Uzodinma Iweala: Beasts of No Nation

In an African tribal myth, a pair of changeling twins separate for the day. One changes into an ox, his brother into a leopard.

The ox grazes and finds his way to a waterhole where the leopard, after an unsuccessful day's hunting, finds him and attacks him. The leopard slashes the ox's throat, even as the ox mortally wounds the leopard.

As they die, they resume human form and, too late, recognise each other.

This is an apt symbol for the tragic, chronic internecine conflict which dogs modern Africa, and which is the setting for this remarkable first novel.

Agu is the gifted child of a schoolteacher and a loving mother who has enjoyed a normal and happy childhood until the day war comes to his village.

He is too slow when his father tells him to run from the soldiers.

He is captured, armed — with a machete at first, until he has earned a gun — and absorbed into an unknown army fighting an unnamed enemy in a nameless country.

He does what he is told — hacks, burns, shoots, rapes, maims and kills — without complaining.

He endures hunger, disease and the sexual attentions of his commander, because he is simply too young to know what is wrong or right.

Uzodinma Iweala has said that Beasts of No Nation grew from a short story he wrote some years ago to try to explain to himself the phenomenon of child soldiers, such as those whose piteous photographs he saw from the conflict in Sierra Leone.

The book draws its power from truth: the author works in Nigeria with organisations rehabilitating child soldiers.

A semi-literate, first-person narration is sustained throughout, perfectly evoking a boy's voice, his confusion, his shame, his fear, his occasional bravado and pride, his unrelenting horror. A little adjustment is needed at first, but then the prose assumes a poetic, sing-song quality.

It's a hard book to look away from. In its darker moments, it seems impossible that it will end well — even as it seems hard to believe, watching the television news, that Africa can ever hope for peace and healing after the unimaginable horrors its children have been forced to endure.

* John McCrystal is a Wellington writer
* John Murray, $34.99