I have been to the sahel and the picture of Amina, clad in her indigo robe, and covered with dust as she walks through the semi-desert is vivid in my mind. The book opens with a man driving off an icy road in western Canada. It is found to be a suicide, and he leaves behind a wife and two grown children. It is soon learned that he was the victim of a scam and has lost the family's life savings and the house has been heavily re-mortgaged and will soon be taken by the bank.
The daughter, Laura, finds much of her father's email from Nigeria, and papers where he has signed everything away naively thinking he was saving the life of a Nigerian girl and would make lots of money eventually. Laura is able to trace the person who committed the fraud by grammatical errors and unusual phrasing and heads off to Nigeria to confront the man responsible for the death of her father and try and get the money back.
Other major, and well developed characters are Winston, author of these emails under different names; Nnamdi, a young man from a fishing village where a big oil company has devastated the river and the environment, destroying the villagers' livelihood and health; Ironi Egobia is a frightening mob boss in Lagos.
The least developed character is Amina, the girl crossing the sahel on foot. We know she is pregnant, but not sure if this is the reason she is fleeing her desert tribe. In her great fear she intends to get as far away from home as possible. When all these separate stories converge, the conclusion is tragic and unforgettable. At first I was cheering for Laura, by herself in a place far from home.
She was resourceful, brave and looking for revenge. She causes some cruel things to happen and shows little remorse,and I stopped admiring her. Thought this was a great thriller, and learned a lot about the Nigerian email scams, and how the big Western oil companies are exploiting the land and its inhabitants.
View 2 comments. Oct 22, Daniel rated it it was ok Shelves: canlit. I'm at a loss in how to write a review for this book. I obviously didn't get whatever the author was driving at—something I find unsettling when the book is garnering critical acclaim.
What is it that I'm missing? It felt to me like the author was trying too hard to make a story that didn't really have the legs to make it. Nigerian e-mail scams have provided office jokes for years, so this attempt at a taut political thriller on the same topic seems a few years too late in the making.
Moreover, t I'm at a loss in how to write a review for this book. Moreover, the exposition on the scam seems contrived. It doesn't flow naturally, making it seem impersonal and emotionally removed. Almost halfway through the book we are taken on a long side trip to the tribal areas of Nigeria, and this diversion absolutely sings.
There is African mysticism and mythology abounding, and we are introduced to the ecological and economic devastation caused by oil exploration, not to mention the political destabilization caused by vigilante action and black market siphoning.
This is what the book should have been about, in my opinion, and it's a shame that the author got so caught up in e-mail scams when there was so much other material to work with. Jan 13, Krista rated it really liked it Shelves: africa , can-con , Would you die for your child? This is the only question a parent needs to answer; everything else flows from this. In the kiln-baked emptiness of thorn-bush deserts. In mangrove swamps and alpine woods. In city streets and snowfalls.
It is the only question that needs answering. The boy's father, knee deep in warm mud, was pulling hard on fishing nets that were splashing with life.
Mist on greens waters. Sunlight on tidal pools. Unbelievable but true: Just last night , my husband showed me an em Would you die for your child? Unbelievable but true: Just last night , my husband showed me an email on his Blackberry, saying, "I don't know what this is, but this guy just connected with me on Linkedin this week and…" Before he could even finish his introduction, I had scanned the email from a "Gabonese businessman" that mentioned "large sums of money" and "lost heirs".
Dave wasn't impressed that I didn't closely read the email before handing his phone back with a smile, and he said, a little put out, "What? That's been around for years. The title of refers to the article of the Nigerian criminal code that deals with fraud, and in particular these internet schemes that the country has become famous for. The book is set at either end of one such scheme: In Calgary at one end, with the grieving family of a retired schoolteacher who had lost everything and committed suicide a la Willy Loman; and in Nigeria at the other -- and as we learn, Nigeria is one of those countries that has been cobbled together through colonial expediency; with numerous unrelated tribes who have mutually incomprehensible languages and customs; with people and landscapes so foreign to each other that the word "Nigerian" seems almost meaningless -- you might as well say "African" and expect it to mean just one thing.
