The Ibis Tapestry

by Mike Nicol

Overview

When a dead man's laptop computer is mysteriously delivered to Robert Poley, he abandons work on his latest "airport" thriller to investigate the murder of the computer's previous owner, Christo Mercer.

Poley discovers that Mercer was an illegal arms trader, fatally stabbed in a remote town in the Sahara. His life was haunted by nightmares of his past, and by his clandestine involvement with a ruthless rebel. Poley begins to recognize a pattern of corruption as severe as South Africa's in the aftermath of apartheid. A chilling story of murder that masterfully evokes South Africa's recent past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679780953
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/30/1999
Edition description:	1 VINTAGE
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Born in Cape Town in 1951, Mike Nicol is the author of three previous novels, Horseman, This Day and Age, and The Powers That Be, and two works of nonfiction, A Good-Looking Corpse and The Waiting Country. He lives in Muizenberg, South Africa.

Editorial Reviews

Complex, colorful and intricately layered, The Ibis Tapestry plays skillfully with truth and fiction to portray the landscape of a nation undergoing revolutionary change. -- New York Times Book Review

Erik Burns

A chilling reminder...Horseman is a dark and terrifying novel presenting a mythical account of the development of evil through the history of Southern Africa. -- The Seattle Times

Sandra Chait

One of the more challenging of the South African novelists to appear in the last decade. [Nicol] combines the strands of fable and parable into an out-and-out allegorical work...of spiritual damnation in a world of unmeaning, where redemption from myth is a myth itself. -- South Africa Times

Douglas Skinner

An unhappily successful writer of "airport fiction" sinks into the deeperþin fact, the endlessþmystery of why South African businessman Christo Mercer was stabbed to death by a pair of apparently casual muggers. On the one hand, you have to wonder why Robert Poley would ever have gotten interested in someone as remote as Christo Mercerþa misterioso with degrees in law and business, a friend of warlords and terrorists, a guilt-ridden killer convinced that his dreams foretold coming disastersþhowever rich his sources of information (stories, interviews, cryptic E-mails from Christo's hard drive, and a dream diary recounting 4,571 of the dreams that Christo so dreaded) or how tantalizing his informants (from "N.S.," Christo's E-mail correspondent, to Deep Throat II, the anonymous donor of waves of collateral material). But the more Poley talks about his own barren lifeþhis messy divorce from the wife who's left him for another woman, the teenaged sons who bounce from one petty scrape to the nextþthe more you can see why Poley needs Christo as an (inevitably futile) escape from himself. Throwing himself into the job of reconstructing Christo's life and death, Poley sorts through a mad cornucopia of monstrous riddlesþscattered, with Johnny Appleseed prodigality, throughout personal testimonials, surrealistic dream narratives, literary antecedents from The Arabian Nights to Tamburlaine (a particular obsession of Christo's), footnotes, footnotes to the footnotes, etymologies, and stylistic notes on Christo's poetryþtill Nicol's pairing of active and passive heroes comes less to resemble the tragic brooding of Absalom, Absalom! than the anticramblings of Pale Fire. Quite a change from Nicol's savagely understated fables of South African oppression (Horseman, 1995, etc.)þbut, in its own pyrotechnical way, just as obscure in the end.

Kirkus Reviews