Critics gave kudos to the author for writing a big, sprawling, old-fashioned novel with diverse characters and serious moral themes. Caputo has painted a portrait of Africa that avoids stereotype or cliché. His eye for detail is unmatched (he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his reporting work at the Chicago Tribune). His characterization is weak, however; a few critics felt that they were watching a puppeteer move marionettes. Caputos leisurely pace and an omniscient, flat narration frustrated others. Despite these criticisms, Acts of Faith is a timely book about attempted heroism in the face of war, and a warning, noted in the epigraph from the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, that "Whoever tries to turn angel turns beast."Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
Few people give to charity without expecting something in return, whether it's a tax break, publicity, ego gratification, or even cold cash. And in Africa, the chances to gain by giving are like those nowhere else. Reporter, novelist, and nonfiction writer Caputo (The Ghosts of Tsavo, 2002) sets this fascinating tale of aid workers against Sudan's civil war, where the Muslim government in the north fights the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) for control of the Christian and animist south. The Kenyan town of Lokichokio, just over the border, serves as a staging area for relief organizations sending aid to the war zone. Quinette Hardin's WorldWide Christian Union tries to save souls by buying slaves back from their Muslim captors. Douglas Braithwaite's Knight Air takes risks the UN will not, defying Khartoum's "no go" zones to fly aid into the rebel-controlled Nuba Mountains. But Quinette wants more than to love--she wants to be loved. And Braithwaite wants more than two planes--he wants a fleet. Quinette marries an SPLA commander, and Braithwaite starts running guns, their rationalizations setting a series of extremely bloody events into motion. When those who give want so much, it gives us a powerful lens with which to view the heartbreaking problems of Africa, where temporary relief has become a permanent industry. This is a big novel, old fashioned in the best way, full of intrigue and a large cast of sharply drawn characters. And with a Sudan cease-fire recently in the news, it couldn't be timelier. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Devastating. . . . Acts of Faith will be to the era of the Iraq war what Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American became to the Vietnam era. . . . Powerful.” —The New York Times
“Acts of Faith should be required reading. . . . Caputo’s best novel yet.” —The New York Times Book Review
"Philip Caputo's Sudan is a place drawn so real, dust and despair fall from the pages. . . . So beautiful, so awful, so authentic, so wonderful, so hopeless, it grieves the heart." —The Miami Herald
“Destined to be a generation-defining book.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“A miracle. . . . You can hardly conceive of a more affecting reading experience.” —Houston Chronicle
"Caputo, a Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter turned novelist, writes with astonishing authority, launching several complex plot lines and an enormous, vibrant cast of characters -- aid workers, soldiers, militants, mercenaries, missionaries and corrupt officials. The plot threads join in a propulsive, satisfying finish, inevitably inching demon and deity ever closer together." —Michael Ollove, The Baltimore Sun
“Philip Caputo, from Vietnam onwards, has understood the hardest truths of the modern world better than almost anybody. Acts of Faith is a stunningly unflinching novel. On the surface it is set in Africa, but in fact its true landscape is the ravaged soul of the twenty-first century. Philip Caputo is one of the few absolutely essential writers at work today.” —Robert Olen Butler
“In Acts of Faith Philip Caputo has fashioned a gripping cast of characters and placed them in a spellbinding story. You can’t get any better than that.” —Winston Groom
“Caputo’s ambitious adventure novel, set against a backdrop of the Sudan...
From the Back Cover
Thirty years ago, Pulitzer Prize--winning author and journalist Philip Caputo crossed the deserts of Sudan and Eritrea on foot and camelback, a journey that inspired his first novel, "Horn of Africa, and awakened a lifelong fascination with Africa. His travels have since taken him back to Sudan, as well as to Kenya, Somalia, and Tanzania, and from those experiences he has fashioned "Acts of Faith, his most ambitious novel. A stunning and timely epic, it tells the stories of pilots, aid workers, missionaries, and renegades struggling to relieve the misery wrought by the civil war in Sudan.
