Engagement Rings: Something Of A frustration - Half Of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It is not often that a novel comes to hand that has been prized, praised and pre-inflated. Half of a Yellow Sun was in that category when I opened it and began to read. And I was captivated immediately. I read the first hundred pages at a pace, delighting in the ease with which the Chimanada Ngozi Adichie used language to draw me into the middle-class clique centered on the University of Nsukka which provides the core characters of her book. Their infidelities, their inconsistencies, their desire, despite the servants, for equality and relaxation are symptomatic of their time. The dissimilar twin sisters, Olanna and Kainene, one imagines will provide a car for parallel and dissimilar lives, providing unlikeness and metaphor, and I eagerly awaited their stories to unfold.

The book's sections alternate between the early and late 1960s, the latter period in Nigeria, of course, being the Biafran War. And, yes, the characters live through the war, and their lives and their natures, and along with them their country, are transformed by it. Maybe even their own identity is redrawn, especially once the promise of a recognised nationality is promised and then denied. At last there are vivid scenes of the war's brutality, its duplicate standards, its compromises, its cynicism, its racism and its starvation. The images are visible and vivid, unforgettable even, and the quality of war to undermine utterly and profoundly any assumption that an individual might harbour about an imagined time to come is movingly portrayed.

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So why then was I so disappointed with the book? All I can offer, I'm afraid, is that At last I found it shallow. Its apparent attentiveness on the domestic lives of the characters undermined their credibility as members of an intellectual elite and rendered them two (or Maybe even one) dimensional. Chimanada Ngozi Adichie considered tells us that Odenigbo is a mathematician and in love with his subject. He covets his personal library, which he loses in the war and then has replaced by a benefactor. But in my experience, mathematicians are passionate population - and are usually passionate about mathematics. No mathematician I have ever met avoids all mention of personal schoraly interests in group settings as scrupulously as Odenigbo. I didn't want the novel to become a textbook, but if characters were ballet dancers, undoubtedly we would expect to hear of the roles they had danced and the music that had moved them. Of Odenigbo's schoraly character we hear nothing. Why is he therefore endowed with knowledge and interest that is never explored? Maybe he only exists as a character to interact with the twin sisters.

Something Of A frustration - Half Of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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And the question is repeated with Richard Churchill who, we are told is an Igbo-speaking English radical. I knew a lot of sixties radicals and they were never slow to offer an understanding or, indeed, place themselves squarely in a space on the ideological chessboard. In Half of a Yellow Sun, we never learn if Richard is a Marxist, Maoist, Leninist or Trot. He never mentions Castro or Ho Chi Minh. He doesn't appear to have any position on capitalism, society, business, the Third World, South Africa, Central America or even Viet Nam. I found myself wondering which sixties decade saw his radicalisation. When Chimanada Ngozi Adichie tells us that he travels to Lagos to attend a function in honour of the state funeral of Winston Churchill (perhaps no relation), I began to wonder if he was an early- (or undoubtedly late) born radical Tory. I have been an expatriate myself, so I can forgive him his attendance of the function, but not his total silence on the issues of the day.

This becomes especially problematic when both Britain and the Soviet Union are mentioned as assisting the Federal soldiery in the destruction of secessionist Biafra. What sixties radical, given the inevitability of his assumption of a Cold War bifurcated paradigm to underpin his ideological position, would not have pondered and discussed this at length, even in bed?

Eventually we also have to read along with prolonged adulation of Ojukwu. His Excellency might even be the Great Helmsman, himself, given that his free-thinking minions seem unable to mention a comment of an historical character who At last fled to Ivory Coast to save his skin and live his life in relative relax after leaving millions of his own population dead. Maybe he had to be preserved to fight other day, as he At last did, if in a dissimilar way, but undoubtedly no sixties radical would have left his role unquestioned. It doesn't ring true, and an opportunity to manufacture a character like Richard through his own and obvious disillusion was ignored.

And then we are presented with a pair of American journalists that the radical Richard has to greet and service in his role as a promoter of the Biafran cause. They are both called Charles and apparently have the same nickname, Chuck - which undoubtedly should have been Charlie of the "right" collection to heighten the farce. They are simply not credible. We can probably accept as deadly literal, that the majority of Americans neither knew where Biafra was nor cared a jot about its plight, since the attentions of the politicised were focused elsewhere at the time. But the presentation of a pair of foreign correspondents as crass as these is undoubtedly incredible, as is, equally, Richard's apparent patience in dealing with them.

I did also become mildly irritated at what became quite allembracing use of Igbo words when they seemed to offer no extra flavour, meaning or understanding. I have no question with the use of local terms to heighten a feeling of place and sound, but their over use tends to obfuscate. We undoubtedly wanted to know what these population thought, but we were never told.

So what are we left with? Half of a Yellow Sun is a beautifully written, beautifully composed domestic tale of fidelity, infidelity, loyalty and opportunism. The unlikeness between the characters' and therefore the nation's lives at the start and the end of the decade is engaging. But because their psyches are never undoubtedly explored, we never understand any motives or, therefore, any consequences. Reading Half of a Yellow Sun was a completely enjoyable palpate which, with hindsight, I would have foregone.

Something Of A frustration - Half Of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Saturday, June 9, 2012

Something Of A frustration - Half Of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie