‘The Prince of Bagram Prison’ by Alex Carr

Published by Orion. February 2008

ISBN: Hardback 978-0-7528-7180-6:

Trade Paperback 978-0-7528-7182-0

 Once, when he was fifteen, Jamal was the Prince of  Bagram Prison in Afghanistan. Before that, he had been just a piece of human flotsam, brought up in a squalid orphanage in Morocco, escaping from that to an equally degraded life in Spain, befor being enticed to Afghanistan to join the Taliban only to be scooped up by the U.S. Army and taken into custody. But now he is in Madrid courtesy of the C.I.A. who have promised him a new life in the U.S. sometime in return for any information he can pick up about jihadists. For four years he has got along fine with his C.I.A. contact, Harry Comfort, but Harry retires and his successor is less sympathetic even when Jamal says he has seen Hamid Bagheri , an Iranian who was in Bagram along with Jamal. Bagheri was due to give evidence for the prosecution in a court-martial in Britain relating to the death in Afghanistan of another Iranian but he has escaped. But then Jamal’s new contact is murdered and Jamal, realising that his information so far from being his ticket to a new life has put him in deadly danger. So he goes on the run. But a lot of people want to find Jamal, one of whom is Dick Morrow, Harry’s ex-boss. He recruits Kat Caldwell, an Arabic specialist and Army Intelligence reservist: Kat had been a translator at Bagram prison and had befriended Jamal. Indeed it was Kat’s kindness to Jamal that led him being nicknamed the little prince. Morrow knows that Jamal trusts Kat. Meanwhile, the only other prosecution witness in the court-martial, the British soldier Colin Mitchell who had been Kat’s lover in Afghanistan but is now in London, is murdered by the sinister C.I.A.-connected David Kurtz. And Kurtz is detailed, not by Morrow, to accompany Kat in her search.

The structure of this book is extraordinarily complicated, too much so, I am afraid, for its own good. It zigzags about continuously in time and place so that it is not always clear when and where a particular episode is taking place. We move from Morocco to Madrid to London to Hawaii to Washington D.C. to Portsmouth to Vietnam and so on and so forth and backwards and forwards between 1974 to 2005 and various dates in between in what seems an arbitrary fashion. And a lot of characters have connections: some of these, like Jamal’s mother who was imprisoned as a political activist and is now searching for the son who was taken from her at birth are convincing. But the account of an affair that Harry had in 1974 in Vietnam who then married Morrow and is now dying does not seem to me to be relevant to the plot. And the fact that Kat not only had a love affair with the murdered Colin Mitchell but had earlier rejected Kurtz’s sexual advances is surely one connection too many.

I would not recommend that this book not be read. Alex Carr’s prose style is literate and she has some interesting things to say. But it is not an easy read: I had to read it three times before I could get the plot straight enough to write this review. Maybe other readers will find it less taxing.

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Radmila May

Also by Alex Carr: An Accidental American