The Train To Djibouti

Posted In: Djibouti

Margeret Novo says...

I wanted to read this book because I thought the idea of a woman filming a documentary about the lives of pirates was interesting. This was my first Leonard book, and the first thing that I noticed was the readability of the book. It's easy to get into the story and each character has a distinctive voice.



I thought I might really be intrigued by Djibouti, but it's kind of shrouded in a khat-chewing mystery. There's just not much back-story or details (yes, there's some, but it's just a nugget), yet most of the action is in the city or nearby.



Reading this is almost like watching an action movie with the commentary on. Interesting and fun for the most part, though I was disappointed when the pirates mostly vanished halfway through the story after al-Qaeda bad-boy Jama (James Russell, with an emphasis on the "sell") pops up as the main problem. I'd have enjoyed more time spent with the pirates, both the general boys and the specific two (Idris and Harry, aka "Ari") who are originally after two al-Qaeda villains. The pirates, too, are surrounded by a fog of mystery; I wanted more because I was curious if they were the "good guys" or if they had secrets that tipped them into the "bad" category. I regretted the departure of the pirates, who were just beginning to be sketched out nicely, from the story.



Dara, the filmmaker and documentary-maker, is a sharp, snappy woman who's right in the middle of everything, and I liked her, as well as her "old-man" sidekick, Xavier. However, the character of Billy, the rich guy who's sailing around the world with his girlfriend, could've been cut from the story and I wouldn't have minded. Put the pirates back in the story instead. I also wasn't enthralled with Jama - he felt like a typical, boring villain who had no original thoughts or an ounce of humanity in him.



An OK story, but ultimately left me feeling a bit let down.

Posted on July 10, 2011

Mertie Muwwakkil says...

Elmore Leonard has written a lot of books, but the only one I've ever read is "Get Shorty" that I enjoyed.Still, I thought I'd seize the chance to get a free copy of his latest effort, "Djibouti."Now I wish I hadn't.



The first third of this book was torture to plow through.Leonard lost me on the first page with this sentence:"By 8:30 the once-a-week Air France was in, the stairway wheeled up and a gang of Arabs and Dara Barr coming off, the Foreign Legion checking out the passengers, seeing could they tell a terrorist they saw one."It's really the last part of the sentence that threw me.It sounds like it's missing two different "ifs" in there.I suppose this was supposed to be from Xavier's point of view, though it's so early in the book that we don't really know anything about Xavier yet, so at that point it didn't make much sense to me.



After that, so much of the first 100 pages is just Xavier and Dara sitting around talking about what they shot.It's extremely boring.I got to thinking, "How can a book about pirates be this DULL?"



The thing is, the book isn't really about Somali pirates.That's just what the book jacket might say.Really it's about the harebrained plot of a wanna-be bin Laden that intersects with a couple of documentary filmmakers, a pirate, a crazy lawyer, and an eccentric billionaire.(Are any billionaires not eccentric?In books and movies it seems they're always up to some crazy scheme or another.I suppose there probably are noneccentric ones who just stay in their mansions and sip their brandy.)What this reminds me of is less "Get Shorty" than the Coen brothers movie "Burn After Reading" that I described as "a battle of wits between the witless."



So here are all the players.First there's Dara Barr, the documentary filmmaker who like all women in this type of story is a bit of a tomboy but would probably be attractive if she bothered to clean up.Her cameraman is an old man named Xavier, who previously worked with her during Hurricane Katrina.They come to Djibouti to make a movie about the Somali pirates.One of the pirates is Idris, who would like to be sophisticated and like many of the pirates has found the good life by ransoming Western ships.Harry is a British-Arab lawyer who ostensibly tries to talk the pirates out of pirating.Also there is the billionaire Billy and his hot girlfriend Helene, who will only become Billy's wife if she completes a trip around the world by boat with him.Billy is sort of a conspiracy theory type who has the money to waste paying people to feed him information to fuel these theories.



Then there's Jama, who's an American who converted to Islam in prison.He made contacts with al-Qaeda and has been doing some work for them.He comes to Djibouti as well, hoping to make a big splash.



As I said, most of it was pretty boring to me.I think it would have been better if it'd just stuck to the pirates.The Somali pirates are relatively new enough to be interesting and fresh.Maybe too new and fresh for an octogenarian white guy in Detroit to write about, so instead he falls back on the old terrorism story while leaving just enough of the pirate thing so they can put it on the book jacket and make you think that's what you're reading about.



Anyway, if you've read a lot of Leonard books maybe you'd like this more, because it's probably the same general thing he's done a dozen times before.I really could never get overly interested in the slow-moving plot or the thin characters.Of special note (which I almost forgot to mention) was the terribly contrived way in which Dara figures out Jama's real name.Just really implausible.



It makes me think, though, someone should update "Casablanca" and set it in Djibouti with Somali pirates.I'm sure Dara and Xavier could think up who to cast in it.



That is all.

Posted on July 11, 2011

Tisa Brunnemer says...

