The Chimera of Cult
Nadifa Mohamed, The Orchard of Lost Souls
Simon & Schuster, 352pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781471115288
reviewed by Alexis Forss
Nadifa Mohamed’s debut novel, 2010’s Black Mamba Boy, offered both a semi-fictionalised account of her father’s tumultuous youth in the Horn of Africa region and a perspective of the Second World War from that neglected theatre of operations. It won her many plaudits and inclusion on Granta’s 2013 list of the best young British novelists, but I found it to be a problematic work.
Throughout I felt that Mohamed described to no purpose, most egregiously in her scene-setting, in which a variety of sights, sounds and scents were evoked and variously troped, but with no unifying principle to bestow any sort of continuity or, crucially, character on the novel’s voice. The result was bland: one old woman is ‘tall as an amazon’ while another is marked by scratches and cuts ‘like the tattoos on a Maori warrior,’ and a nod to the ‘full pregnant moon’ is directly followed by a description of the ‘black planets’ of the protagonist’s eyes. Allegedly this is what not just passes for but is lauded as lyricism in prose. In the meantime, characters ‘corrected’ or ‘shot back’ at interlocutors who had either ‘pursued’ or ‘demanded’ their answers, and whenever Mohamed felt sufficiently secure in her lyricism to venture the prosaic past participle ‘said’, it was usually abused by the standard procession of adverbs: ‘sadly’, ‘apologetically’, ‘uncertainly’, and the rest.
Her sophomore effort, The Orchard of Lost Souls, offers a similar ground-up view, this time of the Somali Civil War. The most immediately noticeable change is the shift from the third person past tense to the present tense, which reads as a declaration of intent, of a renewed seriousness of purpose. Philip Hensher has decried ‘the routine use of present tense in the historical novel [as] a terrible cliché’, and Philip Pullman assents in lamenting its ‘limited range of expressiveness.’ They have a point: a stylistic choice does not a Coetzee or a Mantel make, but in Mohamed’s case the gambit seems to have focused her prose. Sample the following descriptive passage, which occurs a few pages in:
‘There’s Oodweyne watching over us,’ yells Dahabo, pointing up.
[...]
Beyond Dahabo’s pointed finger there is a mammoth painting of the dictator, hanging over the stadium like a new sun, rays emerging from around his head. The painters have tried to soften that merciless, hangdog face but have succeeded only in throwing it off balance – the chin too long, the nose too bulbous, the eyes asymmetrical. The only accurate part is the short, clipped moustache modelled on that German leader.
This is a marked improvement. In Black Mamba Boy, Mohamed’s evocation of the novel’s socio-historical context was hobbled by her inconsistent handling of her child-protagonist’s perspective, by her failure to keep what Martin Amis called ‘ironic faith’ with her narrator. Passages like the one describing Mussolini as ‘the failed primary school teacher, that syphilitic seller of ideas fallen from the back of a lorry, that gurning midget’ jarred because they emerged from outside the novel’s nominally limited perspective. The desultory occurrence of such passages were of a piece with the author’s overemphatic and untempered prose, and left the reader with an inchoate notion of what was going on in that region of the world in that period of history – a result at odds with the corrective agenda which the narrative seemed to proffer to its English-speaking audience.
In The Orchard of Lost Souls, Mohamed seems to have subscribed to Winston Smith’s perception that the best books are those that tell you what you know already. She is more interested in depicting the essential elements of life under totalitarianism, and the reader is trusted to recognise them: the penetration of all strata of life by the chimera of cult, the oppressive boredom and the succour of private insolence. Mohamed sustains this interest as she introduces her three main characters in a bravura sequence of shifting perspective: nine-year-old orphan Deqo, solitary widow Kawsar and young female soldier Filsan unknowingly interact against the backdrop of jingoistic celebrations in the town of Hargeisa. As these three strangers cross paths, Mohamed achieves something missing from her previous novel, and that is tension.
