The Migrant, by Paul Alkazraji
“The opening lines make you, the reader, feel that the story has already been rollicking along like a bolting horse, and it is a pace that the storyteller never eases up on.” (from the back cover)
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As a member of my neighbourhood book club, I’d just dawdled through the critically-acclaimed ‘Nora Webster’ by Irish author Colm Toibin. This ‘beautifully written’ work could be said to have ambled along like a sleepy mule, the story accelerating towards walking pace by the end. To be fair, Toibin’s character portrayals and the way he developed them, were impressive. But you weren’t itching to bring the book with you to every doctor’s appointment. Yawns had to be stifled. Time for something faster-paced.
Well, The Migrant lived up to its blurb, and more so! Jude Kilburn is an English church pastor working in a poor rural village in the south of Albania. When Alban, a 19-year-old lad from his church, goes missing, Jude feels compelled to cross into Greece to rescue him. Jude’s wife Alex, who has just discovered she’s expecting their first child, struggles to let him go but has to accept he’s following his calling to find the ‘missing sheep’ from his flock.
Accompanied by a volatile secret service agent and a reformed gangster, Jude sets off to Athens on a rescue mission. Athens, in 2012, has become a fomenting mass of chaos. Violent anti-austerity riots, a ruthless crime syndicate and a cynical secret police operation…with danger at every turn, Jude and his ‘team’ search for a lead. By a daring combination of using their connections, boldness, sheer courage and Jude’s faith-based intuition, they draw closer to finding Alban. Meanwhile they have to escape from thugs hunting them!
The story at this point onwards becomes unbearably tense as they finally make contact with Alban and with a now-enslaved girl from their village. The next, homeward, chapter seems tranquil by comparison, until – once more – everything is plunged into turmoil. In the end, Alex comes to the rescue. After a vivid dream, she follows the guidance of the Holy Spirit and leads a small rescue party to locate her missing husband and to bring him and his friends to safety. Alas, not all of them…
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Paul, a fellow Yorkshire Christian writer, has lived in Albania for 22 years, for 13 of which he pastored a church in a rural Albanian village. The character Alban is a mélange of several lads he’s known who’ve attempted the dangerous journey over the mountains to Greece (see Paul pictured there) to seek work in Athens. The ‘reformed gangster’ is inspired by a real character who set out to kill a missionary but ended up becoming a man of faith.
Despite the pace of the novel, the scenes were so well described that I felt I’d travelled extensively around this part of the Balkans and to Athens (pictured from the Acropolis)! Paul has a led a workshop for our writers’ group on ‘evoking a setting in fiction’. To help with this, he and two young men had travelled the route in a similar car to that used in story, albeit rather less eventfully…
I asked him whether there was any basis for Alex’s remarkable ‘gift of knowledge’ about where to find Jude. Paul says: ‘Alex’s dream was inspired by scenes in the novel Jane Eyre. There is a person I know who has had dreams and strong impressions as gifts of the Holy Spirit and these were the inspiration for her rescue of Jude and gang…’
I’d add that you could find many other examples of guidance such as this from other sources, like ‘As Many as the Stars’ which I reviewed last year and in January this year, under the Stories/True Stories menu on my site.
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If you aren’t a believer, The Migrant will be a great read. Apart from the high drama, it helped me understand why people become migrants and how it feels to be one. But what I especially like is that, through it, you will understand what it’s like to follow Jesus, to live and breathe as a Christian who lives out his faith vibrantly, placing his full trust and confidence in God. But rest assured, it was no comfortable ride for Jude, nor will it be for you!!
You can buy it from Eden Christian Books or from Amazon.
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