"An Orchestra of Minorities" by Chigozie Obiomoa

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2019.

This story is narrated by the chi - a sort of cross between a guardian angel and a soul - of the protagonist. This is a useful conceit for two reasons. Firstly, because the chi has been reincarnated through a number of lives and so knows more about the behaviours of humanity than its host, enabling the narration to comment sagely from a position of detachment on what is happening. Secondly, because the chi can, from time to time, leave the host’s body and therefore know more about the situation than the protagonist. For both these reasons, the principally first person narration achieves a degree of omniscience. (This is tempered somewhat when the chi explains that what the host cannot say, he cannot say, a rule he has already repeatedly broken, which seems to be the narrator's attempt to have the best of both worlds.)

A third reason emerged just over half way through the book when a killing occurs. The chi then spends a whole chapter popping up to heaven to discuss things with God. Someone (I think it might have been E M Forster) once said that when you reach a climax in your story, when you have got your reader hanging on every word, desperate to know what happens next, have your character look out of the window just to prolong the suspense. Having a chi as narrator enables this to happen. 

As if to compensate for this supernatural element, the story is narrated in a very pedestrian style in which things happen one after another with little embellishment. This includes calling a spade a spade: for example, the protagonist urinates, he copulates. This is a style I associate with other African books such as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and its sequels No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God. I also thought of Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This everyday style is interrupted whenever the chi communes with his spirit colleagues, when the prose becomes much more flowery, and when the chi quotes proverbs and sayings, which can be quite picturesque (see selected quotes).

But it also reminded me of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison, which grounds a fantastic tale with meticulous observations of everyday life, and Glister by John Burnside which combines mystery with gritty reality. 

Is this sort of style the best technique to achieve verisimilitude when you are asking readers to accept fantastical storylines, such as in novels using magic realism, or ones far from their experience of everyday, such as novels set in a war zone or a prison camp? 

Surprisingly, given this prosaic style, I found myself on an emotional roller-coaster, at least in the first part of the story. The protagonist falls in love with a woman of much higher status than himself; when he meets her family he is humiliated by them. I empathised deeply. He decides that the family will never let him marry her unless he improves himself and so, because he loves her deeply, he sells his home and his business so he can travel abroad for an education. 

But then, about 40% of the way through the book, the story seemed to morph into a recreation of the 'hero's journey'. The long first section had established the status quo ante; despite a prophecy of doom, the hero determines on a quest (to improve his lowly status so that he can get the girl, a girl for whom, very early on, he has made an animal sacrifice). Then, in a chapter actually entitled "Crossing the threshold", he travels to a liminal realm (Northern Cyprus, a quasi state recognised by almost no other nation) where he meets challenges, guides and helpers (eg Tobe) not all of whom are friendly. He undergoes (another chapter heading) a "metamorphosis" while enduring a time of trial at the end of which, despite having nothing left, he makes a gift of the little that he does have (glossed with a Biblical reference about going two miles with someone who asks you to go one mile with them). At his lowest point he has a near death experience. Rather unexpectedly reborn he returns (in a chapter headed "Return") to his own world a sadder but wiser man and (again unexpectedly) receives at least a partial restitution for his suffering. However, unlike the happy ever after endings of a fairy tale, this story has a tragic twist in its tail (this is not a spoiler, given that the narrative is cast as the hero's chi, pleading for forgiveness for his host, who has killed, or might have killed, a pregnant woman).

I rather lost my motivation during the Cyprus interlude. It seemed to drag. I found it more difficult to empathise with a character who no longer possessed agency but seemed little more than an object to which things happened. I was no longer 'involved' in the story. And I became increasingly irritated by the supernatural bits, especially the affectation of introducing chapters and even some paragraphs with one of the names of the deity. 

I was also confused about whether one is supposed to sympathise with the protagonist or not. We know, throughout, that the chi is pleading mitigating circumstances for a bad deed done by the protagonist. That suggests that the author wants the reader to be on the protagonist's side. But is he a goodie or a baddie? He is described as "a shepherd of birds" (Ch 5) and shepherds are conventionally seen as good people (like Jesus) but shepherds exploit their flock, taking their produce and killing the creatures for whom they have cared; shepherds are predators. The title of the book refers to the collective distress of his flock of birds mourning when one of the chicks is snatched by a hawk. Given that the hero is portrayed as a poor man, helpless against the bullying of the rich, especially when he travels to Cyprus, I supposed that the title of the book is a metaphor for all the poor people of the world, so many from the African continent, who are preyed upon by the rich people in the world. 

