Sophfronia Scott's Blog: Sophfronia Scott, Author - Posts Tagged "matthew-gavin-frank"

Flight of the Diamond Smugglers: A Tale of Pigeons, Obsession, and Greed Along Coastal South Africa by Matthew Gavin Frank

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


While reading this book I kept thinking of the 1971 James Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever, specifically the scene where Bond, played by Sean Connery, is briefed on diamond smuggling in South Africa. Miners are shown hiding diamonds in their teeth and then having them extracted by a dentist who is in on the heist. Flight of the Diamond Smugglers tells the real-life version of the same issue—diamond mining and smuggling in South Africa. However, the intricacies of the stylized Hollywood plot of the Bond film seemed heavily complicated as I thought of the boy that author Matthew Gavin Frank meets and of the homing pigeon the barely teenaged miner keeps in his lunchbox. When watchful eyes are elsewhere, he ties little bags of purloined diamonds to the bird’s legs and body before sending it to fly home to the waiting hands of the boy’s mother.

One of the cover endorsements for this book called it “…smartly researched by someone with a big heart and a beautiful mind.” The author’s heart is what makes this book deeper than the usual exposé. There’s an undercurrent of vulnerability running throughout the narrative, springing from a tremendous personal loss that opens the book. By the end you learn Frank’s connection and sympathy is not only authentic, it is deeply ingrained within his being from a time when he was about the same age as the boy miner.

The prose is lyrical, the research tight, the arc of suspense masterfully constructed. Frank examines the history of diamond mining and its horrific effects both for the people and the landscape of coastal South Africa. Unexpected moments of beauty rise from the garbage and fossil-strewn sand of the beaches as the author turns his sympathetic heart to the ghost towns that once teemed with life and the bloody cough of the boy miner that he knows will never heal. Frank especially soars, literally, when writing from the point of view of a smuggling pigeon whose flight home may or may not be completed. This is an absorbing and, at times, sad and painful read. But Frank’s heartfelt investment makes it an unexpected treasure.




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