With its cipher of protagonist – much unchanged from the novel’s opening in 1935 to its conclusion in 1947 – a novel like Black Mamba Boy lives or dies on the strength of its supporting cast. While vivid, the personalities conjured up by Mohamed to interact with young Jama were of limited interest, and the novel settled into a repetitive structure that cast all the characters as ‘athletes in the hard-luck Olympics.’ It was clear from the beginning that Jama would never take up Idea and his wife Amina on their offer of a home, and that the kindly Italian officer Lorenzo was doomed precisely because of his kindness. This revolving-door approach to characters summoned only to help or hinder the protagonist stunted the reader’s interest in them.
This predictable series of binary relationships is replaced by a more dynamic and interesting tangle of limited perspectives in The Orchard of Lost Souls. These force the reader to examine motive and causality as Kawsar saves a young girl – clearly Deqo – from excessive punishment by the officials, and Filsan brutally beats an old woman – clearly Kawsar – for having disrupted the celebrations. Mohamed promises much in the collision of these three personalities, but lamentably seems to lose her nerve and settles anew into a wearyingly predictable structure.
What follows is the separation of these three characters, and long sections focus on each in their turn before they are arbitrarily brought back together in what is presented as a nurturing facsimile of family. Each individual narrative is essentially a pas de deux: Deqo has Nasra, the prostitute who takes her in; Kawsar has Nurto, the feckless young woman tasked with caring for her after the beating; and Filsan has Captain Yasin, the superior officer from whom she develops feelings. In all three cases the civil war intervenes, the characters are variously parted from their respective supporting characters, and all we are left with is happy coincidence. The novel reveals itself as a tripartite retread of Black Mamba Boy’s quest-for-family narrative, only this one is more sparsely populated.
I suspect that Mohamed’s true talent may lie in short story writing: the style of characterisation which served her well in Black Mamba Boy works best in short bursts, in short narratives of transience and of disrupted tranquillity. In the three longer slow-burns of uncertainty attempted here the characters remain static, even repetitive, and authorial intervention in the form of historical calamity is required to move them along – and even then they bristle on the page rather than change or grow. Her favoured trick of gradually revealing crucial elements of the character’s back-story works best when it takes place alongside a tighter primary narrative, which is why her characters are at their most vivid when they’re allowed to burn brightly and quickly. What remains is for Mohamed to rig up her characters within structures which best show off their strengths.
A laudatory quote on the inner dust-jacket declares that ‘the most exciting, original new fiction is coming out of Africa.’ Even with the gains evidenced in her second novel I can’t see Mohamed’s corpus to date as the epitome of this purported phenomenon. For that I would turn to 2007’s In the Country of Men, in which Hisham Matar manages to use a child’s point of view to shed a genuine and startlingly defamiliarised perspective on the early days of Gaddafi’s Libya. Matar’s protagonist, Suleiman, recalls the events of his youth without imposing his own politically and historically-informed adult clarity of hindsight. Instead, we see an author keeping ironic faith with his narrator. Irony may be the crux of the issue here – if you place any stock in David Foster Wallace’s 1990 diagnosis that irony is the agent of stasis in Western culture, then you can see how fiction like Mohamed’s could be misconstrued as the answer. Matar employs subtle irony in order to simultaneously occupy and stand apart from his narrative voice – which is precisely what allows him to mean more or, sometimes crucially, less than what he says. Mohamed’s literary undertaking is less ambitious and predicated on a fallacious conceptualisation of what constitutes authenticity: in short, Mohamed deals in matters of life and death but never rises above the level of mere representation.
One irritating but revealing tic is the casual and frequent use of untranslated vernacular, particularly in dialogue where the affectation seems a calculated but senseless attempt at evoking the milieu: ‘Waryaa, hus! Can you hear something, Rabbit?’ is a typical example. This is about as authentic as Spielberg’s War Horse, and is pitched at more or less the same audience: one that purports to like a good story but ultimately suffers from an impoverished notion of irony.
