Initially slow but enjoyable and more complex than its more madcap shenanigans would suggest.
A rash decision thrusts a young British volunteer into the middle of a Nigerian military coup in a debut novel inspired by the author’s own time in Africa.
Twenty-four-year-old Matthew Ferguson is a math teacher in the small town of Hadejia in the northern sector of Nigeria in the 1980s. He’s been in the country for 18 months, working with the British Voluntary Service Overseas, and he’s begun to acclimate to its climate, food, and culture. However, he’s not comfortable with the seemingly built-in “respect” he’s accorded, solely for being a “baturi” (white man). Readers meet him just before he dismisses his training-college class for a three-week school vacation. He’s emotionally in flux; his girlfriend back home has ended their relationship, and he’s struggling with doubts over whether he’s imparting anything useful to his students. He’s also ambivalent about an impending visit with friends during a planned trip to Bama, near the Cameroon border, because he’s broke. It’s during this journey—which is derailed before he ever reaches Bama—that Matthew gets himself into more trouble than even his active imagination could have envisioned, as he finds himself in the midst of an attempted revolution. What follows is an improbable two-week adventure that offers moments of great exhilaration (including a car chase that will remind readers of scenes from the 1968 film Bullitt), close calls, and plenty of angst. For good measure, there’s also a budding romance with an attractive Canadian woman named Chantel. The story may be on the far edge of credulity, but it’s fun. Those who come to the narrative seeking merely excitement, however, will need patience, as the action doesn’t begin until about two-fifths through the book. Still, the early sections contain some of the most evocative passages, and they lay the groundwork for the real focus of the story, which is the people of Hadejia and the lessons of true friendship. By the time things really start to get rolling, readers will be well-acquainted with the main characters and the terrain they travel. In narrator Matthew, Stephen creates a likable, self-effacing protagonist who ably imparts the warmth and generosity of the people he meets as well as the poverty, corruption, and constant heat of Northern Nigeria: “I could feel rivulets of sweat growing under my hair. Sweat began to trickle down my chest and down my face. Drops began to drip from the end of my nose.” Every walk he takes is an opportunity to reveal something about a country on the precipice of financial collapse: “I reached the mournful site of an unfinished town gate. Like so many things in Nigeria, it had failed to reach completion before its finance reached exhaustion.” Matthew’s fun-loving British helicopter pilot buddy, Bob, provides a good foil for the novel’s more reticent hero, and the Nigerian carpenter Koli is so touching and steadfast that readers will remember him long after they turn the final page.
Initially slow but enjoyable and more complex than its more madcap shenanigans would suggest.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 249
Publisher: Matador
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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