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adam_mcphee 's review for:
Kolymsky Heights
by Lionel Davidson
Amazing.
Johnny Porter is an Indigenous Canadian from British Columbia who escaped residential school to become a sailor, then went to university, got a Rhodes scholarship and became a professor at UVic and McGill, working on treaty issues and picking up languages the whole time. (By my count, Porter knows or is familiar with: English, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Tsimshian, Inuit, Eskimo, Gitxsan, Ainu, Chukchi, Evenk, Yukagir and Yakut.)
Through the course of the novel he infiltrates a Japanese tramp freighter (posing as a Korean deckhand), a Siberian trucking company (posing as a Chukchi driver), a secret Russian military base (posing as an Evenk reindeer herder turned porter), an Inuit fishing community, and so on. He's a James Bond for the underclass.
Is it believable? Each section by itself is, but not quite as a whole. But who cares? It's the kind of fun adventure story that you don't see anymore. The climax was amazingly fun.
My only complaint is that were only featured for fifteen or twenty pages.
Johnny Porter is an Indigenous Canadian from British Columbia who escaped residential school to become a sailor, then went to university, got a Rhodes scholarship and became a professor at UVic and McGill, working on treaty issues and picking up languages the whole time. (By my count, Porter knows or is familiar with: English, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Tsimshian, Inuit, Eskimo, Gitxsan, Ainu, Chukchi, Evenk, Yukagir and Yakut.)
Through the course of the novel he infiltrates a Japanese tramp freighter (posing as a Korean deckhand), a Siberian trucking company (posing as a Chukchi driver), a secret Russian military base (posing as an Evenk reindeer herder turned porter), an Inuit fishing community, and so on. He's a James Bond for the underclass.
Is it believable? Each section by itself is, but not quite as a whole. But who cares? It's the kind of fun adventure story that you don't see anymore. The climax
Spoiler
of Johnny Porter travelling to and crossing the Bering Strait Ice Curtain on skisMy only complaint is that