“Gold and Jungle” by Jean-Christophe Rufin

“D’Or et de Jungle”, the new novel by academician Jean-Christophe Rufin, depicts a world of mercenaries, in the pay of a digital giant, in the Sultanate of Brunei, on the Island of Borneo.

Gold and Jungle published by Calmann-Lévy on February 7, it is the story of a coup d’état organized by a private agency in the Sultanate of Brunei, a small confetti on the island of Borneo, on the shores of the Sea of China. Coup d’état for the benefit of a Californian new technology giant.

Jean-Christophe Rufin jubilantly tells us about the construction of this coup which aims to be non-violent. Or almost. There are still hacks, sabotage, blackmail, fake news and other destabilizing campaigns. We follow the actors of this coup d’état. There we find former mercenaries, an old Trotskyist academic, an exiled and forgotten opponent, and a few hacker geeks, capable of forcing any computer secret.

The characters are colorful, and Jean-Christophe Rufin unfolds this story like a thriller, with a team gaining strength, as if preparing for a heist, with a finale full of surprises.

The narrative force of Jean-Christophe Rufin’s novels

After novels like Red Brazil, The perfume of Adam or Katiba, Jean-Christophe Rufin offers us a novel halfway between the geopolitical thriller and the pure adventure novel, all sometimes tinged with the distance and humor that we find in the series of adventures of his Consul, Aurel Timescu.

But this time, there is above all this central idea, this coup d’état: proposing a major player in new technologies to have their hands free from any state constraints. A libertarian dream taken to its extreme. The world has no shortage of small, vulnerable countries that a “turnkey coup” could hand over to companies a thousand times more powerful than them. And we know that some have already seriously considered it, particularly in California.

This grip on reality makes the novel quite fascinating. Jean-Christophe Rufin adds his touch as a former diplomat, accustomed to geopolitical issues and international relations, and also a description of a complex region that we know little about. Enough to feed our curiosity as readers.