I've been a big-time fan of Elmore Leonard for many years and particularly like how he can spin an action yarn into a story that can easily be adapted to the big screen. Get Shorty, 3:10 to Yuma, Mr. Majestyk & Justified (the recent FX series) are just a few examples of Leonard's great skill as a story-teller.



Unfortunately, Djibouti is not a good example of what he can do when he puts his mind to it. While he is usually known for his terse prose and snappy dialogue the writing in Djibouti is choppy and disjointed to the point of incoherence. The plot also tends to be sloppy and unsatisfying. It comes off as if he couldn't decide whether he wanted to tell a story about Somali pirates or al Qaeda terrorists and ended up doing justice to neither. Major characters in the first half of the story fade to insignificance in later chapters and others pop up from nowhere and take over the story. An al Qaeda villain is indistinguishable in character from the two-bit crooks from one of Leonard's other books.



As I said previously, Leonard's stories do lend themselves to video adaptation and it's possible that this would make a fairly entertaining movie. As a book, though, I would give it a pass. There are so many good Elmore Leonard books out there that there is really no reason to settle for this marginal effort.

Posted on July 12, 2011

Rashida Papandrea says...

Elmore Leonard used to be a writer I could count on to deliver a twisting crime novel with crackling dialogue and a clever plot, and 3o years ago came out with a string of novels that were written like a Mozart symphony: flowing, melodic, and smoothe as ice cream going down on a hot summer day.



Djibouti doesn't come close to achieving that level of quality. The main character is a documentary film maker, and for much of the book Leonard makes us read about how she and her assistant watch her film on her Macbook, and review events that we were never privvy to, but instead must read about as she watched highlights on her computer.This doesn't make for compelling reading.Whereas Leonard in the old days would have shown us these events through the plot and dialogue, we now are told about the events.That's simply not good writing.



There are many characters in this book, and some of them seem to be crazier than those from the most recent Carl Hiiasen novel, but the colorful characters who speak with slangy dialogue aren't enough to propel this book into the top 75% of Leonard's career.

Posted on July 13, 2011

Jaime Franch says...

I've always loved Elmore Leonard's writing.His style seems perfectly suited to crime fiction, with the razor sharp dialogue and descriptions, the tangled, loopy plots, and his trademark characters: men and women angling for a chance but always falling just a bit short.



At some level, Djibouti seems like the answer to a question no one asked.How would Leonard's crime fiction style do transported to West Africa, with Somali pirates, American expatriates, and Al Quada terrorists mixing it up instead of Leonard's usual small time criminals?The answer, though, is worth it: pretty darned well.



Djibouti centers on two main characters, documentarian Dara Barr and her cameraman/fixer, Xavier Le Bo.Those two head to Djibouti to try to film a documentary on Somali pirates, and in the process, they meet a wild bunch of characters, including pirate chieftain Idris, UN diplomat/gun-runner "Harry," a wandering Texas billionaire/vigilante and the runway model auditioning to be his wife, and Jama Raisouli, an American expat that Dara describes as a "one man Al Qaeda."



In true Elmore style, each of the characters is angling for something big, whether that's an Oscar-winning documentary, marrying Billy, collecting the reward on Jama, scoring with Dara, or just killing everyone who knows your real name.Again, in true Elmore style, the smarter characters get a lot closer to their goal, but everybody falls short in one way or another as their plans make contact with the enemy.



Reading this book was a blast.I got sucked in within a few pages, and kept looking forward to the next chapter.The only tough part was the book's structure.Leonard tells it as a series of interlocking flashbacks, framed by Dara editing her documentary footage, then cutting back to the action at the time that she was filming. As a result, the action shifts back and forth between different moments, and can get confusing. I had an advance review copy, so maybe there will be more cues in the final publication, either through a change in typeface or some kind of introductory date stamp to the different sections.Either way, though, by the end I felt like I understood the whole story, and the interlaced structure helps set the stage for the last scene very effectively.



All in all, this book will be a treat for long-time Leonard fans.Highly recommended.

Posted on July 13, 2011

Digna Frymoyer says...

Elmore Leonard gave me a treatment for a movie rather than a novel. I bet it will be another John Travolta ('Billy') vehicle. I really like some of the ideas that he tossed out--for example, enjoyed the role Billy character and his girl Friday played, but I didn't care for the loose ends--for example, why were some people perfect shots--did they use perfect guns? All in all, I was disappointed with this novel, but will pay to see the movie :)

Posted on July 13, 2011

Stephen Spivack says...

Until I read Elmore Leonard's Djibouti: A Novel, I never considered that concept that one of the mitigating factors in the rise of piracy off the Horn of Africa was that Asian mega-fishing fleets have been denuding the East African coastal waters for years. Like most of Leonard's books, this is character-driven, but I found it lacking in cohesion. I may give it another read farther down the road, but I've already mailed it to a friend in hspital, and told him when he was done with it to just pass it on: I don't need it back.

Posted on July 14, 2011

Mauricio Moehle says...