The hearts of these men and women are in the right place, but as they plunge into a well of moral corruption for which they are ill-prepared, their hidden flaws conspire with circumstances to turn their strengths-bravery, compassion, daring, and empathy-into weaknesses. In pursuit of noble ends, they make ethical compromises; their altruism curdles into self-righteous zealotry and greed, entangling them in a web of conspiracies that leads, finally, to murder. A few, however, escape the moral trap and find redemption in the discovery that firm convictions can blind the best-intentioned man or woman to the difference between right and wrong.
Douglas Braithwaite, an American aviator who flies food and medicine to Sudan's ravaged south, is torn between his altruism and powerful personal ambitions. His partners are Fitzhugh Martin, a multiracial Kenyan who sees Sudan as a cause that can give purpose to his directionless life, and Wesley Dare, a hard-bitten bush pilot who is not as cynical as he thinks he is and sacrifices all for the woman he loves.
They are joined by two strong women: QuinetteHardin, an evangelical Christian from Iowa who liberates slaves captured by Arab raiders and who falls in love with a Sudanese rebel; and Diana Briggs, the daughter of a family with colonial roots in Africa, who believes that her love for her adopted continent might be enough to save it.
Pitted against them is Ibrahim Idris ibn Nur-el-Din, a fierce Arab warlord whose obsessive quest for an escaped concubine undermines his faith in the holy war he is waging against Sudan's southern blacks.
In a harsh yet alluring landscape, these and other vividly realized characters act out a drama of modern-day Africa. Grounded in the reality of today's headlines, "Acts of Faith is a captivating novel of human complexity that combines seriousness with all the seductive pleasure of a masterly thriller.
About the Author
Philip Caputo worked nine years for the Chicago Tribune and shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his reporting on election fraud in Chicago. He is the author of six other works of fiction and two memoirs, including A Rumor of War, about his service in Vietnam. He divides his time between Connecticut and Arizona.
From The Washington Post
Philip Caputo's new novel -- he's best known for his memoir of Vietnam, A Rumor of War, but he also has published four other novels -- takes on big subjects in a big way: too big, but more about that later. Set in and near Sudan during the endless internal warfare that shattered that unhappy country beginning in the 1980s, Acts of Faith is a cautionary tale with two broad themes: the havoc that can be caused by "true believers" motivated by "faith in some particular creed, sect, ideology, cause, or crusade," and the havoc that can be caused by Americans "in their narcissism, in their self-righteousness, in their blindness to their inner natures, in their impulse to remake the world and reinvent themselves, never realizing that the world wishes to remain as it is and that oneself is not as malleable as one likes to think." Three Americans are central to the tale: Douglas Braithwaite, a magnetic but naive and enigmatic young man who establishes Knight Air, which flies relief supplies to Sudan; his partner, Wesley Dare, also a pilot, much older, who, "having seen what true believers were capable of . . . had turned disbelief into a kind of belief in itself"; and Quinette Hardin, a born-again Christian working for an aid organization called WorldWide Christian Union, who is resolutely going native, trying "to transform herself from a plain prairie flower into a brilliant and irresistible African orchid."
All three are trying, in their different ways, to aid the Nuba people, who live in the hills of central Sudan and are the country's largest non-Arab group. Caught between the National Islamic Front government in Khartoum and the rebels of the black-African Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA), the civilian Nuba are in danger of starvation, even extinction, and an international relief effort -- some of it U.N.-run, some of it church-related, some of it ad hoc and freelance -- has taken shape to help them. Inevitably, it attracts zealots as well as humanitarians, on all of whom Africa works the spell familiar to readers of Joseph Conrad:
"What was it about this place that it created visionaries of all kinds, warrior-prophets and warrior-saints, messiahs true and false, Sufi mystics, dervishes dancing in the desert? Was [a famous pilot] right in saying that Sudan's distances conjure up mirages of the mind, its boundless horizons inspiring men to imagine that anything is possible? Do its skies, so threatening in their vastness and vacancy, foster feelings of insignificance that force men to turn to God for solace and validation of their existence? And does the silence that greets them when they turn -- the unbearable silence of Sudan's immense spaces -- cause them to hear voices in their own heads and trick them into thinking that what they hear is the voice of God, commanding them to sacred missions? And what is it about this place that even as it molds true believers out of its native clay, it also draws true believers from elsewhere? General Gordon, the Christian mystic, tugged to Sudan by his own messianic vision: to abolish the slave trade, and how he tried, with his band of zealots. But the law of unintended consequences operates here like nowhere else."