Still, The Orchard of Lost Souls is a step forward for Mohamed. If nothing else it seems like a highly necessary work for its creator, who could easily have recreated what made her first novel so beloved. Mohamed’s sophomore effort is, for all its improvements, less loveable than her debut: more austere, more ambitious, more political and genuinely angrier. The next work may be the one in which her skills finally click into alignment.
Throughout I felt that Mohamed described to no purpose, most egregiously in her scene-setting, in which a variety of sights, sounds and scents were evoked and variously troped, but with no unifying principle to bestow any sort of continuity or, crucially, character on the novel’s voice. The result was bland: one old woman is ‘tall as an amazon’ while another is marked by scratches and cuts ‘like the tattoos on a Maori warrior,’ and a nod to the ‘full pregnant moon’ is directly followed by a description of the ‘black planets’ of the protagonist’s eyes. Allegedly this is what not just passes for but is lauded as lyricism in prose. In the meantime, characters ‘corrected’ or ‘shot back’ at interlocutors who had either ‘pursued’ or ‘demanded’ their answers, and whenever Mohamed felt sufficiently secure in her lyricism to venture the prosaic past participle ‘said’, it was usually abused by the standard procession of adverbs: ‘sadly’, ‘apologetically’, ‘uncertainly’, and the rest.
Her sophomore effort, The Orchard of Lost Souls, offers a similar ground-up view, this time of the Somali Civil War. The most immediately noticeable change is the shift from the third person past tense to the present tense, which reads as a declaration of intent, of a renewed seriousness of purpose. Philip Hensher has decried ‘the routine use of present tense in the historical novel [as] a terrible cliché’, and Philip Pullman assents in lamenting its ‘limited range of expressiveness.’ They have a point: a stylistic choice does not a Coetzee or a Mantel make, but in Mohamed’s case the gambit seems to have focused her prose. Sample the following descriptive passage, which occurs a few pages in:
‘There’s Oodweyne watching over us,’ yells Dahabo, pointing up.
[...]
Beyond Dahabo’s pointed finger there is a mammoth painting of the dictator, hanging over the stadium like a new sun, rays emerging from around his head. The painters have tried to soften that merciless, hangdog face but have succeeded only in throwing it off balance – the chin too long, the nose too bulbous, the eyes asymmetrical. The only accurate part is the short, clipped moustache modelled on that German leader.
This is a marked improvement. In Black Mamba Boy, Mohamed’s evocation of the novel’s socio-historical context was hobbled by her inconsistent handling of her child-protagonist’s perspective, by her failure to keep what Martin Amis called ‘ironic faith’ with her narrator. Passages like the one describing Mussolini as ‘the failed primary school teacher, that syphilitic seller of ideas fallen from the back of a lorry, that gurning midget’ jarred because they emerged from outside the novel’s nominally limited perspective. The desultory occurrence of such passages were of a piece with the author’s overemphatic and untempered prose, and left the reader with an inchoate notion of what was going on in that region of the world in that period of history – a result at odds with the corrective agenda which the narrative seemed to proffer to its English-speaking audience.
In The Orchard of Lost Souls, Mohamed seems to have subscribed to Winston Smith’s perception that the best books are those that tell you what you know already. She is more interested in depicting the essential elements of life under totalitarianism, and the reader is trusted to recognise them: the penetration of all strata of life by the chimera of cult, the oppressive boredom and the succour of private insolence. Mohamed sustains this interest as she introduces her three main characters in a bravura sequence of shifting perspective: nine-year-old orphan Deqo, solitary widow Kawsar and young female soldier Filsan unknowingly interact against the backdrop of jingoistic celebrations in the town of Hargeisa. As these three strangers cross paths, Mohamed achieves something missing from her previous novel, and that is tension.
With its cipher of protagonist – much unchanged from the novel’s opening in 1935 to its conclusion in 1947 – a novel like Black Mamba Boy lives or dies on the strength of its supporting cast. While vivid, the personalities conjured up by Mohamed to interact with young Jama were of limited interest, and the novel settled into a repetitive structure that cast all the characters as ‘athletes in the hard-luck Olympics.’ It was clear from the beginning that Jama would never take up Idea and his wife Amina on their offer of a home, and that the kindly Italian officer Lorenzo was doomed precisely because of his kindness. This revolving-door approach to characters summoned only to help or hinder the protagonist stunted the reader’s interest in them.