I found the Canadian sections of the book to be the weaker -- with flat characters that didn't much interest me -- but I did appreciate the importance of showing the scam's effects and understand that their narrative had to be carried forward so that there could be the ultimate confrontation.
I wonder if this wouldn't have worked better if it had been from the actual victim's point of view had he been kept alive -- his motivations for getting involved and his slow realisation that he had been scammed would have been more interesting and urgent.
However, I loved everything in the Nigerian sections. Amina may have been the least developed, but her mysterious journey by foot out of the sandstorms of the Sahel was compelling and fascinating. Winston's story -- privileged and educated but unable to find lawful employment -- was a nice counterpoint to Ironsi-Egobia -- raised in an orphanage but ultimately to become a fearsome criminal boss. Yet the heart and soul of the story is Nnamdi -- his childhood in the Delta area was so beautifully described that it was heartbreaking when the oil companies moved in and destroyed his community's way of life.
His journey from here had an inevitability to it -- as did the entire story: This is a slow motion car crash where the reader can understand why everyone acts the way they do, can see that there will be tragedy ahead, but it's unavoidable. The plot and pacing totally worked for me. Will Ferguson won the Giller Prize for , and although I understand it's a departure from his usual award-winning humour writing, I'll be sure to look out for his other books; this one was a happy find.
View all 6 comments. Oct 27, Katy rated it really liked it Shelves: library-book , fiction , award-winner-nominee , canadian. Well done Will Ferguson! No wonder this was a Giller Prize winner! This was a much anticipated read for me. It had been on my TBR for some time and finally it reached the top of my book club list. It did not disappoint! Clearly the author did some deep investigative research in order to make this story believable.
This type of fraud is dealt with in section of the Nigerian Criminal Code, and hence the book title. This is the manner in which the story begins, the email received by a retired teacher in Calgary, asking to help the daughter of a diplomat, but it takes a turn. There are two other stories being told as well, both taking place in Nigeria. The stories continue in a parallel fashion, each becoming more intriguing and without an obvious conclusion, and although you anticipate numerous different endings, none of those ever materialize.
This is really a well written contemporary adventure through cyberspace and on the ground in Nigeria. The descriptions place you directly in the various locations, and the venture into the minds of the characters let you feel their fear and anxiety.
The international intrigue of the crime and corruption in Nigeria is somewhat spell-binding, as the parallel anxieties of the characters intersect via fear of retribution and hope of recovery. While I was expecting the story to be told from the western side of the world, it is really explained from the African culture and subculture of international cybercrime.
This story has provided me an entirely new perspective on these type of events. A perspective I had not even considered. Perhaps people are more alike than they are different. The game of survival takes many routes, many forms, involves many personalities, many risks, and in many ways parallels life. A very provocative read! Shelves: book-club , cbccdn-novels , read-in , when-words-collide , canadian-eh , set-in-calgary. You can definitely tell that Will Ferguson has written travel books—the scenes in this book which are set in Nigeria are the most vivid and colourful sections of By contrast, the Canadian parts are rather bland and cold, but perhaps he meant to have it that way.
I recognized both the building that she lives in and the mall where she seems t You can definitely tell that Will Ferguson has written travel books—the scenes in this book which are set in Nigeria are the most vivid and colourful sections of I recognized both the building that she lives in and the mall where she seems to do most of her eating. These are Canadians who are getting by.
By African standards, they are rich, but by North American standards they are just treading water. On my only trip to Africa in , I visited Kenya—there are dozens of vendors at every toilet stop, aggressively selling their wares. As a not-very-well-travelled Canadian at that point in time , I had difficulties, as I was on a budget and I am not by nature a bargainer. One of my friends, the child of a diplomat, lived in Nigeria for a time.
She claimed that it was every bit as awful as it is portrayed in the book—violence is rampant, environmental issues overwhelming, poverty is everywhere and politicans are corrupt.
And yet, there are relatively decent people who live there and just want to survive and raise their children safely, just as Nnamdi does. The enduring message that I came away with: there are people of all kinds in every society.