Indeed it does. Acts of Faith positively abounds in unintended consequences, some of which arise from Knight Air's downward spiral from eleemosynary airlifts to arms-running, some of which arise from the plot's various romantic complications. Wesley Dare, four times married and divorced, falls in love with a much younger pilot, Mary English, and she in turn -- quite to his surprise -- falls in love with him. Fitzhugh Martin -- the novel's most appealing character, who "had come to Kenya from the Seychelles Islands when he was eight years old, the eldest of three children born to a French, Irish, and Indian father and a mother who was black, Arab, and Chinese" -- falls in love with Lady Diana Briggs, who is many years older than he, "a Kenyan citizen, British by ancestry only," and she falls in love with him. Quinette Hardin, not to be outdone, falls in love with Michael Archangelo Goraende, an officer in the SPLA, "a big man with big ideas," and he with her.
This last romance involves going African with a vengeance, with multiple unintended consequences that leave Quinette a whole lot sadder but not a scintilla wiser. She is the embodiment of American innocence and foolishness, as Michael seems to understand at some gut level when he first meets her. When he asks what she speaks "besides English," and she replies, "Nothing. Unless you want to count two years of high school Spanish," his comment is: "I would be delighted to meet someday an American who speaks more than English. You Americans own the world now and you don't have to learn. But someday someone else will own the world, and then you'll have to learn their language. Who do you think it will be? The Russians? The Arabs? The Chinese?"
It's a good question for which, of course, Quinette has no answer. With the notable exception of Wes Dare, all the Americans stumble through the pages of Acts of Faith, making silly and sometimes dangerous mistakes. None of them is worse than Doug Braithwaite, whose veneer of wide-eyed altruism hides a terrible smugness and arrogance. As Fitzhugh says: "He lacks a moral imagination when it comes to himself. He's so certain of his inner virtue that he believes anything he does, even something . . . terrible, is the right thing. Am I making myself clear? The man cannot imagine himself doing anything wrong. It's a blindness. He can't see his own demons because he doesn't think they exist, and so he's fallen prey to them."
Readers who are inclined to interpret Braithwaite's certitude as a metaphor for the current administration and its policies overseas probably are correct. Acts of Faith is very much of the moment, undoubtedly inspired by the events of September 2001 and the American response to them: true believers in the mountain fastnesses of Afghanistan and Pakistan, true believers in the White House and on Capitol Hill. In this novel, as in Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, the parallels between fiction and recent fact seem simply too obvious to be denied; both novels are as much political statements as attempts to make literary art, and they must be viewed as such.
Unfortunately, as literary art Acts of Faith falls considerably short. Caputo is smart, commendably ambitious, immensely knowledgeable about parts of the world that most Americans know (and care) little or nothing about and writes clean prose that's a couple of steps above the journalism he once practiced, but he never manages to get this novel off the ground. To begin with, it's much, much too long -- twice as long as it needs to be. Conversations drag on and on and on, presumably of interest to the characters talking and to the author who put the words in their mouths, but too often of only marginal interest to the vexed, exhausted reader. A couple of subplots could have been eliminated, to the novel's benefit rather than detriment. Though the pace picks up in the final hundred pages or so, for much of the way Caputo seems to be on automatic pilot, going nowhere.
There's good stuff here, in particular Caputo's evocation of the world of the bush pilots. Obviously he knows a lot about flying, and things come quickly to life whenever a plane takes off, but mostly the novel is flat on the ground. No doubt Acts of Faith will be read by Caputo's admirers, but it's likely to tax their patience, and it's not likely to win him many new readers. It's an honorable effort and a serious book, but for most of the way reading it is work rather than pleasure.
