Black Water: A Novel

by Louise Doughty

Overview

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book

In Louise Doughty's Black Water, John Harper is in hiding in a remote hut on a tropical island. As he lies awake at night, listening to the rain on the roof, he believes his life may be in danger. But he is less afraid of what is going to happen than of what he’s already done.

In a local town, he meets Rita, a woman with her own tragic history. They begin an affair, but can they offer each other redemption? Or do the ghosts of the past always catch up with us in the end?

Moving across three continents and several decades, Black Water explores some of the darkest events of recent history through the story of one troubled man.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250141026
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	09/12/2017
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	517,197
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

LOUISE DOUGHTY is the author of several novels, including Apple Tree Yard (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG), which was a top-ten bestseller in the U.K. and Ireland and has been published or is being translated into twenty-two languages. It was long-listed for The Guardian's Not the Booker Prize and short-listed for the CWA Steel Dagger Award and the National Book Awards Crime/Thriller of the Year.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

I. Monkey Donkey Owl (1998)
II. Now It Is Clear Who Is Friend and Who Is Foe (1942–65)
III. Black Water (1998)

Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

Doughty’s excellent new novel is a character study, a glimpse at mid-century American civil rights, a thriller, a meditation on the effects of foreign policy on individuals, a modern love story and a portrait of Indonesian unrest in the twentieth century.... If it sounds like a handful, it is. But Doughty has found an ideal vehicle for her wide-ranging interests.” —Olen Steinhauer, The New York Times Book Review

“Doughty’s language is punchy, visually striking and emotionally potent.... This is a compelling and vivid psychological drama, with plenty of bite.” —Leyla Sanai, The Guardian

“Skilfully drawn and compelling...This serious novel marks a departure for Doughty, whose psychological thrillers, including Apple Tree Yard, have been so successful. This one strays more into le Carré territory— where she seems equally at home.” —Carla McKay, Daily Mail

“Powerful, probing fiction in the tradition of Graham Greene and John le Carré.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Doughty takes a page from John le Carré, crafting a riveting, psychological, morally ambiguous tale. . . richly detailed . . . [T]he role of mercenaries in world affairs adds a new perspective to the spy novel genre.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“Through Harper, Doughty creates a jarringly realistic backdrop of Indonesia’s violent past, sharply contrasting the menacing atmosphere with a growing romance and Harper’s memories of a vulnerable childhood in 1950s Los Angeles. A tense, contemplative literary thriller and worthy follow-up to Doughty’s critically acclaimed Apple Tree Yard (2013).” —Booklist

"Doughty has created a novel comparable to Graham Greene’s masterpiece The Quiet American in its taut exploration of morality on a geopolitical and personal scale.... The plot is complex and delves into dark, unjustly forgotten corners of history...as much a character study as it is an espionage thriller.... Black Water is a gripping thriller, incisive character study, a critique of US foreign policy and a love story haunted by the 1965 massacres in Indonesia.” —Shelf Awareness

PRAISE FOR APPLE TREE YARD

“Doughty is a brilliant storyteller who knows how to build the suspense to a breaking point.” —Kate Saunders, The Times (London)

“Doughty writes with consummate pacing and psychological acuity, bringing fresh force to a common regret of adulterous lovers.” —The New Yorker

“A disquieting, perceptive and gripping read.” —Amber Pearson, Daily Mail

“Extraordinary...I’ve never read anything like it.” —Ruth Rendell, The Guardian

From the Publisher

Louise Doughty is one of those rare writers who can infuse a moment of stillness, of waiting, with palpable dread. Her superb 2013 novel Apple Tree Yard, for example, opens at the fatal instant when the narrator, standing trial for murder, is caught out in a series of lies; the moment when "it is all about to tumble." And Black Water sets us down in a tropical forest in 1998, inside the mind of a man waiting for his killers to arrive. If not that night, then soon. "The roof above him creaked, the night insects chirruped and hollered — but there was no rain. One thing he was sure about: they would wait for rain." John Harper should know; he is a professional. Now in his mid-fifties, he has returned from Holland to Indonesia, where his murky career began and where, thirty years later, it is about to end. Is he a spy? A scapegoat? Doughty keeps us guessing, allowing only glimpses of Harper's life to emerge in the pitch-dark night: an ex-wife, an alcoholic mother, a boss in Amsterdam, and the memory of "black water, long strands of hair, clinging like seaweed to his wrist."

The narrative rewinds briefly to1965. In a dank backroom in Jakarta, a man is tortured as Harper looks, on because "his handler at the embassy had told him to win the trust of a filthy gangster who may or may not have good contacts with the military." The scene is a poisonous sliver, expertly inserted. Doughty returns to 1998, to daylight and to Harper's first encounter with Rita, whose love may offer him escape if not redemption, but the novel's dark course is set. It will take us back to Harper's childhood in Indonesia and California, to Holland, where he drifts into his covert career, and to the Far East of the 1960s where Communist insurgencies, military coups and Western-backed dictatorships jostle for supremacy. (And where corporate interests are always paramount.) This shadowy terrain, so familiar from the novels of Graham Greene, John le Carré, and Eric Ambler, is new ground for Doughty, but she makes it her own, creating an enveloping sense of intimacy with the elusive Harper and the treacherous world he inhabits.