Some are exploiters and some are exploited. And the world would be a better place if we could eliminate these exploitative relationships. Jan 01, Janet Keats rated it it was ok. This book has too many disjointed threads to keep my interest. There are four distinct stories and only two of them are remotely connected. The other two are completely separate and their relevance to the story eludes me.
The incessant and unexplained wandering of the starving pregnant woman was irritating in the thread's randomness. The transitions were abrupt and unpolished. I did not finish this book for these reasons. Ferguson's description of the scam is creatively and articulately descr This book has too many disjointed threads to keep my interest.
Ferguson's description of the scam is creatively and articulately described. The reader is exposed to the skill and cruelty employed by the scam artist. But essentially, Will Ferguson is a travel writer and It seemed that he was unable to focus on a theme but was distracted by other facets of place and time. I am surprised this work garnered the Giller Prize this year as one of the most fundamental rules, that of maintaining the story line, was broken.
Perhaps it all came together in the end, but if so, I wasn't there to see it. I got bored and went home. View 1 comment. Jul 05, booklover rated it it was amazing.
Nov 02, Mel Epic Reading rated it really liked it Shelves: own-print. I knew almost nothing about Nigeria going into it and now I feel some real sympathy for their people and plight.
I'm always in awe with books that can take me to real life locations and make me feel like I've been there or have a new understanding of that place. A section of the story takes place in my home city of Calgary Canada. It's a bit odd to read about landmarks and roads I know so well author Will Ferguson lives here himself but also a little exciting. Right is very interesting. Right up until an apartment building could be seen from a road that is too far away lol.
I get it, fictional license and all but it was a bit odd to me because I do know the city so well. I'd highly recommend for book clubs as it is sure to generate a lot of conversation.
The basic story is a struggle between what we all feel we need to do to survive and what we are willing to do within our own moral compass. It's often surprising what lengths humans will go to protect themselves and others. I don't want to say too much else as I think the intricacies of the setting, plot and characters are all best discovered as you read I'm very glad I did but it lost something at some point.
I believe is was when we spent a large chunk of time with the same characters; instead of the back and forth that happens in the rest of the novel between locations and characters. Or perhaps I was just too concerned that one of our focal characters was not going to make it very far. There are some intense moments that really brought home to me how lucky I am to live where I do. Overall I think that this is an interesting book, it shares stories from a part of the world many are not very familiar with and it reveals more details about the "Nigerian Prince" email scams than most of us are likely to know.
Ferguson does a good job of making you like characters that are morally ambiguous and a good job of telling the stories that are seemingly unrelated to start with. I will guarantee that it all ties together and the end felt perfect to me. Not necessarily happy or sad; just realistic. I am definitely going to pick-up more by Ferguson.
Not only because he's local to me and meets my Canadian author criteria; but because I did really enjoy the set up and loved the end of Dec 12, Shannon rated it really liked it Shelves: , fiction , book-club. In present day Alberta, a car plummets over the edge of a ravine, killing the elderly driver. There are two sets of tyre marks on the road above, and at first the police suspect the dead man was being chased.
But the marks belong to the same car: it had taken him two tries to get the angle right to miss the guard rails in order to drive off the road. His family never suspected a thing. Never realised how troubled the retired high school teacher was, never realised he had sent all his and his wife In present day Alberta, a car plummets over the edge of a ravine, killing the elderly driver.
Never realised how troubled the retired high school teacher was, never realised he had sent all his and his wife's money to someone in Nigeria, even taking out a second mortgage against the house already long paid for, and is well over a hundred thousand dollars in debt.
Never realised that he felt like he was being watched, that he was being threatened, that he had increased his life insurance policy before killing himself, putting his daughter Laura down as the sole beneficiary.
But the police discover it all, and ask the family: Do you know anyone from Nigeria? Have you ever heard of ? Laura takes her father's death particularly hard. A reclusive copy editor who works from home, she is distracted by all the grammatical and spelling errors in the emails her father received, until she notices that there is a pattern - like the authors she edits, the writers of the emails have a style, and it might be possible to find the person behind her father's death through the way they write.