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Man of All Races
In his early twenties, after two undistinguished and troubled years at university, Fitzhugh Martin had achieved a modest celebrity as center forward for the Harambe Stars, which are to Kenyan soccer as the New York Yankees are to baseball. A sportswriter had nicknamed him “The Ambler,” because he never seemed to run very fast, his leisurely movements caused not by slow feet but by a quick tactical eye that allowed him to read the field in a glance and be where he needed to be with economy of motion.
He traveled with the club throughout Africa, to Europe, and once to the United States. He saw something of the world, and what he saw—namely the shocking contrast between the West and his continent—convinced him to do something more with himself than chase a checkered ball up and down a field. He’d heard a kind of missionary call, quit soccer, and became a United Nations relief worker, first in Somalia and then in Sudan.
That was the story he told, but it wasn’t entirely true: a serious knee injury that required two operations was as responsible for his leaving the sport as a Pauline epiphany. Or maybe the injury was the mother of the epiphany; sitting on the bench with his taped knee, he knew his career was as good as over and wondered what to do with the rest of his life. Of course, if he hadn’t had a social conscience to begin with, he would not have made the choice he did, and that conscience was formed by his ancestry. He had come to Kenya from the Seychelles Islands when he was eight years old, the eldest of three children born to a French, Irish, and Indian father and a mother who was black, Arab, and Chinese. The emigration took Fitzhugh from a place where tribalism was unknown and race counted for little to a land where tribe and race counted for everything. His family wasn’t poor—his father managed a coastal resort near Mombasa—but he came to identify with the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized, because he grew up on the margins of Kenyan society, a boy without a tribal allegiance or a claim to any one race, for all the races of the earth were in him. He was the eternal outsider who was never allowed to forget that he was an alien, even at the height of his athletic fame. His skin was brown, yet the white Kenyans, children and grandchildren of colonial settlers, were more accepted than he, a tribe unto themselves.
After he worked for a year in Somalia, the UN promoted him to field monitor and assigned him to its operations in Sudan. Now a corporal in the army of international beneficence, he wandered in southern Sudan for weeks at a time, stalking the beast of hunger and devising strategies to hold the numbers of its victims to some acceptable minimum. That vast unhappy region captured him body and soul; it became the stage where Fitzhugh Martin played the role he believed destiny had assigned him. “The goddamned, bleeding, fucked-up Sudan,” he would say. “I don’t know what it is about that place. It sucks you in. You see some eighteen-year-old who’s been fighting since he was fourteen and can tell you war stories that will give you nightmares, but drop a piece of ice in his hands and he’s amazed. Never seen or felt ice before, never seen water turned to stone, and you get sucked in.” He meant to do all in his power to save the southern Sudanese from the curses of the apocalypse and a few the author of Revelation hadn’t thought of, like the tribalism that caused the southerners to inflict miseries on themselves. That was where his cosmopolitan blood became an advantage. He moved with ease among Dinka, Nuer, Didinga, Tuposa, Boya; the tribes trusted the tribeless man who had no ethnic axes to grind.
He loved being in the bush and hated returning to the UN base at Loki. It had the look of a military installation, ringed by coils of barbed wire. The field managers and flight coordinators and logistics officers—to his eyes a mob of ambitious bureaucrats or risk-lovers seeking respectable adventure—drove around like conquerors in white Land Rovers sprouting tall radio antennae; they lived and worked in tidy blue and white bungalows, drank their gins and cold beers at bars that looked like beach resort tiki bars, and ate imported meats washed down with imported wines. When Loki’s heat, dust, and isolation got to be too much, they went to Europe on R&R, or to rented villas in the cool highland suburbs of Nairobi, where they were waited on, driven, and guarded by servants whose grandparents probably had waited on, driven, and guarded the British sahibs and memsahibs of bygone days. They were the new colonials, and Fitzhugh grew to loathe them as much as he loathed the old-time imperialists who had pillaged Africa in the name of the white man’s burden and the mission civilisatrice.
