The Mission Song

Bruno Salvador, known to friends and enemies alike as Salvo, is the ever-innocent, twenty-nine-year-old orphaned love-child of a Catholic Irish missionary and a Congolese headman's daughter. Educated first at mission school in the East Congolese province of Kivu, and later at a discreet sanctuary for the secret sons of Rome. Salvo is inspired by his mentor Brother Michael to train as a professional interpreter in the minority African languages of which, almost from birth, he has been an obsessive collector.
Soon a rising star in his profession, he is courted by City corporations, hospitals, law courts, the Immigration services and - inevitably - the mushrooming overworld of British Intelligence. He is also courted - and won - by the all-white. Surrey-born Penelope, star reporter on one of our great national newspapers, whom with typical impulsiveness he promptly marries. Yet even as the story opens, a contrary and irresistible love is dawning in him.
Despatched to a no-name island in the North Sea to attend a top-secret meeting between Western financiers end East Congolese warlords, Salvo is obliged to interpret matters never intended for his reawakened African conscience. By turn thriller, love story and comic allegory of our times, The Mission Song recounts Salvo's heroically naïve journey out of the dark of Western hypocrisy, and into the heart of lightness.