
Four young Nigerian brothers, returning from a fishing trip to a forbidden river, encounter a madman, who prophesies that one of them will be murderer, and one of them, victim.
So far, so Sophoclean. In fact, this novel overall is structured not unlike a Classical tragedy. The first few chapters are a bit slow and expository, but once things get going, the prophecy takes on its own life within the family, and each member in turn becomes its victim in his or her own way. There’s an inexorable quality to the plot as it develops, so that the several missed opportunities to avoid disaster (which are perhaps more in the vein of Shakespearean than Greek tragedy) seem both necessary and impossible.
Yet if the content at a high level is a reflection of Western literary structure, the language and detail are self-confidently African, right down to the references to that seminal modern Nigerian work, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The dialogue of the characters has that lyrical, slightly-formal-yet-familiar quality, and the Nigeria of the novel is a country at a tipping point: struggling to emerge from military rule, clearly enmeshed in corruption but with aspirations towards democratic rule. Meanwhile, each chapter is named after an animal – The Eagle, The Locusts, The Moth – and the action is structured around thematic links to those animals, which gives the novel an overall folkloric flavour. (Unfortunately, my immediate reference for this aspect of the book was Kipling’s Just So Stories; hopefully its Nigerian readership will have a less problematic point of comparison.) The significance of traditional folklore is most clearly embodied in the childrens’ mother, who adheres to local superstitions despite being an eager and church-going Christian.
This is a well-crafted, stylishly-executed novel. Purely as a matter of personal taste, it isn’t entirely my favourite type of content, but that’s my problem, not Obioma’s, and in any event, it was an enjoyable read. Clearly, on a global scale, this is an important work of literature, and it’s always an achievement for a book to be both significant and eminently readable.