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His latest novel, Equator, lies before me on one of the stormiest and coldest December days for many decades. It does not inspire me to travel south because I am a winter child. But, there is no doubt that this novel is fascinating. It is filled with vivid, well-fashioned descriptions that bring alive a languid, moribund, humid and lush landscape in which people are drenched by uncomfortable sweat and daily evening rain that brings with it the dread of malaria-invested mosquitoes. It is, therefore, not difficult to believe that the protagonist of this tale about Portuguese colonial attitudes in the first decade of the 20^th century, and a society faced with 'change-or-die', would have much preferred the snow outside my window to the tiny islands of São Tomé and Principe.

Sent there by his king, Dom Carlos I of Portugal, the youthful bachelor Luis Bernardo Valenca, non-practicing lawyer, owner of a small, inherited shipping business, and outspoken abolitionist, has an unenviable job. He is a loyal subject who cannot say 'no' to his king even though he has no wish to leave for the equatorial regions of the Portuguese empire. His mission is to change the habits of plantation owners who underhandedly practice forced labor on their cocoa plantations despite Portugal's official abolition of slavery in 1876.

Its ally Britain—since the historic Windsor Treaty of 1386—has put pressure on Lisbon to ensure that slavery has ceased to exist on the islands located in the equatorial Atlantic about 200 miles off the coast of Gabon in the Gulf of Guinea. If assurance fails to come, Lisbon will lose the cocoa business that is vital to Portugal's economy. Today we know the islands as the Democratic Republic of São Tomé e Principe. As such it is Africa's smallest country. At the time the novel's story takes place it is still a colony and all those living there are supposedly free Portuguese citizens, whether white, black or mulatto. But to our hero this seems but a mirage.

Made governor of the islands, it is Luis Bernardo's job to find out what is really happening on the cocoa plantations. He then must ensure change and thus avoid the danger that Britain's large cocoa importers will stop buying this product grown in abundance on the islands. Endowed with rich rich volcanic soil, the islands are ideally suited to this crop, introduced there, along with coffee, in the 19^th century after São Tomé could no longer compete with the western hemisphere's sugar plantations. Even today, cocoa is still a major crop on the islands which became an independent nation in 1975. It is now home to about 250,000 inhabitants.

When the Portuguese discovered the islands in the late 15^th century, they were uninhabited, and its first settlers were the undesirables of Portugal, including many Jews. But that changed once it became evident that volcanic soil offered a good opportunity to grow sugar there. To provide the labor force for the sugar plantations, slaves from Angola and other Portuguese African dependencies were brought there to work. This continued when the crops changed to cocoa and coffee, but was supposed to have ended after 1876.

Long entrenched habits die hard on the plantations and in the minds of those who run them. Hence, the obstacles put in Luis Bernardo's way are many. These are social, political and legal. Worst, perhaps, for this cosmopolitan native of Lisbon is the claustrophobic atmosphere in the small capital of the islands where nothing stays hidden from the eyes of those who scheme against him. His only relieve from total solitude is his budding friendship with the British consul and his wife, who arrive soon after Luis Bernardo. As expected, intrigue is soon intermingled with forbidden love in this well-told story about a colonial society that resists outside pressures to adapt to modern attitudes.

Only familiar with Portugal's early maritime history, and not its later period, I found myself fascinated by what Tavares reveals about his country's more recent past. Although originally a lawyer, like the protagonist of his novel, Tavares turned to journalism and then to literary writing. Consequently he writes with the thoroughness of his journalistic background, but infuses this need to express detailed, objective reality with a sense for poetic description, and a feeling for romantic illusion without resorting to unreality.

While one wholeheartedly shares Luis Bernardo's despair about his posting which brings with it terrible loneliness, one also—through Tavavres' eyes—begins to understand, as Luis Bernardo does eventually, why people, who come to the islands, find themselves drawn to remain. Will Luis Bernardo be able to disentangle himself from the islands? That, of course, is for the reader to find out.

The place has its own charm as our protagonist discovers despite all of its drawbacks. Of course, at the time of the novel, set between 1905-8, there were far fewer people living there than do now on these small dots in the Atlantic. Most of the original Portuguese settlers left the islands after independence, leaving it mostly to the descendants of the former slaves. São Tomé is just 31 miles long and 20 miles wide, Principe a mere 19 miles long and 4 miles wide. At the time of the novel it was a place with thick jungle-like forests. No doubt, this has somewhat changed in the hundred years since the story took place. What does remain is that Portuguese is still the country's main language, though people also speak a form of Creole and a few other languages derived from the African slaves brought there over the centuries.

Not only is Equator a well-paced, enlightening and interesting read, but it has many spell-binding moments. It is a real eye-opener about events in the past that would not ordinarily enter one's sphere of knowledge. Of course, Luis Bernardo is a fictional hero. The British threat at the time to stop buying cocoa from São Tomé & Principe is real. Whether this threat it is exerted will not be revealed here on the presumption that readers of this English translation of the novel are as unfamiliar with early 20^th century Portuguese history as this reviewer has been until now.