"You're not so stupid as to believe . . . that ugly things can't happen in beautiful places," a local agent jokes. "What Abang meant was, you're not white." Harper's mother is Dutch, his father was Dutch/Indonesian; his real name is Nicolaas Den Herder and he is the perfect rootless recruit for The Institute of International Economics, a Dutch intelligence contractor whose major clients are American. "There was a community of shadow men out there," young Harper learns, "around the world, in airports and railway stations — on the streets, hidden in hotel rooms, disguised as ordinary people and indistinguishable to everyone but others of their kind . . . all playing the same game." Ugly things do happen. In 1968 Harper delivers a list of names to the military, for example, and hundreds are tortured and killed. He suffers attacks of panic, then of conscience, and is recalled to a desk job. But one bloodbath stains him irrevocably, the truth behind it emerging only when Harper returns to Jakarta in 1998, this time on an economic assignment. "Thirty years of human rights suppression had brought the foreign investment flooding in," he observes when he lands, "momentarily dazzled by the light striking the silent spin of the glass revolving door that swept him through to an air-conditioned lobby."

Black Water is rich in such details. Whether Doughty is describing "a vast steep wall of misted palm trees" or imagining the condemned "kneeling next to ditches by the sides of the roads with their hands tied behind their backs" each scene materializes with cinematic clarity. At the same time, more is suggested than seen. The air seems to thicken for example, when Harper notes of some dawdling boys, " . . . there was something in their smiles he didn't like," and from the first page the novel's brooding atmosphere feels charged with inchoate danger. Those familiar with Doughty's fiction will not be surprised. Menace has always been a stealthy presence in her novels whether the setting is contemporary London (Whatever You Love, Apple Tree Yard, among others) or Nazi-era Bohemia (Fires in the Dark.) But here malevolence is woven into every strand of an elegantly coiled narrative. And the novel's darkest revelation — perfectly timed and brilliantly understated — binds Harper's past and present together in a deadly, final twist. When Rita protests, "The world is different now," Harper responds, "They thought the world was different then."

Anna Mundow, a longtime contributor to The Irish Times and The Boston Globe, has written for The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, among other publications.

Reviewer: Anna Mundow

The Barnes & Noble Review

07/18/2016
John Harper, the 54-year-old hero of this grim novel from British author Doughty (Apple Tree Yard), remembers being a young man in Jakarta in 1965, providing information and covert work for corporations and various governments. Still haunted by the brutal actions he committed for a Dutch private-intelligence operation, Harper has returned to Jakarta in 1998, convinced that he will be slaughtered as were so many others decades earlier. He cautiously enters an affair with a local woman named Rita, worried that she could be killed because of their association. The ambitious plot moves awkwardly from the Cold War in Europe to the Civil Rights struggle in California and back to Indonesia. Yet the different elements never fully connect, the dense prose reading more like a newspaper investigation than fiction. Although tormented by his immoral choices, Harper elicits little sympathy from the reader, except during flashbacks to his childhood in L.A. Agent: Anthony Harwood, Anthony Harwood Ltd. (U.K.). (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

04/15/2016
Moving from Cold War Europe to civil rights America to civil war Indonesia, CWA Steel Dagger finalist Doughty traces a more literary story of a man hiding on a tropical island from something awful he's done in the past.

Library Journal

★ 2016-06-19
Another morally and emotionally fraught thriller from British writer Doughty (Apple Tree Yard, 2014, etc.), this one about an operative for an Amsterdam-based black-ops organization grappling with fallout from his personal and professional history in Indonesia.As the novel opens in 1998, Harper is taking some involuntary R&R in the hills of Bali after some unspecified "errors of judgment" have made him a liability to his firm, which he's fairly certain will soon send someone to kill him. This disgrace is stirring up unwelcome memories of Harper's equally disastrous 1965 tour in Indonesia, which also happens to be his birthplace. Doughty skillfully develops a mood of menace and regret even as she dangles the possibility of happiness in the form of Rita, a Belgian expatriate Harper picks up in a bar. Casual sex quickly deepens into a tentative relationship, until an inexplicable outburst prompts her to ask gently, "What happened to you?" At this point, the narrative pulls back to explore Harper's difficult youth. He's the mixed-race son of an Indonesian soldier killed by the Japanese and a Dutch woman whose wartime ordeal turned her into an alcoholic. Uprooted over and over by his mother's disordered whims, devastated when she plucks him from his one chance at a stable family life, Harper decides to put his faith in "the power of transience: in motion you could be whoever you wanted to be." He's recruited by "the Institute" and sent to Jakarta in 1965. The chilling account of what he sees and does there exposes the dark origins of Harper's individual guilt and probes the larger question of our collective complicity in the evil legacies of colonialism and the Cold War. Yet the compassionate portrait Doughty paints of a man desperate for the opportunity to experience love and loyalty lends a grace note of hope to the deliberately ambiguous ending.Powerful, probing fiction in the tradition of Graham Greene and John le Carré.

Kirkus Reviews