It's not about the money, she tells herself: it's about losing her father, a man who had been trying to reach out to her but to whom she had not given her time. A man she misses deeply. In Nigeria, a lone woman walks through the desert with a jerry can of water balanced on her head.
Pregnant, she has long ago traded her jewellery for food and is reduced to scavenging at campsites and chewing on nuts. Finally reaching the city of Zaria, the furthest she's ever been in her life. But even here, there are people who recognise the ritual tribal scars on her face that can tell a person exactly which village she is from; even Zaria is not far enough away.
And she she keeps walking, heading to the next city. And in the west, in the Niger Delta, European oil companies strike deals with the government to drill for oil, destroying the mangrove swamps, poisoning the water, killing the fish that are the livelihood of the Igbo people who live there. Nnamdi is a boy when the Dutch first come and a teenager when they give him, and many other boys, jobs in an attempt to pacify the tribe and give them a vested interest in protecting the pipelines that snake through their land.
What Nnamdi learns on the refinery island will save his life several times, and take him far from home. All three - Laura, the unnamed woman, and Nnamdi - are on a trajectory that will bring them together in unexpected ways.
This is an epic story and demonstrates Ferguson's ability to weave seemingly disparate plot lines and characters together. It also shows the impressive depth of his research, which I had noticed from reading his earlier novel, Spanish Fly. In the latter book - about three con artists during the Depression in the United States - you could tell that Ferguson's research and fascination with the cons was stronger than his storytelling, and his characters suffered for it.
With , though, there was a much better balance between the scope of his research - which is truly extensive - and the storytelling. As a story , I really enjoyed this. As insight into life in Nigeria and the situation between the locals and the oil companies, it's enlightening and terrifying and disheartening.
Where it falters a bit is with Laura and her side of the story, especially towards the end. I would say that Ferguson wrote the Nigerian side of the story, and the Nigerian characters, more believable, honest and human than he did Laura.
Which is curious, when you think about it. It begins in an unnamed city in Canada which I figure is either Calgary or some more northern city - the Rockies are mentioned, and Laura absently tracks the ups and downs of the oil industry by watching the cranes move on the horizon: when they're still, it's a bad day.
Alberta is home to the infamous Tar Sands. I'm always curious about why authors decide to leave a city unnamed like that. The bulk of the novel is set in Nigeria and covers pretty much the entire country - it was easy enough to picture the individual settings and get an idea of how close they are, as well as the very diverse landscape, based on how things are described, but I would still have loved a map. I love maps, and I find them useful in creating a more three-dimensional picture in my imagination.
If you're unfamiliar with what "" is, it is an email scam that nets millions of dollars for Nigeria and is one of their biggest industries, after oil. It begins with an email, and it's a fair bet that by now, anyone who has at least one email address would have received at least one of these messages.
I hadn't had one in a really long time - well I get spam mail on gmail never Hotmail but I never open them; most of those are about winning lots of pounds from Britain for something-or-other or messages from Canadian banks telling me there's a problem with my account - right, and I don't even have accounts with those banks! Incidentally, we also get one via phone here, someone Indian asking us about the Microsoft bug reported on our computer - a-ha, yeah, nice try.
You ask yourself, how can these possibly work? They're so blatantly obvious, so incredibly stupid. But they do.
Not with you or me, but with other people. In the case of Ferguson's novel, the scam that lured in Laura's dad - a lovely, kind-hearted man whose two children didn't have much time to give him anymore - it was a plea for his help in aiding a young woman. And of course, the sender had done their research, having found out lots of information about him via the woodworking forum he frequented, which enabled the sender to make his message personal, intimate even - clearly, they had the right person.
Ironically, the day I wrote this review I received a private message through Goodreads - the user was deleted before I could report it so they're very quick on catching them, but just goes to show that they really do find people everywhere, on forums etc. I thought, before I deleted it, I'd include it here as a sample message, very typical of Hello , I am Barr.
