A few days ago someone I know in publishing sent me a copy of a book and asked me to have a look at it. It was called Chaotic Butterfly by a writer I had never heard of called James Amoah. Could I review it?

I smiled. As readers know, I am not a kind reviewer. I like to beat bad books half to death, and, let’s face it, most books nowadays are bad. Also, I generally focus on science fiction, a field that has more bad books than CIA poppy fields have poppies. The book in question was not even SF, it seemed, but really, so what? Any victim will do when one is in a crabby enough mood, and I had not yet had my morning coffee.

So I got out my truncheon, all prepared to flip through its pages and break its bones with leering savagery; and—to my shock—I found myself more intrigued and impressed by this book than by anything I’ve read in a good long while. In fact, I was so intrigued that I bought the first book in what appears to be the trilogy—Devil In The Chain. Which left me even more impressed, this time with the author.

Devil In The Chain—you can get a copy here from Amazon.com—is not on a par with Chaotic Butterfly. But what struck me about that first book was its simple competence. The book was brisk, clever, cleanly written, fast-moving and surprisingly informative. Apparently Mr. Amoah is a supply chain consultant and trainer based in Europe, and the book traced literally every step in the production of chocolate, from its starting point as a seed planted in African fields through its harvesting and shipping and eventual factory processing offshore to its distribution to chocolate shops.

“Who cares?” you may say. And I suppose most readers may not care. I don’t! Chocolate production documentaries excite neither me nor the best seller lists.

But I am giving a very poor description of the book if I reduce it to that.

Around the timeline of the way the a piece of chocolate is made and taken to market, Mr. Amoah built a quite ingenious thriller, rich in car chases, international settings, sorely challenged heroes and heroines, a disfigured crime lord as its maniacal villain, and a mystery that remained unresolved till the genuinely surprising surprise ending.

The prose read like a British mystery, and I was delighted to see Mr. Amoah excel in two items rarely seen in fiction anymore: genuinely good and decent protagonists, and a happy ending. I liked the people I read about, and I was happy to see things turn out well for them. Only a very good writer can get away with that nowadays. Anti-heroes, navel-gazing inverts, and mandatory politically correct stick figures are the current rule in fiction. Mr. Amoah’s good guys were so good they did not even preach: he let the goodness of his people speak for itself. They made me feel rather good, and the happy ending left me feeling rather happy. Wow, I had actually enjoyed myself, and even learned a little something. Not my usual reading experience.

But though I enjoyed Devil In The Chain, and recommend it, I was not that taken with it as a writer. Yes, it was well written, well structured, entertaining and all that. I came away knowing a good deal more about supply chains and how chocolates are made. But it wasn’t Proust. It wasn’t Kafka. It was competently done genre fiction—fun, but not a serious capital-N Novel by a capital-N Novelist addressing deep themes, the woeful human heart, internally conflicted characters, the clash of civilizations, God, Meaning, The Way We Live Now.

Mind you, had I read Devil In The Chain first, and learned that Mr. Amoah had written a sequel, I’d have picked it right up, expecting another quick bit of fun. Fun is good!

But anyone who approaches Chaotic Butterfly with that shallow expectation will be dumbfounded. Mr. Amoah seems to have taken the light elements of his first book and raised them exponentially in the second, lifting it to the brink of true fiction. I say ‘the brink’ because Amoah has somehow managed to keep all the elements and more that kept readers on the edge of their seats in the first book—the car chases and criminal mafiosi and international spies, the murder mysteries and assiduous cops and cliffhanger twists and turns and spectacular explosions.

Yet, for all that, Chaotic Butterfly is the work of a novelist, a person of scope and depth presenting evolving characters in a world of equal scope and depth. Amoah is no longer playing a friendly game of checkers with the reader. He’s playing high-level chess now; and chess for blood.

The impressive thing about the book—one of several impressive things—is that Amoah managed to build it all on the previous simple structure. The Anan family, the protagonists of Devil In The Chain, are still there leading the story, but now the single-minded supply-chain-obsessed Johanna is in charge, and finds market share dropping, criminal influence threatening, and financial complexity and innovation stripping control from her hands. We see Jacob, a callow adolescent in Devil, growing from existential uncertainty into the adulthood of a committed, mature love. Benjamin Anan, almost more adolescent than Jacob at the beginning of the new book, evolves into something hard and lonely by the volume’s end, powerful and wealthy but swelling in anger and destructive force. A not dissimilar arc is followed by his father, Michael Anan, who passes from something like an irresponsible middle-age-crisis party animal at the start of the book to an older, emotionally scarred, political activist by its end. A sadder arc is traced by Edward Warped, passing from incarceration and homelessness, to overnight wealth and fame, only to sink back into madness.

