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Acts of Faith by Philip Caputo
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Africa is much in the news these days as the G8 meets to solve the seemingly
social structure to bring this wealth to the people who live there. While some
of us, perhaps, have touched our toes in the African waters of Cape Town or Cairo
or even Casablanca or Marrakech, it is in the regions of the Sudan, Republic of
the Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Liberia, etc. where the chaos of Africa reigns.
It is in some of these forlorn regions that Philip Caputo sets his latest (and
longest) novel. To read Acts of Faith is to take a journey most of us will
never take and to meet a world even the abbreviated news we do see can’t come
close to representing accurately. It takes fiction like this to really get at the truth.
Caputo’s rich novel follows the lives and “missions” of a broad cast of
characters (so many that it opens with a chart of who is who) as they live out
the drama that fate has handed them or that they seemingly have chosen. But as
Caputo makes clear over and over, things are not what they seem in Africa:
intentions are never clear, results are rarely as expected, right and wrong are
never the choices available, and any sort of Good that emerges is fleeting and
often at the expense of some other Bad.
Rather than ground his novel in the political and military movements at work in
Africa, he puts his focus on a sort of rag-tag group of expatriates,
humanitarians, rebels, bureaucrats, and warriors whose activities intersect and
overlap. I can’t begin to recount the plot’s path nor even describe a “main”
character; there is just too much going on. But I can say that after a somewhat
slow start setting things up, Acts of Faith takes on the mysterious and
compelling flow of the very Nile that runs through the heart of this world.
Characters take moral stands, violence and hostility are around every corner,
hospitals are bombed, heroes killed, slaves taken and “repurchased” by
well-meaning Christian missionary groups from Iowa, locals get rich, weapons are
bought and sold, drought and starvation wear on the masses, hope turns to
cynicism… and on and on.
Acts of Faith is a powerful book and is immensely helpful in understanding
something about the difficulties in Africa. But like all good novels, it is
also about love and romance, courage, despair, ambition, and always – the
weather. It takes a certain amount of faith just to enter this long novel and
peek into Caputo’s world; but like many other challenging things we undertake on
faith alone, the rewards are worth the attempt.
Review by Bruce Jacobs, July 14, 2005
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