“The Fishermen,” one of this century’s most remarkable debuts, tackles destiny, fratricide and revenge in a west Nigerian town. Its expansive follow-up, “An Orchestra of Minorities,” is narrated by a 700-year-old guardian spirit known as a chi and attempts, as Obioma explained to the arts magazine Bomb, an inversion of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” in which the ways of men are justified to the gods. Both books contain writing as magnificent as their author’s ambitions. Both were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Neither will prepare readers for Obioma’s third novel.
“The Road to the Country” is set during the Nigerian Civil War, which took place over 2½ devastating years in the late 1960s. The war claimed a reported 1 million people, many of them children who perished from starvation. Some estimates — including Achebe’s in his 2012 memoir of what is also known as the Biafran War — put the losses even higher. “An entire generation was wrenched from the future,” as Obioma’s peer Emmanuel Iduma has noted.
The war began in July 1967, two months after a charismatic, college-educated military officer named Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu announced the creation of the independent Republic of Biafra in Nigeria’s Eastern Region. (Ojukwu, like other real-life Biafrans, appears in the novel.) In the previous year, the area had become a refuge to about 1 million members of the Igbo people, who fled a campaign of terror in the Northern Region after being scapegoated for a coup. The Nigerian government responded to the secession with overwhelming and merciless force. Achebe, to quote the Igbo author of “Things Fall Apart” one last time, called the war “a cataclysmic experience that changed the history of Africa.”
When “The Road to the Country” opens, the Biafran War is just underway. A poorly armed militia has formed to defend the nascent state. Casualties are mounting. People are afraid. Adekunle “Kunle” Aromire is oblivious to all of it.
A self-absorbed law student with an Igbo mother and a Yoruban father, Kunle has returned to the family’s Western Region home from Lagos for the first time in 13 months. He has spent the past decade blaming himself for an accident that paralyzed his younger brother, Tunde. (Hoping to be alone with his neighbor and crush, a fellow 9-year-old named Nkechi, Kunle had shooed the boy outside, where he was promptly struck by an Oldsmobile. Kunle has cloaked himself in guilt ever since.)
Obioma invests these early, establishing pages with a touch of dark comedy, as the hopelessly naive Kunle incites wide-eyed disbelief in his father and uncle. Relaxing on his parents’ couch following a bath, Kunle decides “that he must find out more about what is happening — this ‘war.’” How Obioma relieves Kunle of his innocence is a major focus of this ultraviolent and sometimes enervating novel.
Through a series of literal missteps and wrong turns, Kunle finds himself conscripted into the Biafran militia. Given inferior combat training and a new name — Adekunle is also the name of a Nigerian general known as the Black Scorpion — the reluctant soldier re-christened Peter Nwaigbo is thrust into a conflict marked by incessant bombings and widespread gore. Terror absorbs him. He feels “the sense of being trapped in a burning house.” He cries often.
In time, Kunle adopts the Biafran cause as his own. That’s in part because he sees the war as an opportunity to cleanse himself of shame over Tunde. “Perhaps instead of attaining the redemption he sought for so long in righting the wrong he once did,” Obioma writes, “he could achieve it on a larger scale if he helped fight to save this people.” In the meantime, and in the novel’s most strained storyline, Kunle falls in love with a comrade, the vengeful Agnes Azuka, whose husband and sons were butchered by the Nigerians.
Obioma says “The Road to the Country” is the first Biafran War novel to take place on the front lines. That may be so, but its ideas about the physical and psychic traumas of warfare, humanity’s destructive nature, and the familial bonds that form in bunkers and barracks have been expressed countless times before. Despite the seemingly endless ambushes and explosions, “The Road to the Country” offers a story with few surprises. It can feel as if Obioma is searching for pieces of a puzzle that has already been solved. The labored framing device, in which the story we’re reading is actually a vision experienced by a seer in 1947, is weighted with notions about perspective and the fluidity of time.
The novel’s reflections and warnings bear repeating, though, particularly because war is a hell that we keep revisiting, and especially when the writing is as skillful as this: “It occurs to him that the only true thing about mankind can be found in the stories it tells,” Obioma writes, “and some of the truest of these stories cannot be told by the living. Only the dead can tell them.”
Jake Cline is a writer and editor in Miami.
