In January 2012, NPR’s This American Life broadcast what was, for a time, its most popular episode ever. Wanting to expose the dark side of the Apple computer cult, it ran a reworked excerpt from The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a one-man stage show by monologist Mike Daisey about horrible conditions in some of the Chinese factories that make products for the iconic company. Two months later, TAL’s producers retracted the entire episode after learning that Daisey had lied about certain elements in his monologue. He hadn’t fabricated the underlying facts – some workers really did become sick after prolonged exposure to a toxic chemical, and hiring underage workers was common practice – only the manner in which he came to know them.
    Some of Daisey’s accusations crop up in Vancouver author Elizabeth Stewart’s novel Blue Gold. (One of its minor subplots involves young workers in a Chinese tech factory falling ill after they are forced to use a harsh chemical cleaner.) Like Daisey, Stewart aims to jolt people who spend most of their days staring at smartphones and tablets into looking a little harder at the real-life misery that often goes into making them. Unlike Daisey, however, she is upfront about the fictional nature of her tale, and manages to cram an enormous amount of geopolitical strife into her brisk and eventful novel without violating a YA novelist’s more
fundamental requirement to entertain.

The book has three interconnected narrative threads, each featuring a 15-year-old girl who endures a life-altering experience that is sadly typical for someone living in her part of the world, while also describing the inherent hazards of habit-forming gadgets.

Laiping leaves her family and rural village to work at a factory in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, where she is forced to work long hours soldering circuit boards for phones. She is at the mercy of her bosses, who drive her to exhaustion, humiliate her, and reply to complaints with harsh punishments and threats of dismissal.

Sylvie is a Congolese refugee who is forced to live in a Tanzanian camp ruled by a violent warlord after her
village is destroyed and her father shot. She and her family are caught in the middle of the battle raging over coltan, a mineral used in computers and smartphones – the blue gold of the book’s title. The warlord plans to get rich acting as an intermediary between Canadian mining companies digging up coltan and the Chinese tech industry that desperately needs it. Worse, he drafts Sylvie’s brother into his private army and demands that Sylvie become his bride, threatening to kill her family if she doesn’t. After a Canadian nurse uses her phone to take Sylvie’s picture and record her talking about her life, the girl’s scarred image becomes the face of a Western campaign to raise awareness about the human cost of coltan. Back in Shenzhen, Laiping comes across Sylvie’s picture while browsing some forbidden corners of the Internet.

Tying these two storylines together is that of Fiona, a Vancouver girl who snaps a topless selfie while drunk and sends it to her boyfriend. The photo is set loose on social media after she loses her phone, and suddenly the brainy keener’s reputation is ruined. During her season in sexting hell, she becomes aware of the coltan campaign and of Sylvie, and pressures her dad – who happens to work for a Canadian mining company – to help the Congolese girl.

Blue Gold is very much in the Deborah Ellis vein of issue-driven fiction, though Stewart, whose previous novel, The Lynching of Louie Sam, won both the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction and the John Spray Mystery Award, doesn’t have Ellis’s gift for simultaneously creating suspense and raising awareness. The inevitable chunks of exposition force Stewart to compensate by suddenly revving up the action, leading to occasional narrative whiplash. Sylvie’s story, for example, grinds forward at a slow pace for most of the book, then shifts into high gear during a car chase and shoot-out before ending anticlimactically. What Stewart does do well is offer an unflinching glimpse of the misery and degradation commonplace in many parts of the world.

During the TAL kerfuffle, Daisey defended his semi-truths by saying that fictionalizing the plight of workers helped make the message more relatable. Blue Gold demonstrates this in spades: at its best, it has the feel of a horror story – one that, as the afterword makes clear, is all too real. The sections of the book that feature Laiping and Sylvie are especially vivid and disturbing, so much so that even the most jaded teen readers may find themselves stealing a guilty glance at the phone or laptop sitting nearby.