In Giles Foden’s first novel, 1998’s The Last King of Scotland, an idealistic young Celt, Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan, travels to Africa into a series of adventures amid the corruption and brutality of Idi Amin’s Uganda. In Foden’s second, Ladysmith, an idealistic young Celt, Irish Bella Kiernan, travels to Africa and has a series of adventures amid the violence of the Boer war and the siege of Ladysmith. In Zanzibar, an idealistic environmental scientist, marine biologist Nick Karolides, travels to Africa and into a series of adventures, events leading up to al-Qaida’s 1998 US embassy bombing in Tanzania.
Now we have Thirst, in which Cat Brosnan, an idealistic young Celt and an environmental scientist, travels to Africa and has a series of adventures searching for a hidden aquifer in the desert of the Skeleton Coast of Namibia. People talk of “Greeneland”, as the familiar places and stories that characterise Graham Greene’s writing. Something similar is true of Foden: a westerner’s wild and violent adventures in Africa. Gilesville. Fodenmark.
