Western Madagascar, Dancing with Bones

Three very different egos play out needs in western Madagascar where remote communities struggle with wild weather, volatile politics and adventurous, pushy tourists.
Ambitious English mixed-race, bright-as-a-button, feisty Katy works under cover for a global conservation agency, and though often challenging and combative, she also has a gift for turning negativity to pleasant experience, and with a heart of inescapable resolve, her quirkiness, combat skills and open sexuality change lives: ‘undistracted acceptance of prolonged animal activity convinced them she lacked some essential biology.’ … ‘extraordinary ability to be still and centred gave a head start in martial arts.’ ... ‘In a display of animal ranking they judged who and what she was.’ She opens to the troubled man who will cause pain, and her life in remote Belo sur Mer is punctuated by a succession of passionate, sometimes violent encounters where she becomes fully accepted into the ancestor honouring, in-the-moment tradition of a fishing and boat building community, until in a vision of life with a modest man unlikely to hold her heart, she commits to him and his young transgender lover as violent insurrection tears their world apart.
Boy Rama rises through murder and extortion in a wild land of clans, bone people and vast natural wealth to become a Malagasy government minister as he longs for a once scorned heritage while his childhood dominator thrives differently in prison, conspiring to kill him and cruelly abuse his family; redemption for Rama comes at great cost.
Powerful, rich, Irish Brendan carries hatred for a violently abusive father along with the internal ghost of his lovingly abusive nanny in a conflicted persona that drives manic ambition. He murders to appease avatar Nanny while expanding his influence as insightful Katy eases old pain until, seeing she knows too much, even as he’s already deeply involved in sedition and slaughter he can’t kill her, ‘it would be like tearing out his entrails.’ As he follows in her adventurous world of passion she’s increasingly certainty he’s murdered a friend, feeling impotent in their trap of love and intrigue as he conspires against her secret lover Rama, the man she works with to bring about change.
She uses Rama, builds contacts, enjoys her multi-roled life of intelligence and as a tribal woman in a small community while cultivating friends and taking lovers she shrugs off a rape attempt before almost dying in a vicious gang attack; to forgive and befriend some as she deals with others.
In an unannounced visit to Rama’s jailed old gang mate, Potrafanton, she forces a major breach of security, crippling him as she flees while bleeding from his whip marks. Outlawed by her lover Rama, scarred and pregnant, she defends her adopted community against insurrection, helps save Rama and kills her betrayer. Emerging from dreadful carnage, she plans to emasculate Brendan, the man she loves and despises and unknowing cause of her deliberate pregnancy.
In UK, in a dramatic set piece in the city of Bath, undiminished, she shows him she’s displaced the gnawing ghost inside him more thoroughly than he could have imagined, and larger than life Katy with vengeful agent Ada push him beyond sanity.
88000 words: Prologue, 1 Western Madagascar, 2 Road, 3 Belo, 4 Albert, 5 Ongine, 6 Mala, 7 Gold, 8 Loose Ends, 9 Connection, 10 Pen Rhiniog, 11 Skin, 12 Bellum, 13 Bath.