Operation Rimbaud - Paperback

From Governor General's Award winner Patricia Claxton comes a new translation of a tale of intrigue, impiety, and insurrection by Quebec's original literary lion, Jacques Godbout. Thirty-five-year-old Michel Larochelle, an agnostic Jesuit, sees his membership in the Society of Jesus in unconventional terms: as a cover for all manner of clandestine activities, as he travels the world and samples its many earthly delights. At the end of the 1960s, and with liberal expression reaching its peak, it seems almost anything is available to this peripatetic man of the cloth. So when Larochelle is personally chosen to execute a secret mission dubbed 'Operation Rimbaud' on behalf of Haile Selassie, Ethiopia's venerable King of Kings, he doesn't hesitate. Aware of an imminent coup threatening the kingdom, Selassie entrusts Larochelle, along with Selassie's alluring daughter, with the perilous task of overseeing the safe removal of precious artifacts from the country - the original stone tablets bearing the ten commandments. Honouring his personal adage to kill only when necessary, Larochelle keeps the tablets intact while managing to violate nearly every law they dictate on a wild romp through the African wilderness, pursued by all manner of marauding outlaws, and haunted by the ghost of one of its most famous visitors, Arthur Rimbaud.