"Afterlives" by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Afterlives (published 2020) is the latest novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah who on 7th October 2021 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Zanzibar, in Tanzania, Gurnah has lived most of his life in Canterbury, Kent, England. I moved away from Canterbury the day before Gurnah won his Novel Prize! And I never met him. 

It took me a while to get into this book. It is written in a conventional third person past tense with an omniscient narrator and the narrative distance varies from extreme overview shot (there are individual paragraphs which detail years of warfare, as if they are the establishing shot in a film, taken from a long way off) to in head thoughts (for Hamza and Afiya, at least) but it never gets close enough to the thoughts of the characters to be stream of consciousness so the overall effect is a little bit stand-offish. This is particularly the case in the first few chapters and the last chapter which deal mostly with peripheral characters; the core narrative of the love story between Hamza and Afiya is restricted to the centre of the book. There were parts which read like a narrative history. This distant narration reminded me of other African writers such as Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, and No Longer at Ease). 

I think this was why I took a while to enjoy the book; once it arrived at a more conventionally 'western-novel-style' narrative I began to enjoy exploring the character of Hamza and, through him, began to appreciate the complexities of the other characters, Khalifa in particular who is a great grumpy old man with a heart of gold and his shrewish wife Bi Asha. 

In some ways, Afterlives resembled a memoir more than a novel. What, in conventional novel terms, is one to make of the demonic possession of Ilyas, unless it is to provide a motivation for his researches in the final chapter, or to suggest that native African explanations of 'voices in the head' have as much validity as Western-style psychology? 

It was a coincidence that I had read An Ice Cream War by William Boyd less than a month before this book: both of these novels deal with the fighting between the Germans and the British in East Africa during World War One although their perspectives (Afterlives purely African; Ice Cream purely British) are diametrically opposite. 

Another brilliant book about the African experience in the First World War (though this time in the trenches of the Western Front) is At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop.

Selected quotes:

• "‘No, you’re adding too much salt,’ Hamza said in exaggerated disbelief." (C 5)
• "European volunteers who thought killing was an adventure and were happy to be at the service of the great machinery of conquest and empire." (C 5)
• "In his exhaustion he sometimes reached a stage when he was unafraid, without bravado, without posturing, detached from the moment and open to whatever might happen to him." (C 5)
• "The Oberleutnant was furious and the other Germans joined him in his rage at the indiscipline of the carriers, as if they really believed that the ragged troop they beat and despised and overworked owed them loyalty." (C 7)
• "The morning was warming up but not yet hot and the crowds were still good-natured in their jostling and shoving. Carts barged their way through pedestrians, their drivers calling out in warning, bicycle bells tinkled and cyclists snaked a passage through the press of bodies. Two elderly matrons shuffled on unconcernedly and the crowd parted around them as if they were rocks in the middle of a stream." (C 8)
• "The worst mistakes he made in his earlier life in this town had been the result of his fear of humiliation." (C 9)
• "These thoughts filled him with sorrow, which he thought was the inescapable fate of man." (C 9)
• "Their disagreements sometimes ended in an exchange of tiny imperceptible smiles as if they had seen through each other’s performances." (C 9)
• "He puts great faith in the truth, though that sounds more pompous than I meant it to. Perhaps it would be better to say he has faith in frankness, openness, something like that, without noise or show" (C 10)
• "Poor Ilyas, his life was attended with difficulties yet he lived under a kind of illusion that nothing bad could ever happen to him on this earth. The reality was that he was always on the point of stumbling." (C 11)
• "Good fortune is never permanent. You cannot always be sure how long the good moments will last or when they will come again. Life is full of regrets, and you have to recognise the good moments." (C 12)
• "She talked almost constantly while she was with Bi Asha, even ventriloquising some replies to the questions she addressed to her." (C 13)
• "So what we can know for sure, Ilyas told his parents, is that someone loved Uncle Ilyas enough to follow him to certain death in a concentration camp in order to keep him company." (C 15; last lines)

Other books about war reviewed in this blog are here.

October 2021

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"An Ice Cream War" by William Boyd

 Two English brothers from the upper-classes, and an American, get caught up in a side-show of the First World War, the fighting between German and British East Africa. Of course the warring powers are both colonialists and both societies are alien invaders of African lands. But the overall message of this book is that human beings are tossed and turned by the tides of history. From the very start, one of the minor characters is described as shoulderless: "From the back, his silhouette resembled a pawn in a game of chess." (2.2) As Felix realises: "it was futile to expect that life could in some way be controlled. But surely everyone had some vestigial power to influence things at his disposal?" (4.3) And as Temple reflects in the Epilogue: "Life doesn’t run on railway tracks. It doesn’t always go the way you expect." 

