William Morrow, 2003
272 pages
The first novel by Portland author John B. Robinson, The Sapphire Sea, is a cinematic adventure story that takes readers on a breathless ride through the exotic, dangerous and little-known worlds of Madagascar and the gem trade.
From the first page, when a bright blue flash leads young expatriate gem trader Lonny Cushman and his motorbike to the world’s finest sapphire, Robinson races the reader through a world where no one is safe and nothing is as it seems.
Foreigners are attracted to the poverty-stricken Third World island by the mother lode of sapphires, the possibility of riches, the lawlessness, the anonymity and the excitement – a sort of Wild West in northern Madagascar. When Cushman finds the gem he knows can change his future, a wild cast of characters springs from the shadows to try to end his ownership of the sapphire, as well as his life.
But Cushman is no one-dimensional, Ludlum-style macho hero. He works for his stateside, unsupportive, gem-dealing father with whom he has serious father-son issues. He has suffered a bitter divorce, is an unhappy absent father to his 7-year-old daughter and is beginning to question his reckless, feckless lifestyle.
While he strains his resources and wits to stay one step ahead of his would-be killers and keep the magnificent sapphire, Cushman also wrestles with his personal demons.
Excitingly told, the story has all the elements needed for a good read: danger, sex, color, a great plot and well-developed, unusual but believable characters. It also has more. This well-off white New Yorker is accurately contrasted against the struggling poor of his adopted African country and not always to his advantage.
Robinson, who reviews books for the Portland Press Herald, traveled to Madagascar on a fiction-writing fellowship and turned to gem-dealing while there in order to find a way to get residents to trust and talk to him. Although The Sapphire Sea is fiction, his personal experience affords readers a knowing glimpse into the underside of gemstone dealing and the politics of a region little understood by Americans, a country largely ruled by superstition and the military.
Although the seamy, steamy atmosphere of Madagascar portrayed in The Sapphire Sea probably won’t inspire readers to take the tour, Robinson’s graceful writing style paints an evocative picture of its unique geography and culture. The story telling is superb, the book hard to put down.