But this is one of the marks of genuine fiction. Living characters that grow, rather than stock characters that persist as fixed quantities.

Amoah continues to excel at creating characters who are simply good—the care-giving Naomi Anan, for instance, or Edward’s handmaiden Capucine Ember. He also paints characters who are unqualifiedly evil, though far from being cartoons—Kwaku, the villain from Devil who returns with a flamboyant vengeance, or the deranged former child soldier and cult leader Kevin.

But while the characters in Chaotic Butterfly are anything but grey, he now deploys them to explore ethical areas that are deeply ambiguous. The Chinese agent Robert Clark, the upper-class charmer Philip Ellbourne, the highly ambiguous Maddok Rott-Charlus, coldly shaping a better world behind the EU curtains—are these people good or evil? I honestly don’t know. I don’t know that they know, but I know that their uncomfortable ambiguity is riveting.

I was especially taken by Robert Clark, whom Amoah follows from a starveling child in the exterminatory work fields of the Cultural Revolution to the very peak of Chinese political hierarchy, dealing brisk terror without hesitation, yet all the while haunted by the legacy of a residual Christianity left by his missionary foster parents.

Chaotic Butterfly, like Devil, is didactic: again Amoah wants to show us the operations of the supply chain. But he isn’t as heavy-handed about it as in the first novel. In Chaotic Butterfly, Amoah has jumped from analyst to humanist: in the first book he traced a single supply chain, but here he traces the social and emotional environment driving and enabling it. He also shows us the supply chain evolving, developing and changing under the impact of new technological developments.

Chaotic Butterfly, like its predecessor, shows the reader how things get done, but now his subject is not so much a relatively simple specific business process but the highly complex social process through which all such lesser processes move and change.

As Amoah presents it, it moves in striking, dramatic ways. Innovation in production can stem from the near-mad (Edward), it can be driven by and at the same time crippled by greed (Jean-Claude) or doltish accident (d’Oven) or behind-the-scenes interference (Rott-Charlus), or it can be accelerated by shallow but vital recklessness (Benjamin). Progress is made, but not without struggle, or the constant presence of the accidental and unexpected. If one single supply chain process was a central theme of Devil, the way in which human pressures and technical innovations distort and transform—and improve and elevate!—supply chains is the theme of Butterfly.

Yet somehow Amoah manages to transmute these abstract corporate conflicts into real, intense, drama. I certainly did not expect to be moved by seeing a businesswomen grappling with the impact of blockchain on her business. But I was: Amoah manages to bring out the human and social grace notes accompanying these processes, their story, and the result is both involving as fiction and illuminating as non-fiction.

Chaotic Butterfly is not a collection of business speeches mouthed by cartoon characters along the lines of Goldratt’s The Goal, however. It is absolutely fascinating to see the way it approaches literature, without ever quite giving up its grip on supply chain and genre requirements. On that last criteria, it overdelivers. Butterfly opens vividly with the spectacular crime scene mandatory for a thriller. A swift turn to the Anans finds Jacob in jail, and CEO Johanna selecting one Mary Cloutie—apparently a spy controlled by the Chinese agent Robert Clark—to head up marketing. Jo’s brother Benjamin introduces a mad but brilliant nerd developer to launch a new blockchain innovation which will make the family rich, but which conceals an emergent sentient AI designed to wipe out as much of the mankind the nerd despises as possible.

Meanwhile the shadowy Clark learns of Russian monitoring of a Chinese biowarfare installation. He destroys both the Russians and the Chinese involved, but regrettably their destruction unleashes a fatal bioweapon that destroys an entire American town. America blames Russia. Thermonuclear war is in the air.

And if the missiles fail to drop? No problem: there’s a rogue Chinese eugenics project threatening to wipe out all mankind too. Oh, and did I mention that Kwaku, the missing Ghanaian crime lord, pops up to obliterate the entire Russian Mafia in continental Europe, while a cult deifies him?

Speaking as a writer, it is borderline amazing to me that Amoah could have assembled this wild and apocalyptic a set of plot elements, constantly ratcheting up the stakes, and yet filled the looming cataclysms of his construction with touching family scenes, moving notes of unrequited love, cutting-edge international business concerns, detailed discussions of blockchain and Chinese supply chain prospects, and—well, suffice it to say, and this is my main judgment on Chaotic Butterfly: it is an astonishingly ambitious book. Amoah is stretching himself, and it is a dazzling, admirable, performance to see: he is trying to grasp the world as a whole, and to see more deeply into the heart of his characters at the same time; all this through the lens of a business process, supply chain, that is holding it all together even as it changes under our eyes. He seems to have leapt from being a more than decent mystery novelist to one of the more serious writers currently taking up the pen, all in one completely unexpected jump—but without jettisoning any the thriller elements that contain and drive it all. If anything he’s amped them up!

