Mission

A novel set in Kenya

Michael, a missionary priest, has just killed Munyasya, a retired army officer. It might have been an accident, but Mulonzya, a politician resentful of the power of foreign churches, tries to exploit the tragedy for his own ends. Boniface, a young church worker, and his wife, Josephine, have just lost their child. They did not make it to the hospital in time, possibly because Michael made a detour to retrieve a letter from the Mission, a letter from Janet, a former volunteer teacher who was the priest’s neighbour for two years. It is Munyasya who has the last laugh, however, when he reveals that he was probably in control of events all along. Thirty years on, the same characters find their lives still influenced by his memory.

Origins

Mission grew out of my experience as a volunteer teacher in Migwani, Kenya, in the 1970s. I wrote it twenty years ago, as a sequel to a previous novel, A Fool's Knot, which dealt with the story of one of the minor characters of Mission, John Mwangangi. A Fool's Knot was never published, though I came very close to having it accepted by one of the major publishing houses in London. As career increasingly became my major preoccupation, I gave up trying to publish, but a few years later decided to create the larger picture surrounding the events of A Fool's Knot and wrote Mission, completing it around 1985. I wrote it for enjoyment and, apart from two or three letters to see if an agent might be interested in it, I did not pursue publication.

Career then took over completely and time evaporated. I changed jobs in London, moving from a secondary school to a sixth form college and took on more responsibilities than I had previously as a Head of Maths and Computing Department in a south London comprehensive. Though the particular college had, at the last count, two published novelists, my manuscript stayed firmly in electronic form in Wordperfect 5.1 on the household Amstrad. I thought it would go no further.

After moving, with the computer, to Brunei, Mission continued to languish in its own, but forgotten folder. When the computer screamed out to be replaced, I copied all the old folders onto floppy disks and transferred any current data to our new, resplendent 40MHz machine. Mission's folder stayed on its dedicated floppy disk until 2006.

Two countries later, having begun a new kind of life where my wife and I hoped there might be space for our own interests, I suddenly found that my major interest and preoccupation for several years was complete, bar the shouting of having the thesis lodged in the library! I had nothing to do - for a month at least. And there in an ancient and edge-frayed cardboard box of floppies there was a dusty five and a quarter labelled Mission. I had just bought another new computer, this one measured in gigas, which did not even have a floppy drive. Rather than just bin the thing, I powered up an old machine and attempted the transfer of Mission's five files via the vagaries of Microsoft's automatic conversion filters.

Four of the files appeared in the target window and were duly saved, but one, Janet's chapter, proved corrupt. No amount of reconstruction work on the diskette could resurrect it, so it went in the bin. I was somewhat gratified by the machine's aesthetic in rejecting it because the chapter was by far the weakest of the five. Having re-read the other four and been quite surprised to find that they were better than I remembered, I decided to revise the whole book. With that complete, I had to plug the gap left by the loss of Janet and, rather than return to the 1970s where the original version had been set, I decided to move the characters forward 30 years. The chapter seemed to write itself. It was a fundamentally strange experience to sit in a cafe in Benidorm's November sun over a coffee and realise, a couple of hours later, that three thousand words had spilled out.

And then Libros International appeared on the scene. I am grateful to Jill Lanchbery for the introduction and Mission is now published. Whatever people might find in it, I am happy to place on record here that I feel proud of the book. It says what I wanted, at least today. The manuscript of A Fool's Knot was recently retrieved, in hand-written form, from the loft of our house in Balham, London SW12. We had not set foot in the place for 14 and half years. The novel is in process...

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