Richard Spencer residing in Accra-Ghana,a personal attorney to late Mr. Robert ,a nationality of your country who died in tragic motor accident by running into a stationery Trailer without warning sign on December 26 , Reply to my private email address for more details: richrdspencer gmail. Richard Spencer. I honestly couldn't have made that up to say the least, I'm incapable of writing something with that many errors!
The messages are always like that: help us liquidate someone's money before the government seizes it, all you have to do is hold it in your account, and you'll get a commission. But there is no money, and that's not how it works. In Nigeria, it's a huge underground business, employing thousands. As one of the RCMP officers explains to Laura and her family, it's named after "the section in the Nigerian Criminal Code that deals with obtaining money or goods under false pretenses.
It doesn't even use my name! In the story, Laura's blustering older brother Warren is the character created as a foil, the person added to the story to show just how easily people can fall for things. In fact, the whole conversation with the RCMP when they're shown the emails, the forged documents, and had it all explained to them, is pure exposition.
They've gone over there and started poking about in the city's underbelly. Turned the tables. You'd be on their turf. An embassy or something. As was learning about the state of Nigeria's oil industry, which is plain frightening. I read this book for a book club and one of the other readers brought along a slideshow of images from the Niger Delta, of the water slick with spilled oil, the natural gas flares, burning off the gas that would normally be collected.
As Ferguson describes in the novel, these fires create acid rain and the people's skin burns. Their food source is gone, and they have resorted to sabotage and guerilla warfare: opening up the pipes to siphon off the oil to sell on the black market; kidnapping foreign white workers and holding them to ransom; terrorising their own people on the rivers and in villages.
When their own people aren't attacking them, the government sends in soldiers to kill them, burn their villages, take anything left. It's amazing the Igbo have survived at all. One of the boys was wavering on his feet. His eyes were milky and unfocused. It reminded Nnamdi of the glassy gaze of the Egbesu boys, but without the bravado or the gin.
We have to stand guard twenty-four hours. Take turns, work it in shifts. But dey fumes is always leaking, from the hose or from the valve. So you inhale a lot of it. Gives you headaches. It will poison you. To sit on top of wealth that others wanted. Why do you think the gods punished us like that? Cursed us with oil. Do you suppose it's the blood of those, come back to haunt us? So in Nigeria, they're not particularly well-loved, and the government views their protests against the oil industry as a kind of anti-Nigerian act of terrorism.
Reading Nnamdi's story, it pretty much breaks your heart, watching along with him as the precious mangrove swamps - mangroves being one of those instrumental vegetation needed to filter CO2 from the air - are annihilated, the water poisoned, the fish and animals obliterated. So much waste - it's unbelievable. Anywhere else, the industry is fairly well regulated, but in Nigeria, either no one cares or it's simply too dangerous - the locals have made sure that any attempts to repair pipelines, for instance, are a death mission.
That's another aspect touched upon in : colonialism and inter-tribal conflict. There are running jokes about the different tribes, of which there are many, who, like everywhere in Africa, now find themselves lumped together in one country thanks to the borders drawn by European colonists.
What was Nigeria? It was a net, loosely thrown, a name on a map, one created by the British to paper over the gaping cracks in the joinery. A conjurer's trick, where the many became one, a sleight of hand, like the tired magic of old men making coins disappear. But Nigeria? That is on the pail we carry these in. She knew that the naming of a place helped bring it into existence.
The naming of a location - or a person, a child - was a way of claiming them. Until you named something, it wasn't fully real. The trick to staying invisible, then, was to remain nameless. Without a name, you couldn't be pinned in place, couldn't be cornered or captured.
We never learn the real reason why she's fleeing her tribal land, her village, her people - the way she talks about them gives me the idea she still has pride in who she is and where she's from, but something happened to drive her out, most likely linked to her pregnancy. I found that not knowing increased the mystery of her, and kept you wary, but also made you proud of her too. In the end, it didn't matter that we don't learn the truth, it becomes irrelevant.
Nnamdi is a hugely likeable character. Unlike many others that fill the background of the story, he is loyal, trustworthy, respectful, intelligent and full of life and even laughter. He is only about eighteen years old, and the fact that he was the most sympathetic character of all of them makes his story the hardest to read about.
