Somewhere near the end of this book Barclay states he both loves and hates Zimbabwe. This is evident in the book, and it's easy to understand why.

Barclay is a British diplomat who worked for the British Embassy in Harare from January 2006 to April 2009. During this time the infamous violence that accompanied the 2008 elections and the rise of Morgan Tsvangirai were defining events.

When Barclay arrives in 2006 he is immediately smitten with a country he describes as being "a temperate paradise of green hills and waterfalls, orderly and organised, filled with happy people". But it doesn't take long before the problems of modern Zimbabwe become blatantly obvious - the country is in a steep decline in almost every respect. The health care and education systems have failed, the economy is dead, agricultural production has collasped and a country that was not long ago exporting surpluses now can't feed itself, infrastructure is neglected, there is no law, order or justice and elections haven't been free or fair for years. And therein lies the tragedy of Zimbabwe: only two decades ago this was a thriving, 1st world country.

Even though Zimbabwe only covers the period that Barclay was in the country there is just enough backgroud detail of Zimbabwe's independence and postcolonial history to get a sense of how things have devolved to produce the current situation. Barclay highlights the friendly chattiness, convictions and courage of the Zimbabwean people, and their amazing ability to continue to hope for something better. But this book is predominantly a catalogue of failures, greed, horrendous violence and fear illustrated both by Barclay's own experiences and observations, and the stories of people he knew or came into contact with through his job.

Zimbabwe challenged my knowlege on a couple of basic things. I hadn't realised that the collapse of the country had happened so recently. I had thought it was a fairly long decline when in fact most of the damage has been done since the mid 90's. I was also a little surprised to read some of the details of Mugabe's leadership of ZANU-PF. After Tsvangirai's election win in 2008, Barclay even reports Mugabe was willing to retire but other senior members of ZANU-PF quickly put a stop to that line of thinking.

This is a hard book to comprehend simply because of the violence and brutality. But Barclay's political analysis was great. He is unbiased, insightful, and kept me fascinated. He even manages the occasional moment of dry wit to break things up. And while there is a clear preference shown towards Tsvangirai's MDC party this is only logical given the only current alternative is Mugabe and his cronies. But Barclay is not blind to the MDC and Tsvangirai's shortcomings either and offers up his criticisms and, particulary toward the end of the book, he doesn't pull his punches. ( )