MixedThe Guardian (UK)Mortals is, among a lot of other things, a story of spies in a hot climate that turns into a meditation upon morality. Indeed, over the remarkable opening chapters broods the approving shade of Graham Greene. Mortals is, in some ways, a kind of \'our man in Botswana\'. Except that the man in this case is American; and although Rush has absorbed and understood southern Africa in a way few of his compatriots have done, none the less this is a novel about political power and that, more than ever, means America ... The way Rush discloses his people by offering us their souls in sections is very fine. His burly, rolling prose is the perfect foil for quick, delicate insights. It is what makes him such a good writer of stories. And that, frankly, is the best of this novel: the delicate unpacking of tragicomic lives with which it opens. The disappointment for those who admire Rush\'s fiction is that what he begins so strongly, he does not sustain.
