Mark Bagshaw

Chaucer on the Nile Mark Bagshaw

On the eve of the destruction of the Mubarak regime in Egypt, Chaucer Jeffries, a budding writer who wants to be "the kind of person on whom nothing is lost," trains his finely honed instrument on the tourist scene in Cairo and along the Nile-before blundering into a terrorist conference on the Red Sea where fireworks are the literal result. A double major in literature and international business at the University of Bologna of Ohio ("Baloney U") who is taking classes on a study-abroad trip, Chaucer gets detoured and distracted when one of his college friends goes missing near the pyramids of Giza and a flash drive containing terrorist recruitment materials turns up in his backpack. Overnight, Chaucer finds himself a 'person of interest' at the center of a web of international intrigue being spun by forces he cannot easily identify. Ultimately, these forces draw Chaucer's crew into a conflict between the leaders of two terrorist factions and the thuggish Amn al-Dawla-the government's internal security service-a conflict whose resolution hinges on one disaffected software programmer choosing whether and how to do the right thing with what he knows. In the process of extricating himself and his friends from danger, Chaucer not only gains some practical knowledge of international business and international terrorism, but learns a bit about negotiating borders in love and friendship as well. Chaucer on the Nile is a funny story, full of interesting characters, in the tradition of The Canterbury Tales, and a moral tale in the tradition of The Divine Comedy and Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, a work of immediate political and social relevance to our efforts to manage the inevitable tension between international competition and international community.