Book review: In Darkness

By EMMA COWING
Published on Tuesday 21 February 2012 00:00

AT 4.53PM on Tuesday, 12 January 2010, the island of Haiti was plunged into darkness.

The earth shook, buildings crumbled and thousands of people were buried under the rubble. For a country as impoverished and divided as Haiti, the earthquake was a humanitarian disaster that brought the country to its knees. After years of political revolution, questionable UN intervention and economic ruin, Haiti’s future became precariously balanced on its turbulent past.

It is into this bleak, uncertain world that Nick Lake brings his reader in his new novel, In Darkness. We meet Shorty – a 15-year-old gang member from Site Soley, a shanty town in Haiti’s capital Port au Prince. In hospital for a gunshot wound when the earthquake struck, he is now trapped underground, with only the rats for company. In an attempt to hold on to his sanity he begins to tell his story – from his birth, as one half of twins born during an earlier earthquake and delivered by Haiti’s former president Jean-Baptiste Aristide, to his father’s brutal murder at the hands of masked intruders, his sister’s disappearance, and his subsequent descent into the murky underworld of Haiti’s ganglands.

Meanwhile, as his body grows ever weaker trapped underground, he dreams of another story – that of the Haitian slave Toussaint, who led the country’s black population to freedom two centuries earlier, and with whom he has an intriguing amount in common.

Billed as a book for adults and “older teens”, In Darkness is complex, human and enormously gripping.

Linking the Haitian ganglands with a world where magic happens and death sometimes does not, it is a novel that feels, in parts, like an episode of The Wire as retold by a Cloud Atlas-era David Mitchell.

Which is to say that In Darkness is brutal and stark, poetic and soulful – and definitely worth keeping the light on for.

• In Darkness

Nick Lake

Bloomsbury, £12.99