I would be lying if I said Chaotic Butterfly is flawless. Any book as rich would inevitably be long, but there are business discussions and scenes that could do with some compression. It would benefit from additional editing. Additional proofreading, too. I look forward to a tighter second edition.

Yet at the same time, when I finished the book, I was sorry: a part of me wished it were longer. From blockchain, to sentient AI, to internal Chinese Communist politics, to globalized crime, to playing tips on wei chi, to the question of who really runs the EU, to psychedelic hallucination, to the origins of religions, to Hermès’ pricier selection of scarves (!), Amoah touches on so many intriguing subjects that you wish he could dwell on them more.

Possibly it’s because of his global supply chain background: he seems to be able to grasp all the disparate threads of our modern world as a whole and highlight the key threads hurling it careening forward into—what? Amoah makes us wonder, and that is one of the great attractions and weaknesses of the book. He tries so hard to say so much that the book points beyond itself: it seems to want to burst its covers.

Writers read books differently than the public reads books. We read competitively, looking for skillful performances from which we can learn, and I have to confess: it’s as a writer that I was most taken by much of this book. Amoah approaches his craft not just with skill but with a kind of quirky cunning. He makes such interesting decisions.

Why, for all the book’s length, did I come away with such a sense of compression? The Benjamin Anan arc alone contained enough material to have made a decent standalone novel. The same could be said for the Robert Clark arc, the d’Oven-Duvalier arcs, the rise and fall of the Ciorans, the tragic story of Michael Anan. It’s as though six or more novels are trembling inside Chaotic Butterfly, trying to break out of its skin. Writers are lazy, man. Why didn’t he simply sit back and let them drop from his pen one by one?

His setting descriptions puzzled me too. Though he has a gift for language, he provides surprisingly little in terms of description and locale. (I think he feels that television and Internet make it unnecessary to describe a Paris street or Swiss cafe anymore.)

Most impressive: his masterly counterpoint. These are long story lines and long speeches in this long book, but Amoah has a positive genius for intercutting. The reader hops from scene to scene in bite-size chunks briskly ripped from its many crises. The technique raises new mysteries as quickly it resolves old ones and the story flies forward. In a book marked by long and serious discussions, things rarely seem to drag, because the author is canny enough to pull away briefly to a vertiginous threat, and then—at the point of its maximum tension—pull back to the earlier discourse.

Yes, the reader’s teeth grind—what happens after the heroine is thrown out the skyscraper window, James?

Hang on, reader, you’ll find out. But first a page on blockchain interfaces!

As the story cut away at the point of maximum tension, this reader cursed the author aloud. But also zipped through the intervening pages to learn what happened.

(A warning to readers: I repeatedly cussed Amoah out for ending the book on the same trick. That last line! I wanted to throttle the author. What, now I have to wait till Book Three comes out? Tell me what happened next right now, Amoah! Grrrr. It’s the sort of writerly trick that has the reader salivating to buy the next book; and, curse him, it works.)

Amoah has other felicities: he eschews gore and porn, for which I pat him on the back. I don’t believe I read the ‘F’ word once. An unimaginable reticence in what passes for literature today! Mercifully, the book is refreshingly non-American; I barely noticed the fact while reading, but I can’t recall a single Yank.

I was pleasantly surprised too to realize that race is not especially emphasized at all, not in either book. Amoah’s people are people first and stereotypes not at all: he seems willing to allow the reader to fill in the colors as they choose, if they choose, but he himself focuses on their intellectual and ethical character: the flavor of their minds and souls, not the color of their bodies. Though an African novelist from a continent and people much scarred by racism, his world is curiously and almost casually post-racist. I was reminded, strangely, of Star Trek: ‘All that nonsense is a thing of the past,’ his books seem to say. ‘We don’t bother with it.’ Would that the world agreed.

But is he an African novelist? I have a taste for non-Western literature, and I know of a few quite fine Ghanaian writers. The Ghanaian detective fiction of Kwei Quartey (a possible influence on Devil In The Chain?) is first-rate. But as a rule writers from that area of the world suffer from the unfortunate tic of much African fiction: an unwavering focus on local custom and history, a backwards glance fixed upon the miseries of colonization, a sort of literary nationalism that speaks to fellow nationals but not to the world.

