First class read that goes beyond the one-dimensional fare often served these days (can a genre be too 'popular'). Anyway, Gaynard's intricate style and assured authority reminds me of Simonen and there is no higher compliment in my lexicon. However, Gaynard goes deeper, I think, than the great man ever did in dragging the absurdities of the French establishment into the honest daylight. His knowledge of the delicate/brutal intricacies of Francophone Africa is also a revelation. I knew little about that world before reading this book but I think I absorbed something of its deadly allure from these pages. Like the best of these books, horrible things happen, are allowed to happen, to ordinary people who are disempowered and removed from the smug self-sustaining cliques of privilege and power. When the redoubtable Mayoman Timothy O'Mahony starts to grind his way to the truth he must first unpeel the embalmed layers of self righteous pomposity that glue the fragile fabric of the elite in place. This struggle against the stream accentuates the contrasts in civil society and demands your immersion in O'Mahony's world.

A book to be savoured, in hope that O'Mahony will swim out again.