The weak link is Laura, though part of this is deliberate on Ferguson's part and the rest is a let-down in what was strong storytelling up to the end. Laura comes from a different world, and when she arrives in Nigeria she represents the quintessential white colonist, caught up in her own objective, her own wishes, with zero empathy or any wish to understand the people she encounters.
She blunders in in typical white-foreigner fashion, making things so much worse, and effectively kills one character. While I could see her side of it and understand her actions, because I had got to know the other characters and their world a bit, I found her abhorrent and unsympathetic. It just goes to show what knowledge and education can do to your perspective, in opening your mind.
The question then becomes, Just who is the real victim? There are many ways to be a victim, and it's never black-and-white like you wish it was, like Laura makes it out to be. The trouble is that Laura's not a very convincing character.
Interestingly enough, Ferguson did a much better job at capturing the Nigerians, than he did his own countrywoman. It's hard to really understand her, because she's so withdrawn and lives like a hermit. I would have respected her but that, after making her point, she then demands the money - when all this time she's claimed it wasn't about the money. I don't know whether to think that in the heat of the moment, she lashed out to hurt more deeply, or whether, deep down, it really is about the money, always.
Food for thought. The novel is full of parallels, between the oil pumping like hot blood through the Niger Delta contrasted with the wealth of industry and progress in Laura's city, to the parallel between the description of a man having a tyre put around his chest and arms, doused in petrol and set alight, to the detective investigating a scene near Laura's apartment building in which a homeless man has been set alight: these juxtapositions show both the interconnectedness of the world the fact that what's happening in one country - that we all like to frown upon - often benefits our own - like China's emissions, largely created by the demand for cheap products consumed by us , as well as showing that the cruelty seen in one country, like Nigeria, is not confined to it - that we can be cruel and violent and heartless, too.
A lot of the time, these parallels were a bit obvious, a bit heavy-handed, but I still appreciated their presence. As a story, is an impressive work, richly layered, complex, nuances and empathetic, fleshing out a country that's easy to demonise and isolate as its own downfall.
As the winner of Canada's most prestigious literary award, I'm not so sure. This is solid fiction, but not what I would expect of the Giller Prize. It has some absolutely lovely prose, some beautiful - if harrowing - descriptions, and speaks to the condition of humanity and the human heart with touching honesty and wry humour.
It is a story I definitely recommend, one that shows great sensitivity towards another culture and people and tells their story with much respect.
It was a better story, overall, than Spanish Fly. But I don't think I would have picked it for a Giller winner. Oct 02, Cheryl rated it liked it Shelves: africa , library , fiction , literature , canadian. I learned a lot of things about the Nigerian email scams that have plagued and plugged our email boxes.
I once actually even finished reading an entire entreaty, shaking my head in disbelief that a someone could actually write such a thing and think that someone would fall for it, and b that some people actually do fall for it.
But I never knew anything about that world, and this book sure opened my eyes to that world of conniving thievery. By far the most interesting parts of the book are tho I learned a lot of things about the Nigerian email scams that have plagued and plugged our email boxes. By far the most interesting parts of the book are those set in Nigeria -- it was fascinating to read about the devastating effects on society of the oil industry, and of the webs of intrigue involved in the email scamming industry, and even of the scam-the-scammers roles.
Just as the NIgerian story lines about Winston and Nnamdi would get perking along nicely, the story would switch disappointingly back to the Canadian lines. There were multiple, too many, frayed threads that were woven clumsily together.
The Nigerian sideplot with Amina -- what was that for? It was boring and didn't fit and seemed irrelevant and contrived. And what was up with the longing eyes of the detective, staring at the apt building of Laura? The characters were poorly developed and unconvincing. There was far too much journalistic digression about the mechanics and explanations of the scams; a little would be good, but this was too much.
It felt lecturing and preachy. No, there were just too many confused storylines which synergistically weakened the whole thing. Some sharp editing could have pared this down in half and resulted in a taut twisty thriller. Makes me wonder again: why don't editors' names ever appear in books? Nov 29, Megan Baxter rated it it was ok.
