KEY POINTS:
For those around during the 1960s the Nigerian civil war was big news. Fought over the doomed breakaway territory of Biafra, it was the first genocidal conflict to play out on television. Its harrowing images of starving babies and millions dead stunned the world.
Although author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was not yet born at the time of the war, she grew up in its shadow. The war killed both her grandfathers and left a gaping wound in the country's psyche, as well as a raft of stories.
Like many Nigerians, Adichie is frustrated by the one-dimensional way conflict in Africa is reported in the Western media, and found only during her university education in the US "the baggage that comes with blackness'.
Adichie's writing stems from a need to explore the complexities of her country's now forgotten history and to engage readers emotionally with those who lived through it.
At 29 she has achieved enormous and deserved success. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers' Best First Book, and her second, Half of a Yellow Sun (Harper Collins, $26.99) has just won the coveted Orange Prize.
It is a powerful, ambitious work that achieves, I think, the emotional truth she set out to capture. Although the novel is about the Biafran war, Adichie starts small, ensuring that the effects of the political events are felt through the painstakingly built-up minutiae of the characters' lives and relationships.
The novel opens when young Ugbo leaves his dusty village to work as a houseboy for Odenigbo, a professor at Nsukka University. His home, a paradise of modernity for Ugbo, is a hotbed of middle-class radical politics, discussed in raucous evening gatherings. When the beautiful, London-educated Olanna joins Odenigbo, turning her back on her luxurious life in Lagos, she is in thrall to his idealism.
Her twin sister Kainene, who remains to manage the family business, is edgy, cuttingly direct and brittle. She takes an English lover, shy journalist Richard Churchill who identifies whole-heartedly with his adopted country, researching for a book on Igbo-Ukwu art.
All five characters are caught up in the impending catastrophe as Nigerian troops approach.
One structural strategy Adichie uses to keep her story character-driven is to flash back and forth in narrative chunks from the pre-war early 60s to the war-torn late 60s.
In this way we see who they are before experiencing violence and starvation and how these hardships change them.
The wide scope, rich detail, diverging storylines and multitude of minor characters, could make it a little confusing for the reader. Yet it is a minor quibble.
Compassionate, lucid, searing, this is an eloquent plea for memory and a riveting story.
- Detours, HoS
