The Zouave

Good wars are few. Most are pure folly, including the Falkland Islands War, which Jorge Borges likened to two bald men fighting over a comb. The U.K., in recession and downsizing, expressed willingness to part with its relic of empire in the distant South Atlantic, but not at the expense of the Scottish and Welsh islanders, who’d eked out an existence over a span of 150 years. That was the big sticking point. The Argentines, meanwhile, fervently believed they had a God-given right to the islands four hundred miles from their shores. It didn’t matter that they already had plenty of barren, windswept, underpopulated land in Patagonia or that the islanders would become citizens of a country ruled by military dictators who’d imprisoned, tortured, and “disappeared” thousands of innocent people. Instead, after seventeen years of fruitless negotiations, junta members thought a little war could rally nationalistic fervor, cast them as heroes, and distract from the country’s ongoing economic hardship, corruption, and carnage. When, in 1980, a small cabal of navy brass begins preparing for an invasion, a critically important element in their secret plan inadvertently surfaces in a most unlikely place: the village of Eygalières, in southern France. That’s where ex-spy, former schoolmaster, journalist, and painter Charlie Baker and his devoted companion, Sadie Winthrop, just happen to be hiding out after a close scrape with terrorists, as told in The Scam Artist: The Other Bosch. Hoping for peace and solitude beneath the warm sun of Provence, they instead find themselves helping a trusted friend who, at great personal risk, refuses to accept the inevitability of war. Caleb Bach’s third novel in the Río de la Plata Trilogy tells his story, and that of the mysterious title fi gure, who bravely fights his own internal battles. In stirring fashion, The Zouave: Madness in the Southlands melds history, intrigue, romance, and art to create an unusually compelling tale.