The blurb describes this as a black comedy. It certainly had overtones of Evelyn Waugh's comic novels (eg the appallingly racist and unfunny Black Mischief) and, like them, I did not find it very funny. Bizarre things happen, certainly, but at best I found them mildly amusing. Mea culpa perhaps. As I have said before in this blog, I don't get comic novels. I don't do surreal, either. The only thing I laughed at was the ludicrous conversations between Felix and Gilzean, who spoke broad, and broadly incomprehensible, Scots. I don't normally like untranslated foreign language in a novel but this was meant to puzzle, so it fitted.

It certainly doesn't have the biting anti-war anger and savage surreal humour of Joseph Heller's Catch 22. It was much more subdued. Perhaps the names were significant: Felix was lucky and Charis had charm but I'm not sure how angelic Gabriel was.

So I treated it more or less as a normal novel.

It is told in the third person and the past tense from a multi-person perspective, head-hopping chapter by chapter. This enabled the reader to get into the head of the principal characters, mostly Felix, Charis, Gabriel, Liesl and Temple. Some of these characters are killed off before the end of the novel and none of them truly develop as characters in the conventional way of novels because fundamentally what happens to them occurs through the promptings of fate or some joker god, and in despite of their characters. This gives the book a strange un-novel-like feel. Heroes are supposed to be masters of their own fate. This lot aren't. It resembled, for me, The Iliad, another war nook in which the heroes are the playthings of the gods.

I'm not sure how much I enjoyed it. I found it quite heavy going at the start. I suppose one felt sorry for the gauche Felix and the innocent lovers Gabriel and Charis and I suppose all the characters were made harder by their experiences of war. Towards the end I was quite interested. But I never really invested emotionally in any character so the horror was not as horrific as it might otherwise have been. 

Selected quotes:

• "Wheech-Browning suddenly leapt four feet sideways leaving the two flies circling aimlessly in the space he had occupied a second before. It took them a moment to find him again." (2.1)
• "He was the sort of man, Temple often thought, whose weakness was a kind of challenge: it made you want to punch him in the chest, just to prove you weren’t affected by it." (2.2)
• "There was a delicate spattering sound as bits of expressed brain hit the leaves of the bushes behind the man." (2.6)
• "Gabriel thought maps should be banned. They gave the world an order and reasonableness which it didn’t possess." (2.6)
• "Nothing in his education or training had prepared him for the utter randomness and total contingency of events." (2.6)
• "The British. He shook his head in a mixture of rage and admiration. A general who was an alcoholic, an army resembling the tribes of Babel, and everyone milling around on this arid plain without the slightest idea of what they were meant to be doing." (2.12)
• "Over to the right were temporary hangars, little more than canvas awnings, that provided some shade for the two frail biplanes – BE2 Cs – which at the moment constituted the presence of the Royal Flying Corps in East Africa." (2.12)
• "There was no breeze and the air was clinging and felt over-used, as if, Felix said, it was composed of exhalations only. All the people of the world breathing out at once." (2.13)
• "A magnificent pale Bathsheba, heavy-breasted and full-thighed, glistening palely in the lamplight as the buckets of water were tipped over her, while he looked on, captivated, an impotent David in the shadows outside." (2.15)
• "It was curious, he thought, how the touch of your own hand on your genitals was so reassuring." (2.15)
• "The sense of his own responsibility, so successfully evaded for so many months, hit him with full force." (2.17)
• "The man had a poor, crude-looking face, as if it were an early prototype whose features hadn’t yet been properly refined. It was utterly expressionless, as if this too were a faculty reserved for later, more sophisticated models." (3.1)
• "There was also something thoroughgoing and uncompromising about African rain. It came down with real force, each drop weighty and loaded with full wetting potential, drumming down at speed as if falling from a prodigious height." (3.1)
• "His ludicrous ‘quest’ had fizzled out in the mud of Kibongo, his high ideals and passionate aspirations replaced by grumbles about the damp and endless speculation about what to eat." (3.2)
• "What kind of a war was this? he demanded angrily to himself. No enemy in sight, your men slowly being starved to death, guarding a huddle of grass huts in the middle of a sodden jungle?" (3.2)
• "He was full of retrospective wisdom, twenty-twenty vision as far as his hindsight was concerned." (4.3)

October 2021

This novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1982.

Also by this author: Waiting for Sunshine and Trio

Also set during the world war one fighting in East Africa: by Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gonfur

Other books about war reviewed in this blog are here.

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