Scott Anderson’s new novel, “Moonlight Hotel,” starts out so innocently – and innocuously. Protagonist David Richards is a midlevel diplomat assigned to monitor development projects in the languid and tiny fictional Middle East kingdom of Kutar. He spends his time with water projects and making the rounds of embassy parties in the kingdom’s sophisticated capital of Laradan.
Richards has been known to drink a bit too much and to cavort with women, but on the whole he’s a decent, if not overly ambitious, sort.
But there is – as they say – trouble brewing in the northern part of the country, where rebels are flexing their muscles for the umpteenth time during the past few centuries. Because this is nothing new and because nothing has ever come from these uprisings in the past, the residents of coastal Laradan are unconcerned.
With the help of a bungling U.S. Marine named Col. Munn, the local army rushes into the hills to stop the rebel advance, but the army is quickly overcome by the rebels as they advance on Laradan and eventually put the city under siege.
When all foreigners are ordered out of Laradan, Richards is ordered by his bosses to stay behind. With an assortment of a few other embassy types and a couple of expatriates, he holes up in the once- spectacular Moonlight Hotel. This is where the story becomes less lighthearted and more interesting.
The small group at the hotel includes the foppish British diplomat Nigel Mayhew; Paolo, an Italian businessman; the beautiful Amira Chalasani, a wealthy woman whose family was from Kutar but now lives in England; Stewart McBride, a jaded American freelance war correspondent; and the elderly woman known as the Contessa di Timisora, who claims to be Romanian royalty run out of her country by the communists.
Anderson ratchets up the suspense as the siege intensifies, and conditions in Laradan become more dire, and this is where he brings the real meat of the novel into play.
Anderson makes no secret of where he stands when it comes to whether it is wise for the United States to inject itself into the affairs of other nations.
For example, he not only has the American military plan to defeat the rebels fail miserably, he casts the Marine Col. Munn as something of a buffoon – a decidedly dangerous one, but a buffoon nonetheless.
Here is a passage from the story when Col. Munn explains to the American diplomats that the rebels have ordered them out of Kutar: “Now, I got too much respect for you people to try and softball this thing, so allow me to be blunt: In analyzing the suboptimal success trends we got going around here, it appears that errors in judgment may have occurred.”
Another officer tells the embassy staff a destroyer will “initiate destinal progress at full-speed for city of Laradan, Kingdom of Kutar, with said vessel projectioned to eventuate contact at 2100 hundred hours Thursday. At 0800 hours Friday, personnel extraction will commencify from Pier 4 …”
As the situation in Laradan worsens, Anderson’s prose becomes more serious, and it is when he discusses the effects of the shelling on the civilians in the city that the sense of doom pervades. As a war correspondent himself, Anderson knows what he is talking about, and the passages about the minutiae of war, the mundane things that only those who have been there notice, are particularly moving.
He has Richards react to the shelling like this: “In all the books he had read, in all the movies he had seen, David couldn’t recall any reference to the sheer masses of paper that war lets loose, that it might flutter through the sky amid the smoke and dust like confetti, that it might spread so thickly over the ground that it resembled a blotchy blanket of snow. Letters, accounting ledgers, children’s schoolwork, pages torn from magazines, the paper was all around him as he walked through Laradan that day. It skipped along the gutters. It waved at him from ruins. It clutched at his ankles as he stepped.”
“Moonlight Hotel” is a cautionary tale about one country meddling in the affairs of another to ill effect. But more, it’s a story about the psychic toll war can take on people, particularly the innocent.
Books editor Tom Walker can be reached at 303-820-1624 or twalker@denverpost.com.
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Moonlight Hotel
By Scott Anderson
Doubleday, 383 pages, $24.95
