Since Dave Eggers’s Pulitzer-nominated debut in 2000, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he has been producing books at a rate of roughly one a year (not counting his books for children). The Monk of Mokha fits into a subgenre we might call his philanthropist-ventriloquist mode: see also What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006) and Zeitoun (2009). All three books involved close collaboration with the “hero” of the tale, Eggers telling the story on behalf of his less articulate victim of social injustice.
The non-fiction narrative in The Monk of Mokha follows Mokhtar Alkhanshali, abandoned in war-torn Yemen by the US state department along with thousands of other Yemeni Americans. After a brief kidnapping, he escapes in a tiny skiff in order to transport his coffee samples to a conference in Seattle and triumphantly revive the ancient Yemeni coffee industry.
These books are like the driverless cars that Eggers parodies in his dystopian thriller The Circle (2013). With no one truly in charge of the narrative (not Eggers, quite, but not Valentino or Zeitoun or Mokhtar, either), there is slippage in all directions.
After a childhood and early youth in San Francisco’s deprived Tenderloin neighbourhood, Mokhtar sets out for his motherland to transform agricultural practices and build direct links between Yemeni farmers and high-end American coffee retailers. Eggers to the rescue (like a St Bernard with a press release in its mouth): “These bridge-makers exquisitely and perhaps, most important, bravely embody this nation’s reason for being, a place of radical opportunity and ceaseless welcome.” Mokhtar, apparently, has a killer sense of humour, “and in these pages I hope to have captured it”. But what we mostly get is a DreamWorks screen test: “Looking something like a cross between Indiana Jones and a graduate student of agriculture, Mokhtar was ready.” Hollywooden.
Small discrepancies abound. Mokhtar has the gift of the gab; as a teenager, he exceeds expectations by working at Banana Republic and then as a Honda salesman, where he “is averaging 12 cars a month and was pulling down $3,000 a month in commissions”. But when he decides to start importing Yemeni coffee, he’s “forty-one hundred dollars in debt” to a friend (sounds like a lot more than $4,100, right?), sleeping on his parents’ floor and working as a doorman. He has no means of saving money towards the coffee-tasting course essential for his project. Mokhtar’s friends call him “Rupert”, after the bear, because of the preppy style he develops at Banana Republic. During a discussion of Mokhtar’s activism in the Arab Spring, we hear that “he had owned one suit in his life, and he’d worn it through”. Later: “Any man of means in Yemen had an impressive watch. Mokhtar’s was Swiss made, silver and sturdy.” His glasses are pretty spiffy, too: “hexagonal frames, wire rimmed, made in 1941”.
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These are details, but they are important, and other inconsistencies make it impossible to get a fix on Mokhtar. You end up trusting neither the tale nor the teller. In order to keep his hero centre-stage, Eggers relegates main players to the sidelines — notably Willem Boot, a Dutch coffee specialist, and Andrew Nicholson, an American living in Yemen and already exporting its coffee to America. There are about 40 pages of interest here, most concerning the history of coffee, a few on the atmosphere of Yemen under fire. The other 280 pages involve long elaborations of Mokhtar’s business plan and a lot of waffle about high-end coffee. Much of it reads like those Jack Daniel’s ads you see on the Tube, stressing heritage and authenticity. I found myself longing for Mokhtar to get taken hostage, just for the sake of some action.
And now, having written this review, I feel even more uncharitable — because the feelgood filler isn’t filler to Eggers. He really means it, every word. But this is a writer operating in impossible conditions, turning out a hobbled narrative and yards of journalese in the process. (Think narrow escapes and hard times, and some painfully maladroit sentences: “Vacuum packing made it easier to keep coffee fresh and to bring it to far-flung places but further distancing the customer from the roaster.”)
Is this an ethical cup of joe? It certainly means to be. But is it worth $16 a cup, the price of Port of Mokha at Blue Bottle coffee shops? You can only hope that Mokhtar’s coffee tastes better than Eggers’s prose.
Hamish Hamilton £18.99 pp352