Amoah—while clearly a Ghanaian patriot—seems to have shaken off such narrow localism completely. He celebrates Ghana, to be sure, but he writes as a citizen of the world. I would not be surprised at all if someone reading Chaotic Butterfly thought the author British, or Swiss, or American, or even a Chinese expatriate. He could pass for all these things, yet he is none of these things: Amoah is a man and writer of the age of globalization. He modulates through cultures like a pianist moving from one key to the next. But he hasn’t forgotten the cost, either: the nostalgia of his characters for the vanished sense of home lilts through each.

If we may consider him a Ghanian novelist for the moment, however, then literature in that country has taken a major step forward. There are worthy writers from that country to be sure, but the autobiographical slices-of-life that pass for African fiction generally, are nothing like the international scope of Chaotic Butterfly. Amoah is and is not a Ghanaian novelist, is and is not a European novelist, is and is not a British novelist. Yet I have no doubt that he has entered the ranks of notable Ghanian writers with this book, and that as a Ghanaian novelist, he’s broken through the limits of its localism completely, and opened the scope of the Ghanaian novel to incorporate the entire world.

Another complete surprise: the Chinese emphasis. I figured a Ghanaian writer living in Europe would write about Ghana and Europe. Reasonable, no? Yet Amoah has a strong focus on China throughout, and he seems to understand it from the most intricate of its supply chain challenges, to the horror of the Chinese Communist Party’s roots in Maoist genocide, to the whiff of Taoism in its foreign policy, to the metaphysical metaphors of its board games, to the impact of Christianity on its political future.

How many ‘pulse-pounding thrillers,’ how many Western novels of any sort being written today, even touch on these matters? Is this Amoah the business analyst seeing the looming rise of Chinese influence and addressing its nature and impact because of its sheer importance? I don’t know. I also don’t know if the Chinese leadership are reading this book. They should be.

But enough. All right, I’m raving. What can I say? Normally I read cheesy rot about space ships and robots and crawling mutant slime. Chaotic Butterfly proved a breath of fresh air. I love this book for that alone. But more than that: I respect it. I don’t know whether the reader smart enough to buy a copy will love it as much, or get quite as much of a kick, but I do know they will enjoy it. Bullets fly, planes crash, crises and cliffhangers abound, as does frequent wit, scenes that will make the reader laugh outright, and (not least) Amoah’s wonderful gift for words. One has but to quote. Consider his his description of his two principal investigators:

     “Duvalier had the looks, physique and mindset of filmdom’s next James Bond. A John Barry soundtrack seemed subliminally to accompany him. By contrast, O. O. had a face that was a cross between a large dyspeptic frog and a somewhat molten Winston Churchill.”

Or:

     “Not for Siggi the tram, or a common Uber. As he watched mobs of sorry untermenschen flock over the streets to their jobs and clerkships, he thanked the gods—the Greek gods, of course—at the thought of how superior his life was to his fellow men, if indeed he could refer to the grey-suited drones shuffling along the streets as that. To Siggi they seemed dour overcoated cattle trying not to slip on the assiduously reluctant patch of ice that never seemed to entirely leave the streets.

     “As his taxi passed the beating heart of Zurich, the Union Bank of Switzerland, Siggi noted protestors milling outside the edifice waving signs. “Hitler’s Bankers” announced one. He noted the ragged jeans of the protestors with disdain.

     “Peasants. At least the Nazis had fashion sense!”

 

Or:

     “Young Cioran’s eyes were piercingly intense, blue as diamond; his body was cadaverous, his hair close-cropped. His sharp features were a strange mixture of Hawking and Auschwitz.

Or:

     “For a moment all his businesses, all his investments, all his financial instruments broke across his intellect as a single unified whole. The complexity of economic trends, rising inflation, falling rates of interest, derivatives, loans, portfolios, all took on a sudden luminous clarity, as though he were looking into the complex ellipses of an atomic particle, or a solar system. He felt like a brilliant chess prodigy suddenly seeing beyond individual moves and standardized openings into the game itself, into what it was to be a master of the game”

The lines sing. Yet this book is so well written that the writing is not the focus. If you want to know how chocolate production operates, read Devil In The Chain. If you want to know how the world operates, read Chaotic Butterfly. Yes, it’s an uneven work in some ways—not the work of a writer who has (yet) reached his full measure.

But that’s what I found amazing and even inspiring about it—the sense that this is a writer who will grow, a writer of profound ambition grappling with no less profound aspects of the world we live in today. Genre fiction is soon forgotten, but in Chaotic Butterfly James Amoah is admirably striving for something more; something that will not just inform and entertain, but enlighten, and that may live.

Is he equal to understanding our strange, recklessly evolving world? Ah, who is? But Mr. Amoah is trying, and trying to the limits of his remarkable and considerable abilities. I certainly look forward to the works that will follow.