Nurture hatred in your heart and you will keep ‘an unfed tiger in a house full of children’. A man who passes on a plausible lie ‘may be offering a rattlesnake in a calabash of food’. Someone who lugs grievances around carries ‘a full pitcher of resentment from which, every step or so on its rough journey through the worn path of life, a drop or two spilled’. This second book from the young Nigerian author whose debut, The Fishermen, reached the Man Booker shortlist does not quite escape that difficult second novel syndrome. It’s overlong, raggedly structured and freighted with rambling digressions. Yet almost every page trumpets the gifts of a writer who can make his language soar, wheel and pounce like that pitiless avian deity the hawk, ‘borne on violent wings and merciless talons’.
As in The Fishermen, Chigozie Obioma’s provincial tale of passion and ambition serves as a sort of microcosm that distils a bigger narrative about Nigeria, and indeed Africa, today. Chinonso, our too innocent chicken-farmer hero, saves a wealthy chief’s daughter, Ndali, from suicide. They fall in love, and he determines to better himself. After selling his cherished property and poultry, he enrols at a dodgy college in Northern Cyprus. In this parched dystopia on the edge of Europe, he finds himself fleeced, betrayed and ultimately jailed on a false charge of rape. After ‘this great shattering of a man’s soul’, Chinonso returns like Odysseus (that ‘white man of ancient times’) to his home. There, he vainly seeks to regain the love of Ndali, now a prosperous — and married —pharmacist.
No human narrator tells his story. We hear it through the poetic, sententious and buttonholing voice of Chinonso’s ‘chi’, or guardian spirit: one of those supernatural shadows which ‘speak the language of the living’.
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