"Djibouti," Elmore Leonard's newest novel about a documentary filmmaker chasing modern-day pirates in the East African nation of the title, is a frustrating book to read. Dara Barr, intrepid girl-documentarian, shot the wild winds of Hurricane Katrina as they swept past her French Quarter doorstep and won an Oscar for it. Miss Barr doesn't waste precious megabytes on small-time subjects; she's established her mean street cred with "Women of Bosnia," about the rape camps, and "Whites Only" about neo-Nazis (prize-winners, both), thereby confirming her righteous anger and toughness (her independence is expressed through her hairstyle, according to one character). With various high-def cameras in hand (including a spy-type pocket pen camera), and aided by Xavier, the 6'6" 72 year-old black man who became her assistant on that project, she jets off to Djibouti to get her story. The Somali pirates, who take tankers and other merchant ships hostage for huge ransoms, have engaged her sympathies--their traditional fishing grounds in the Gulf of Aden have been invaded by these foreigners, as well as large fishing enterprises from as far away as Japan. Along the way she meets a cast of tough-talking, rough-acting characters: Billy, the wealthy yacht sailor from Texas who is currently auditioning runway model and gold-digger, Helene, for the role of companion and future wife; Idris, the Somali pirate who justifies his actions by comparing piracy to the Coast Guard collecting fines for dirtying the water; and Ari, aka Harry, a Saudi whose job it is "to talk to pirates," ostensibly to dissuade them from continuing the practice (though he's not averse to shooting them when appropriate). In addition, there are terrorists of various nationalities, a Liquid Natural Gas tanker which everyone wants a piece of and which might be used in a U.S. Port as a bomb, sudden CIA agents and Navy SEALs, and plenty of gunplay to pass the time. Osama bin Laden may be involved. Idris may have a thing for Dara, who may have a thing for Xavier, who seems to have a thing for her. Helene may or may not marry Billy--she's bored on the boat. Dara and Xavier aren't sure what their film is about, as the "story" keeps changing, expanding, getting more complicated. All of this might have been fun. It isn't, because of the way the story is told.



The first sentence of Chapter Five is "Dara was out on the Buster [the rented boat she was based on] for twenty-seven days." The action of the novel doesn't follow her out on the Buster into the Gulf of Aden, instead everything that happened during those twenty-seven days is discussed by Dara and Xavier as they sit before their editing screen. The two sit there watching the footage (which is described for us), and saying things like, "Remember you did this?" "Yes, then you said that," "Yes, and he did this."and so on. This is a strange and off-putting way to tell an adventure story. This non-action is broken up by short passages where Idris and Harry go off and deal with suspected al-Qaedas, or Billy and his hot model drink champagne on his boat. All the characters in the book use the same slang, and while it may be believable that Billy calls all Muslims "wogs" (though Dara does suggest "towelhead" as an alternative), and Filipinos "gooks" (a strangely out-of-date choice), it is jarring when the elegant Helene does the same. At one point Billy refers to Idris and Harry as "the twins" and pretty soon everyone else is, too, until finally they become "The Gold Dust Twins" (they're trying to collect a ransom); eventually even the author himself calls them The Twins. Character identity smears and eventually disappears, which is a problem when one is running so many of them at the same time, most of whom pop in and out of the story in short, disjointed, flashback episodes; it is as though Leonard already is seeing the book as a film, and is making the adaptation process easy for the screenwriter. The effect, though, is to throw the reader out of the story as the choppy style becomes more and more intrusive. Xavier stands out only because he speaks a version of "black English" ("things be happenin"), though all of the Somalis speak in perfect Queen's English. All this "style" ruins the narrative beyond repair, eventually causing headache-generating confusion in a story already overdosing on convoluted plot twists. Are the terrorists really terrorists, or CIA agents? Who is Jama, and what is his real name? Will Billy sail around the world, or destroy the LNG tanker? Will Helene marry him? Will Dara sleep with Xavier, live to finish her documentary, and what will it finally be about?



It's hard to care.

Posted on July 14, 2011

Shana Olausen says...

It takes time to get into this one. We see a scene described, by people we don't know yet, that's being shown on a laptop, of a happening in the past, with commentary about what happened later. And as disorienting as that is, we still have bad guys, losers, good guys, smart dialogue and an exotic locale. Leonard makes us work a little harder for the reward. He casts the movie by asking the characters who should play them. I'd buy a ticket.

Posted on July 15, 2011

Dino Rainbolt says...

I'll preface this review by saying that I really like Elmore Leonard's writing.But this book is a mess.I blame the mess mostly on the way Leonard chose to tell the story, which has all the standard elements of an Elmore Leonard novel, just in bland disarray.The basic story is of a documentary filmmaker and her partner who travel to the Horn of Africa to shoot a documentary about Somali pirates.There are a number of what should be colorful characters, who for some reason mostly seem flat.



For some odd reason, Leonard chooses to tell the story primarily through the two main characters reviewing documentary footage that they've shot of the main events of the novel.So that takes a lot of the suspense out, and it's confusing and kind of annoying.I could see it working in a movie (which is maybe where this is headed) but in a novel it adds nothing and makes the story harder to follow.



And the dialogue, which is usually the highlight of any Leonard novel, is pretty bland in this one, as well.Very disappointing.

Posted on July 19, 2011