Book review: Submergence by JM Ledgard

Submergenceby JM LedgardJonathan Cape, 208pp, £16.99

JM LEDGARD was born in the Shetland Islands, went to a Scottish university (I'm guessing St Andrews, as it's where one of his book's two central characters got her training in oceanography) and has been a foreign correspondent for the Economist since 1995. His first novel, Giraffe, was set in Cold War Czechoslovakia.

Africa is now one of his prime stamping grounds, and his story of James More, an Englishman kidnapped and imprisoned in Somalia by jihadist fighters tied to al-Qaeda, rings with authenticity and pin-point detail.

The acknowledgements in the back of the book, admirably short and to the point, tell a story of their own. "I would like to remember," Ledgard writes, "my friends in the mighty nation who welcomed me in a time of distress; the Economist, for allowing me to follow the story."

He also pays tribute to a French DGSE secret agent, Dennis Allex, held captive for two years (to this day, apparently) by an al-Qaeda-linked faction, and Asho Duhulow, stoned to death at the age of 13 in Kismayo.

Both appear to have inspired Ledgard's story of More.

A British intelligence agent spying on al-Qaeda while posing as a water engineer - captured by jihadists unaware of his secret double life - he witnesses a woman's stoning on his long journey in captivety through the badlands of East Africa.

Submergence plays out in three arenas. More's hellish, knife-edge ordeal, drives the book forward with a morbid pace: I read it in two sittings.

The reader is kept on tenterhooks waiting, hoping, for the moment when More, the former paratrooper, will finally turn tables on his captors. It's an admirable plot device, though if I was nit-picking I'd say Ledgard plays it out a little too long.

Through More's eyes, there's sophisticated understanding and observation of the jihadists but scarcely an ounce of sympathy; they're destructive, primitive extremists. More is determined not to fall into the Stockholm Syndrome, and we're not encouraged to either.

Living a different kind of high-intensity life, submersed in water rather than desert, is the "biomathematician" Danielle Flinders. Her discipline is applying mathematics to the study of life in the ocean, probing the darkest, deepest ocean floors, studying microbial life reaching down far beneath the top layers of the seas visited by boats or even submarines.

Here Ledgard dwells on myth and the philosophy of science rather than playing deep-sea dives for cheap drama. Danny's fascinations include Cuvier's beaked whales, which hunt for squid at depths of up to 2,000 metres.Humans are liquid bodies, Danny observes, but their civilisations exist only as "film on the water" of the deep, while the inward journey of ocean exploration by aquanauts into the depths below takes them into an environment as hostile as space. The third running strand of the novel is the memory of James More and Flinders's chance encounter in the Hotel Atlantic, an ancient manor on the French coast of the Atlantic, Danny's favourite ocean, which has played host to Mark Twain and President Mitterrand.

Between them, Ledgard spins a sweet and fleeting romance, amid snowy sea walks and some rather luxurious meals. Submergence is frequently beautifully written, and ensnares the reader in a forceful, hard-driving narrative.

But with a footsoldier in the war on terror held captive in Somalia, taking refuge from beatings and humiliation in a lost weekend with the ocean-borne woman of his dreams, it has a love story at its heart.

If there's any justice in the world this novel will at least be nominated for a major literary award.