Bruno Salvador, known to friends and enemies alike as Salvo, is the ever-innocent twenty-nine-year-old orphaned love child of a Catholic Irish missionary and a Congolese woman. Educated first at a mission school in the East Congolese province of Kivu and later at a discreet sanctuary for the secret sons of Rome, Salvo is inspired by his mentor, Brother Michael, to train as a professional interpreter in the minority African languages of which, almost from birth, he has been an obsessive collector.
Soon a rising star in his profession, he is courted by London corporations, hospitals, law firms, the immigration services, and – inevitably – the mushrooming overworld of British Intelligence. He is also courted – and won – by Penelope, a white upper-class star reporter on one of the great national newspapers, whom with typical impulsiveness he promptly marries. Yet even as the story opens, a contrary and irresistible love is dawning in him.
Dispatched by British Intelligence to a no-name island in the North Sea to attend a top-secret meeting between Western financiers and East Congolese warlords, Salvo is obliged to interpret matters never intended for his reawoken African conscience.
The Mission Song is a thriller/espionage novel by British writer John le Carré. Set against the background of the chaotic East Congo, the story involves the planning of a Western-backed coup in the province of Kivu, told from the worm’s-eye view of the hapless interpreter.