To The Last Page

With his second novel Stephen Burke’s subject of interest appears to be more readily identified, but The Reluctant Contact expands on and shows greater refinement of the historical and political content seen in his debut novel The Good Italian . Even though they come at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the common theme of both novels seems to be around the incompatibility of adapting a political or ideological utopia to real human sentiments. It’s the human element however that is more tightly focussed in The Reluctant Contact , but the espionage side is also convincingly handled in the novel’s Cold War thriller situation. In contrast to The Good Italian , where the subject was love in the time of fascism, set in 1935 in Mussolini-era Italian occupied Eritrea, The Reluctant Contact is about love in a colder climate; in 1977 in a Soviet mining post on the Norwegian Svalbard Archipelago. Pyramiden is a model outpost that operates very much to the ideals of communism, and despit...

War and Morality The first thing that attracted me to this book was the setting. 1935 in Italian occupied Eritrea is an interesting time and place, not quite war time, but moving in that direction. The second thing that interested me was the title. The Italian perspective of the events that brought them into the war on the side of the Germans is complex and rarely covered in fiction, so a look at them from the view of a "good Italian" also promises an intriguing moral angle on the situation. Stephen Burke's novel doesn't disappoint on either of those questions - or at least not until the latter chapters that seem to bring some of the most interesting events leading up to the war in North Africa to a rather hurried conclusion. Initially however, there is indeed something Graham Greene-like about the moral position of Enzo Sacchi, a young man from Genoa who finds himself harbourmaster at the port of Massawa. With Italy about to expand their colonisation of the region, d...