This predictable series of binary relationships is replaced by a more dynamic and interesting tangle of limited perspectives in The Orchard of Lost Souls. These force the reader to examine motive and causality as Kawsar saves a young girl – clearly Deqo – from excessive punishment by the officials, and Filsan brutally beats an old woman – clearly Kawsar – for having disrupted the celebrations. Mohamed promises much in the collision of these three personalities, but lamentably seems to lose her nerve and settles anew into a wearyingly predictable structure.
What follows is the separation of these three characters, and long sections focus on each in their turn before they are arbitrarily brought back together in what is presented as a nurturing facsimile of family. Each individual narrative is essentially a pas de deux: Deqo has Nasra, the prostitute who takes her in; Kawsar has Nurto, the feckless young woman tasked with caring for her after the beating; and Filsan has Captain Yasin, the superior officer from whom she develops feelings. In all three cases the civil war intervenes, the characters are variously parted from their respective supporting characters, and all we are left with is happy coincidence. The novel reveals itself as a tripartite retread of Black Mamba Boy’s quest-for-family narrative, only this one is more sparsely populated.
I suspect that Mohamed’s true talent may lie in short story writing: the style of characterisation which served her well in Black Mamba Boy works best in short bursts, in short narratives of transience and of disrupted tranquillity. In the three longer slow-burns of uncertainty attempted here the characters remain static, even repetitive, and authorial intervention in the form of historical calamity is required to move them along – and even then they bristle on the page rather than change or grow. Her favoured trick of gradually revealing crucial elements of the character’s back-story works best when it takes place alongside a tighter primary narrative, which is why her characters are at their most vivid when they’re allowed to burn brightly and quickly. What remains is for Mohamed to rig up her characters within structures which best show off their strengths.
A laudatory quote on the inner dust-jacket declares that ‘the most exciting, original new fiction is coming out of Africa.’ Even with the gains evidenced in her second novel I can’t see Mohamed’s corpus to date as the epitome of this purported phenomenon. For that I would turn to 2007’s In the Country of Men, in which Hisham Matar manages to use a child’s point of view to shed a genuine and startlingly defamiliarised perspective on the early days of Gaddafi’s Libya. Matar’s protagonist, Suleiman, recalls the events of his youth without imposing his own politically and historically-informed adult clarity of hindsight. Instead, we see an author keeping ironic faith with his narrator. Irony may be the crux of the issue here – if you place any stock in David Foster Wallace’s 1990 diagnosis that irony is the agent of stasis in Western culture, then you can see how fiction like Mohamed’s could be misconstrued as the answer. Matar employs subtle irony in order to simultaneously occupy and stand apart from his narrative voice – which is precisely what allows him to mean more or, sometimes crucially, less than what he says. Mohamed’s literary undertaking is less ambitious and predicated on a fallacious conceptualisation of what constitutes authenticity: in short, Mohamed deals in matters of life and death but never rises above the level of mere representation.
One irritating but revealing tic is the casual and frequent use of untranslated vernacular, particularly in dialogue where the affectation seems a calculated but senseless attempt at evoking the milieu: ‘Waryaa, hus! Can you hear something, Rabbit?’ is a typical example. This is about as authentic as Spielberg’s War Horse, and is pitched at more or less the same audience: one that purports to like a good story but ultimately suffers from an impoverished notion of irony.
Still, The Orchard of Lost Souls is a step forward for Mohamed. If nothing else it seems like a highly necessary work for its creator, who could easily have recreated what made her first novel so beloved. Mohamed’s sophomore effort is, for all its improvements, less loveable than her debut: more austere, more ambitious, more political and genuinely angrier. The next work may be the one in which her skills finally click into alignment.