives but end up ferrying military supplies to the rebels, under shell companies with names like Busy Beaver Airways, convinced that, "Humanitarian aid was no longer the solution to humanitarian problems."
Accidentally but perhaps inevitably, the Knight Air staffers become combatants themselves. Making one delivery to the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, Braithwaite and Martin are nearly trapped in an attack by government forces. Taking to the air, Braithwaite calls down directions for the rebels’ mortars and thus directs the fire. Braithwaite is far from blind to the moment of the moment. " ’We’re in it, my man,’ " he tells Martin, " ’We are in the goddamned war!’ "
This slide from noncombatant to combatant is typical of many of Caputo’s twists in "Acts of Faith," in which almost any categorization contains the seeds of its opposite. The altruistic ideas in providing relief give way to publicitymongering among some of the slave redeemers, for example, despite evidence that many of the victims may not be authentic. Knight Air, in its lust to grow commercially, takes on a Somalian investor who demands changes and remarks, " ’The Sudan market is saturated.’ " When Martin replies that he’d never thought of Sudan as a market, he’s told, " ’You should change your thinking.’ "
On the religious side, the ultra-Christian Hardin goes fully native and does decidedly unChristian things, all the while convinced that "Jesus was still her friend." And from the Arabs, one of the leaders of the murahaleen, Ibrahim Idris, is refreshingly out of accord with Western expectations, less a fanatic than a traditional cattle herder who is also a devout Muslim. He "thought the desire for martyrdom, which the government and the mullahs were drumming into the heads of so many young men, was mistaken."
Caputo serves up an amusing scene in which Idris tries to shake a nephew out of his martyr complex. Riding toward a raid, Idris mentions that the young man also seeks cattle for a bridal payment. " ’My question is, how will you seize these cattle if you’re martyred? How will you marry Nunayi if you’re dead?’ " His nephew responds, " ’Martyrdom is my chief desire, but if God wills it not to be so, my next desire is to capture some cattle and marry her.’ "
This isn’t Caputo’s first foray into Africa or the Muslim world, which figured in his novel "Horn of Africa," set in Ethiopia. If clash-of-civilizations arguments and meager reporting out of Africa leave you feeling a bit starved of the real story, you might enjoy the sense of topsy-turvy reality in this fictional account. A rebel leader, knowingly resorting to terrorism, explains, " ’War is cruelty, you cannot refine it.’ " The battle scenes and their aftermaths are compelling in detail (the hum of a falling bomb comes from its tail rotor, by the way), but so are the everyday observations, the Lokichokio base’s Hotel California and Dogpatch, the white prostheses on black people, and murahaleen amulets that are supposed to be the keys to paradise in the event of martyrdom but read, in English, "Khartoum Intercontinental." As Martin thinks near the end of "Acts of Faith," "In Sudan, no matter what you did in the name of right, wrong inevitably resulted."
About the author:
Philip Caputo worked nine years for the Chicago Tribune and shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his reporting on election fraud in Chicago. He is the author of six other works of fiction and two memoirs, including A Rumor of War, about his service in Vietnam. He divides his time between Connecticut and Arizona.
Author photo by Rollie McKenna