Perhaps he is making the point that those who have power, no matter how much or how little, prey upon those who have less power. That is the theme of my novel The Kids of God.

A recurrent motif is the story of the gosling whom the protagonist loved as a child, after his father had killed the gosling's mother for sport. But the gosling was tethered and, eventually, in a foreshadowing of the plot, killed by the protagonist. "For each man kills the thing he loves," as Oscar Wilde wrote. In may ways the fatal flaw of this hero was that, like a dog in the manger, he couldn't bear to see someone else getting enjoyment from one whom he loved.

I suppose that might be the point. The author is inviting us to appreciate the protagonist with all his faults. As the French say: “Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner”; to understand all is to forgive all. We are sitting in judgement upon this man who has done something awful, upon this man who is a representative of the poor people of the world, the dispossessed, upon this Everyman, upon this shepherd, upon this man who in some ways represents Jesus himself, and we are asked to understand his strengths and weaknesses and to weigh him in the balance and to decide whether to forgive him. 

Delightfully, the book is written in a mixture of English, Igbo and Pidgin. Frustratingly, the Igbo and Pidgin are rarely translated. Annoyingly, sometimes Igbo is used at a key moment in the text. Is this book supposed to be inaccessible to non-Igbo speakers? Is the reader supposed to use Google Translate to find out what is going on? If ever there was a case for footnotes, this is it.

Selected quotes:

• "Loneliness is the violent dog that barks interminably through the long night of grief." (Ch 2)
• "After he had combed through the thick hide of night, as one would search for lice on the skin of a densely furred animal, he returned home in anguish." (Ch 2)
• "He broke from the group like a wheel unhooked from a fast-moving car and rolled into the void." (Ch 3)
• "When a man encounters something that reminds him of an unpleasant event in his past, he pauses at the door of the new experience, carefully considering whether or not to go in. If he has already stepped in, he may retrace his steps and reconsider whether to re-enter." (Ch 4)
• "Discretion was at the centre of his self-esteem. It was must be kept alive to maintain him." (Ch 4)
• "I have dwelt among mankind long enough to realise that they do not store information about those who have hurt them as they do others. This kind is kept in tightly sealed jars whose lids must be opened to remember them." (Ch 4)
• "He decided to attend the party with only a part of him attuned to it, dragging along the other intransigent half." (Ch 7)
• "The character of human shame is chameleonic." (Ch 8)
• "Soon, someone who has a bachelor's degree would be useless, because everyone would have it." (Ch 8)
• "A person must reconsider their position if everyone else is saying something that contradicts their own position." (Ch 8) A refutation of Kipling's "If you can keep your head while all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you." 
• "Seeds sown in secret always yield the most vibrant fruit." (Ch 9)
• "For this was the way of the universe: when a man has reached the edge of his peace, the universe lends a hand, usually in the form of another person." (Ch 11)
• "The worst thing adversity can do to someone is to make them become who they are not." (Ch 12)
• "Speak only what you know. If a fact is thin, do not feed it to make it fat. If a fact is rich, do not take from it to make it lowly. If a fact is short, do not stretch it to make it long. Truth resists the hand that creates it, so that it is not bound by that hand. It must exist in the state in which it was first created." (Ch 13)
• "It is God that swats the fly from the bottom of a tailless cow and from the food of the blind man." (Ch 15) Another refutation , this time of the proverb "God helps those who help themselves"; inverting it to become 'God helps those who cannot help themselves."
• "A man sits here all day, merely alive, the enamels of life peeling away from him and withering into flecks at his feet." (Ch 18)
• "Anticipation is one of the most curious habits of the human mind. It is a drop of vicious blood in the vein of time." (Ch 20)
• "Revenge is a debris field." (Ch 20)
• "He wept for the time which would not replenish itself." (Ch 20)
• "The mind of man is a field in a wild forest on which something, no matter how small, must graze." (Ch 26)

A carefully crafted novel with an ingenious narrative technique and some delightful insights into the human condition. May 2024; 512 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God