One great aspect of traveling to new countries is visiting used books stores to find the donations of other globetrotters, books that otherwise wouldn’t be easily found in your local Salvation Army. A few months ago, I picked up such a find, The Sun Chemist by Lionel Davidson, from a bookstore in Bali.

I’ve read Lionel Davidson before. His book The Rose of Tibet was a thrilling and mysterious tale of a man trying to save a beautiful maiden from the Chinese Communists. I enjoyed that book so much that I eventually got into The Night of Wenceslas. Truth be told, I thought that this second book might actually be about Christmas (so I read it for the holidays), but it was a much subtler spy novel, trading suspense for the character’s romance with a woman much larger than he. Thus when I came to this book, I wasn’t quite sure on which end of the “thriller” spectrum Davidson might land this time.

The story is about a researcher who’s part of a team analyzing the life of a Jewish scientist-turned-politician by reviewing his many decades of notes and journals. When at one point they realize that in the 1930s, he might have chanced upon a method of converting a desert tuber into useful fuel, they set about to unravel the mystery that might end the then-current oil crises of the 1970s. The only problem is that it appears someone else is out to stop them.

The pace of this book is miserably slow. There is so much about patatas and the bore of research that I’m honestly surprised I kept at it until the end. It must have been the fact that I spent hundreds of thousands of rupiah on the dumb thing. I was rewarded, however, with the two final chapters which offered a small surprise and then an enjoyable (almost Geoffrey-Household-like) chase scene. The explanation of the story in the final pages, however, returned to its normal, boring pace and wasn’t at all satisfactory. I felt the “so what?” reaction to the story, and that’s never a good thing for an author to deliver.

All in all, this is the worst Davidson book I’ve read. I think I’ll give him one more go—Smith’s Gazelle looks interesting enough—but then I’ll have to leave him on the dusty shelves of back-alley bookstores in Asia.

©2019 E.T.

Read More from Lionel Davidson:

• Adult Novels:
  The Night of Wenceslas (1960)
  The Rose of Tibet (1962)
  The Menorah Men (UK title: A Long Way to Shiloh, 1966)
  Making Good Again (1968)
  Smith’s Gazelle (1971)
  The Sun Chemist (1976)
  Murder Games (UK title: The Chelsea Murders, 1978)
  Kolymsky Heights (1994)
• Youth Books:
  Soldier and Me (UK title: Run for Your Life, 1965, as David Line)
  Mike and Me (1974, as David Line)
  Under Plum Lake (1980 )
  Screaming High (1985, as David Line)