Robert Glancy's second novel, Please Do Not Disturb, is set in the fictional East African country of Bwalo. It is a portrait of a land struggling, decades after its emancipation from British colonial rule, to escape the iron fist of the man responsible for its liberation; his despotic reign has turned Bwalo into "a country where anything can happen to anyone at any time."
The novel revolves around an event known as the Big Day, the annual commemoration of Bwalo's independence in the 1980s. Its liberator, King Tafumo--who used a mythic biography and 20 years in English exile as his stepping stones to power--now lies physically ailing and demented in his palace's medical wing. His bureaucrats, army and secret police serve him by maintaining a terrifying surveillance state, where those suspected of disloyalty simply disappear. Chief among his functionaries is Josef Songa, a childhood friend who now refers to himself, with no small amount of bitterness, as the "Minister of Whispers and Lies."
Glancy (Terms & Conditions) relies on a chorus of four narrative voices, in addition to Josef's, to tell a subtle, complex story of the climate of fear that's the chief product of political oppression: Charlie, the adolescent son of a hotelier in the capital city; Hope, Josef's ex-wife and nurse to the failing ruler; Sean, an English professor and blocked novelist from Ireland; and Jack, a smuggler and drug dealer. These characters, save Charlie, have made compromises to continue to exist in the cesspool of corruption and terror that is Bwalo. Most compelling among them is Josef, whose willingness to betray even his closest friends has begun to congeal into a profound moral crisis.
Glancy, who was born in Zambia and lived in Africa until age 14, creates a convincing portrait of poverty-stricken Bwalo, "a country you couldn't even call forgotten for the fact no one had heard of it in the first place." With events like a near-disastrous safari--for the benefit of a teenage American performer named Truth, who's been flown in with his entourage to provide the Big Day's musical entertainment--and a rapidly unfolding plot to overthrow Tafumo, there's ample action to keep the novel's plot bubbling. Please Do Not Disturb is a tragicomic story of the price exacted when those bent on corruption thwart the promise of freedom. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Robert Glancy's second novel is the story of political intrigue and moral decay in a corrupt African nation.