Sometimes when I read books, I am delighted to find that an author has captured in words small experiences, feelings, quirks, or occasions in ways I never expected to see in print. If they're really good, like Proust or Alice Munro, they capture experiences I never consciously thought about, but deeply recognize.
Other times, books make the alien understandable. People who react in ways utterly unlike the ways I think I would in similar circumstances, and I understand why they did, because the au Sometimes when I read books, I am delighted to find that an author has captured in words small experiences, feelings, quirks, or occasions in ways I never expected to see in print.
People who react in ways utterly unlike the ways I think I would in similar circumstances, and I understand why they did, because the author teaches me to see through their eyes. In these ways, books do what I strive to do when I teach - make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement.
You can read why I came to this decision here. In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook Oct 09, Steven Langdon rated it really liked it Shelves: super. To read it is to enter an inter-connected world, where a retired school teacher in Calgary becomes the counterpart of a displaced pregnant refugee fleeing from the Sahel -- both buffeted by forces beyond their ken yet trying to fulfill their duty as parents.
In a superbly "," an intricate novel about internet fraud and family ties, is one of the five books nominated in for Canada's main fiction award, the Giller Prize -- with the jury hailing it as a new-style form of global literature. In a superbly rendered plot structure of back and forth vignettes and narratives, Will Ferguson takes us deep into the social and economic texture of Nigeria, while he dissects the details of a deadly car crash in Calgary.
The echo of the oil industry reverberates in each location as does the desperation of young men who turn to violence. Ferguson writes beautifully, and his images are compelling.
The school teacher's daughter comes to see herself as a modern Rapunzel, cutting her hair to escape from her hermit-like life. The Ijaw dissidents formed "mosquito crews" that tapped into oil pipelines "through a thousand pinpricks. This is far more than a thriller, too, despite its high-powered plot and dying bodies. Most of the figures in the book are agonized by their family relationships, with such ties, both positive and negative, shaping and distorting what they do. And yet.
I feel a sharp unease about " He has set himself to write a book set mostly in Nigeria, and write it mostly from the perspective of its black Nigerian characters, especially Nnamdi, the young Ijaw man from the south-eastern Delta area whose father dies, as does the school-teacher father of Laura in Calgary, Winston, the gifted Lagos storyteller who spins scams that lure Laura's father, and Amina, the young Sahel refugee woman whom Nnamdi befriends.
This difficult goal is made even more complex by the fact that Ferguson has never been to Nigeria and experienced first-hand its complicated texture. By writing so much of the book from these perspectives, Ferguson makes the novel much more powerful. But can such writing have the authenticity to be truly insightful and honest? However, I have worked in Nigeria, been there a number of times, and know West Africa reasonably well -- so I feel that I can legitimately raise some serious questions.
Four substantive issues worry me: 1 Like most of Africa, I have seen family ties in Nigeria to be extremely strong. In view of this, I do not find it credible that Nnamdi's mother would force him in effect to leave their village with Amina, rather than welcome her to stay there until her child is born.
Her action seems to me especially unlikely given the greater leverage of men in Nigerian society relative to women, especially since Nnamdi has just returned with considerable earnings from his successful tanker expedition to Kaduna -- and since he is now head of the household given his father's death.
That he should be heartless is fair enough. Also that he should carry resentment from being left as an orphan as a child. But the idea that he should have such detailed and constant knowledge of what is happening throughout Lagos, and should be able to intervene so efficiently with the police -- that perspective contradicts every characteristic that makes Lagos the chaotic, pulsating, unknowable amoebe that it is.
The essence of Lagos is that there is no control, no coherence, no logic but the force of unchecked weather or markets or movements of people. Her compulsive, driven need to escape is never explained. She is apparently from a tiny tribe, that has had major economic reverses. What is making her run? Is someone after her? If so, that is never explained. Why would a Moslem from the north want to go to the south of Nigeria, given the dangers and prejudice she will meet there?
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