When he wasn’t in Sudan, he who had grown up on the edge of things dwelled on the edge of the compound, in a mud-walled hut with a makuti roof and two windows lacking glass and screens; it wasn’t much better than the squalid twig-and-branch tukuls of the Turkana settlement that sprawled outside the wire, along the old Nairobi-Juba road. Inside were a hard bed under a mosquito net, a chair, and a desk knocked together out of scrap lumber. Fitzhugh’s only concession to modern comfort was electricity, supplied by a generator; his only bow to interior decoration, the posters of his heroes, Bob Marley, Malcolm X, and Nelson Mandela. Asceticism did not come naturally to him. Self-denial is easy for people with attenuated desires and appetites; Fitzhugh’s were in proportion to his size. He could down a sixteen-ounce Tusker in two or three swallows and inhaled meals the way he did cigarettes. He loved women, and when he came out of the bush, he would sweep through the compound, scooping up Irish girls and American girls and Canadian girls. (He stayed away from the local females, fearing AIDS or the swifter retribution of a Turkana father’s rifle or spear.) Inevitably, he would feel guilty about indulging himself and go on a binge of monkish abstinence.
He met Douglas Braithwaite exactly two months and eighteen days after the UN fired him, an encounter whose date he would come to recall with as much bitterness as precision. Years later he tried to persuade himself that he and the American had come together for reasons he couldn’t fathom but hoped to discover, hidden somewhere in the machinery of destiny or in the designs of an inscrutable providence. Who among us, when an apparently chance meeting or some other random occurrence changes us profoundly, can swallow the idea that it was purely accidental?
Over and over Fitzhugh would trace the succession of seeming coincidences that caused the path of his life to converge with Douglas’s. He never would have laid eyes on the man if he hadn’t lost his job; he would not have lost it if . . . well, you get the idea. If he could map how it happened, he would find out why.
Eventually Fitzhugh’s mental wanderings led him back to the day he was born, but he was no closer to uncovering the secret design. So he was forced to abandon his quest for the why and settle for the how, a narrative whose beginning he fixed on the day a bonfire burned in the desert.
The High Commissioners of World Largesse, as he called his employers, occasionally overestimated the amount of food they would need to avert mass starvation in Sudan. Blind screw-ups were sometimes to blame; sometimes field monitors deliberately exaggerated the severity of conditions, figuring it was better to err on that side than on the other; and sometimes nature did not cooperate, failing to produce an expected catastrophe. Surpluses would then pile up in the great brown tents pitched alongside the Loki airstrip, tins of cooking oil and concentrated milk, sacks of flour, sorghum, and high-protein cereal stacked on pallets. Once in a while the stuff sat around beyond the expiration dates stamped on the containers. It then was burned. That was standard procedure, and it was followed rigorously, even if the oil had not gone rancid or the flour mealy or the grain rotten.
Mindful that cremating tons of food would make for bad press, the High Commissioners had the dirty work done under cover of darkness at a remote dump site, far out in the sere, scrub-covered plateaus beyond Loki. Truck convoys would leave the UN base before dawn with armed escorts, their loads covered by plastic tarps; for the Turkana, men as lean as the leaf-bladed spears they carried, knew scarcity in the best of times and were consequently skilled and enthusiastic bandits.
And it was the Turkana who blew the whistle. One morning a band of them looking for stray livestock in the Songot mountains, near the Ugandan border, spotted a convoy moving across the plain below and smoke and flames rising from a pit in the distance. The herdsmen went to have a look. That year had been a particularly hard one for the Turkana—sparse rains, the bones of goats and cows chalking the stricken land, shamans crying out to Akuj Apei to let the heavens open. The bush telegraph flashed the news of what the herdsmen had seen from settlement to settlement: The wazungu were burning food! More than all the Turkana put together had ever seen, much less eaten.
The word soon reached Malachy Delaney, a friend of Fitzhugh’s who had been a missionary among the Turkana for so long that they considered him a brother whose skin happened to be white. Apoloreng, they called him, Father of the Red Ox, because his hair had been red when he first came to them. He spoke their dialects as well as they and was always welcome at their rituals and ceremonies. In fact, he was sometimes asked to preside, and anyone who saw him, clapping his hands to tribal songs, leading chants of call and response, had to wonder who had converted whom. Malachy had been reprimanded by the archbishop in Nairobi and once by the Vatican itself for his unorthodox methods.
