When words fail

Ignore the title, with its subliminal echoes of Mills & Boon. Aminatta Forna’s magnificent second novel is not really about love. Its themes are far grittier, and all the more compelling for it: war, loss, and how a society emerging from civil strife must reinvent its own history, fabricating a tolerable narrative in order to remain semi sane.

The country in question is Sierra Leone. Its charming capital, Freetown, dotted anomalously with chimney-potted villas recalling an era when this was a British colony, is framed by green hills which tumble into a beach-fringed sea. It doesn’t attract many tourists, though. For Sierra Leone has in recent decades proved a rich source of the nightmarish images that make more stable societies blench: drugged-up rebel forces, conscience-free child fighters, the casual amputations of civilian hands and feet.

Adrian Lockheart, a British psychologist suffering from professional and personal aimlessness, relocates to Freetown. There, he befriends Kai Mansaray, a driven local surgeon, and becomes de facto father confessor to Elias Cole, a history professor whose lungs are gradually giving way.

Adrian takes a while to warm up to the country, much like the narrative itself — this was the one segment of the book where I felt some pruning might have been in order. But as this diffident Brit is sucked in, falling in love with the inscrutable Mamakay, picking clumsily at the mental scabs of his patients, struggling to discern the outlines of past events, Forna’s narrative takes hold.

Why does one of his female patients periodically lose her mind and go on long, seemingly aimless walks across the countryside? What explains Kai’s phobia about the main bridge out of town? Why does another patient become hysterical at the smell of roasting meat? Why does Mamakay so despise her father, Adrian’s dying professor friend?

All the key actors, it emerges, are wrestling with past horrors.