The Lost City, by Henry Shukman

Andean adventures

A young British soldier, Jackson Small, invalided out of the Army after an incident in the rainforest of Belize in which his best friend lost his life, wakes up one day in a field near his parents' home and is taken to a military hospital suffering from post-traumatic stress. Unable to adjust to civilian life, he sets off for Peru in search of a lost city once glimpsed by his fallen comrade, Connolly.

Henry Shukman's Sandstorm, which won the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award in 2006, was an intense exploration of love, loyalty, regret, and the failure of idealism, in which a washed-up foreign correspondent looks back on his life and tries to figure out how it all went wrong. The Lost City follows hot on its heels, and explores similar themes on a broader canvas.

Robbed of his money, passport and equipment, Jackson is befriended by a stray child, Ignacio, accompanied everywhere by his cat. At first the boy appears to be a liability, someone who needs to be placed in the care of a responsible adult before any harm can befall him, but it soon becomes apparent that his resourcefulness is an asset.

In a small coastal town, Jackson meets and falls in love with Sarah, a young American backpacking through Peru to get over a failed relationship and to visit her uncle Alfredo. He has dropped out of Western society for a less materialistic life farming in the Andean foothills, close to where Connolly glimpsed his lost city. In Chachapoyas, the young couple meet Father Beltran, a tough-minded, big-hearted priest struggling to save street children and the local campesinos from the depredations of the drug barons. Both Alfredo and Father Beltran urge Jackson to abandon his quest; if his city even exists, there are powerful forces in the area with compelling reasons not to want another Machu Picchu discovered on their doorstep.

With enough gunfights and explosions to spark a bidding war for film rights, this might seem like Boys' Own stuff. But Shukman is also a fine poet and acclaimed travel writer, and the adventure is matched by the beauty of the descriptive writing. He knows this unique landscape well, and evokes its different moods and aspects, its shifting play of light and colour, its isolated, dusty towns with their old Spanish churches, and the lives of its people who live and work close to the land.

Inevitably, this kind of writing excites comparisons with Conrad, and the description of the bleak coastline of northern Peru, with its enervating climate and its sleepy, forgotten ports, could almost come from Nostromo. And there is more than a tinge of Greene about Brown, the seedy British consul holed up in a flea-bitten Andean town, who lusts hopelessly after Sarah, secretly hoping that Jackson will get himself killed because "everyone knew bereaved women were the most seductible".

Lost in the cloud forest, Jackson stumbles into the US Drug Enforcement Agency's helicopter-borne war against "narco-terrorists", and is forced to acknowledge that his quest is compromised from the outset, and to learn some uncomfortable truths about himself, his own sexuality, the Army and his country.

Towards the end, we are presented with a series of strongly articulated and conflicting world views: those of Father Beltran, Alfredo, and Carreras, a fearsome drug lord with a fondness for English willow-pattern plates.

The last - the protagonist's apparent embrace of American optimism and the American way - is perhaps the most disconcerting. Whether it represents the author's view, and whether the reader agrees, is immaterial: what the novel has already revealed makes the ending hard to swallow. It is not so much a clear-eyed acceptance of reality, but more as if Jackson has decided to forget all he has seen, to unlearn all he has learnt.