Plot closed - use diversion
- Domino Island by Desmond Bagley
This review contains spoilers. They aren’t specific and shouldn’t affect your enjoyment of the book.
I’d not read any Desmond Bagley before, somehow his work had escaped me. Bagley was a big cheese in the thriller world back in the late sixties and seventies, his books were bestsellers and many were adapted for film and television. He died in 1983. In 2017 an unpublished first draft, written in 1972 and provisionally titled Because Sultan Died was unearthed. The manuscript was type-written and marked in pencil with various notes made by the author and his publisher. It was subsequently prepared for publishing by writer and Bagley aficionado, Michael Davies into the renamed novel, Domino Island, published in 2019.
Davies describes his contribution to the project as being that of curator. His intention seems to have been to preserve the integrity of Bagley’s draft whilst actioning the writers and the publisher’s scribbled notations in order to ready the manuscript for publication. Davies says that in addition he also filtered out anachronisms and made the character’s attitudes and behaviours palatable for today’s reader. This, he appears to have done without his intervention being noticeable; the dated behaviours of the characters are evident but there’s nothing there to offend. Importantly, Davies hasn’t attempted to graft a modern view onto the characters’ morals, something which would undoubtedly have stuck out like a sore thumb of colour. Davies reportedly kept his creative input to a minimum, making only limited structural changes and editing or developing underwritten scenes just where he felt necessary.
We can assume then that Bagley’s writing style has been honestly preserved, and it’s very much of the period and very much to my taste. The protagonist is extremely well-formed and, written in the first person, the tale works well as an Audible audiobook narrated by Paul Tyreman. I enjoyed the story very much, it ticked all of my boxes: a great sixties period feel; an international setting, when international still stood for something exotic; great scene-setting; a Bond-style hero; strong, characterful and beautiful women; wealthy lifestyles; sun-drenched escapism; fast-paced action and intrigue. Definitely intrigue. Domino Island delivered on all the above for me. However, I do have a fairly sizable gripe…
The story is set up well and it proceeds very nicely with the reader on board with protagonist Bill Kemp who’s been dispatched to Campanilla, a fictitious tropical island and former British colony in the Caribbean. Kemp is a freelance intelligence consultant sent there on behalf of an insurance company to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of a wealthy and politically important man, David Sultan. Kemp suspects those circumstances to be suspicious and soon finds them deeply knotted and tangled into the Island’s economic and volatile political situation as the island approaches an important election. The tension and intrigue build as Kemp meets the various Islanders who populate the story and tries to figure out what exactly has gone on, and so unfolds an intriguing and, so far, wholly satisfying political thriller. And then, about three-quarters of the way through something inexplicable happens.
The plot takes a sudden and unexpected diversion. The characters all remain but the carefully constructed politically driven narrative is abruptly abandoned to be replaced instead by something quite different. It’s as if we’ve left the smoothly tarmacadamed roadway for a rutted dirt track and now the story is bumping along it at a complete tangent to the main highway. Suddenly we’re in a different story, not a bad one but certainly not the one we started out in. And perhaps that’s exactly what’s happened?
Knowing the novel had been developed by Davies from Bagley’s first draft, at first, I suspected that the original manuscript was incomplete, that the end was either too thinly sketched out to be developed by Davies into something which coherently tied all the strands of the plot together into a satisfying conclusion or that Bagley simply hadn’t written an ending to the story. But in fact, this isn’t the case, the original manuscript was complete and this was the ending which Bagley had himself written. It's curious because what we get instead of any conclusion to what has gone before feels like something else grafted on, morphing the carefully developed political thriller into an action-adventure story. And when this sudden and inexplicable transition happens it’s like being in a car with a learner driver attempting to change gear for the very first time. It’s that bad. So, what happened?
Reading up on Bagley, it becomes evident that, when he wrote Because Sultan Died, the writer was coming towards the end of a period of sustained writers’ block. He’d started several novels but was unable to complete any of them. My best guess is that in the case of this manuscript, having come to a dead-end, instead of giving up, Bagley just powered on through, concocting an ending of sorts, perhaps just to get the thing finished. Maybe the ending came from another of his incomplete manuscripts of the time or was just an outline he had for another story. This is conjecture of course, we’ll never know.
But it does feel like the ending has been extracted from something else and attached into the main body of the book, like a heart surgeon transplanting a doner organ. Except here, in place of a heart Bagley’s used a bull’s testicle. Right kind of size but it doesn’t exactly fit and it doesn’t really work. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so rude about Bagley – especially as he’s no longer around to defend himself from such scathing words and, in any case, he never intended for the story to be put in the public domain in the first place – but maybe this contributed to the reason the manuscript wasn’t bothered about, wasn’t worked up into a second draft and never went on to be published at the time. Instead, it was dismissed by both him and his publishers. Bagley unblocked his writer’s block shortly afterwards and the creative flurry of new work which followed buried the draft which was subsequently forgotten about.
The matter of the last quarter is a shame as I enjoyed Bagley’s writing, I liked the story and I wanted it to end in a fulfilling manner – which it didn’t. Could Davies not have intervened? Well, I’m sure the task of piecing together another writer’s manuscript and determining where exactly to place the knife wasn’t an easy one. Maybe he recognised the problem but either he or the publishers felt it better to use the original work, flawed as it was, over superimposing another writer’s words and their own plotting over the final acts instead? Still, I would at least have liked a better transition, maybe a top-up of oil in the gearbox to help cope with Bagley’s dropped clutch. The embryo of the events which later hatch in the last quarter is glimpsed earlier in the novel, some threads are loosely dropped into the story but I would have liked them to have been woven into the narrative’s fabric. Maybe then, the change in direction wouldn’t have felt so jarring.
For me, one thing which Domino Island has achieved though is opening up Bagley’s writing to me and I look forward to reading another of his thrillers, one which he felt worthy of publication.
About the author
Desmond Bagley 1923-1983. Photo credit: Graham Jackson, The Bagley Brief
Everything you could possibly want to know about Desmond Bagley, you’ll find on The Bagley Brief, a website dedicated to the author’s work.