Mythical reading: "The Fishermen" by Chigozie Obioma

This is the first of my sister-gifted set of 2015 Booker Prize shortlisted works, which, I admit, have been sitting waiting on the shelf rather longer than they deserve. Then again, I had thought that the focused summer period would be a good time for them (the next one is another). 

The Fishermen is a debut novel by Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma, one of whom many see as a rich crop of young contemporary African writers. He was also the youngest of the 2015 Booker nominees. (He didn't win, by the way, that was A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James.)

In this impressive novel, Obioma pulls off a number of remarkable combinations: the perspectives of child and adult, the mythical and everyday, the guileless narration of childhood and sophisticated, even arcane vocabulary, the Bildungsroman and Aristotelian tragedy, the political  and the domestic, the rational and the religious, English and African native languages. For me, the most striking of these combinations was between the simple, almost naive, narration of the story by the central character, Ben, from perspectives shifting between later adulthood and contemporary childhood (he is nine during the main events of the book), and the often heartbreaking events he relates. 

Ben is the fourth of a set of brothers - Ikenna, Boja, Obembe and Benjamin - living in a middle--class family in the town of Akure. There are also two infant siblings, David and Nkem, the sole daughter. The story begins when Mr. Agwu, the father, an employee of the National Bank of Nigeria, is posted to a distant city, in the dangerous north of the country. The family stays behind in Akure, with the father only able to return every couple of weeks. Mr Agwu is an aspirational patriarch, a strong believer in a "western education", a railer against corruption and superstition, a man who actively wanted many children (in a country where birth control is the new orthodoxy), and has mapped out splendid professional futures for his sons. He is, to our eyes, a severe disciplinarian, keeping his sons in line with the menace - and the use - of the belt, but he is also, fundamentally, a good man whose absence from the family, and consequent inability to keep his sons on the straight and narrow, turns out to be a disaster of mythical (that word again!) proportions. 

The book trails the fact that the family's story is on a tragic arc from early on. Are we to see Mr Agwu's aspirations as hubris, the Aristotelian tragic flaw, triggered by his absence, which brings relentless disaster on his family? Or is it the beacon of hope which offers a way out, perhaps not for the current generation, but then at least for the next? Like much else in Obioma's complex novel, it could be both. Either way, without father's strictures, the boys are gradually distracted from their books. They try football with the local kids, but find themselves unwelcome. The next idea is a scheme to become fishermen, a plan that takes them to the local river, where their catch rarely exceeds a few short-lived tiddlers and tadpoles. This activity is also relatively short-lived, shut down - and punished with a paternal beating - once discovered by right-thinking adults in the community, for whom the river is a place of ill omen, no longer the healthy, life-giving, deity-inhabited watercourse it once was, but a rank, polluted, dangerous place which brings good to no-one. 

Chigozie Obioma

In another novel, the children's bid for freedom, set against irrational adult objections, might be seen rather differently, but here, it is the adult view which is vindicated. Tragedy is unleashed by an encounter at the river with the local madman, Abulu, who is a constant presence on the fringes of society. He is deeply unappealing: unhinged and unpredictable, filthy, living off garbage, given to public masturbation and even, on one occasion, necrophilia. But there is another side to his madness, something which talks to the residual superstition of the community, crazed prophetic powers. One such prophesy, delivered to the boys, who encounter him by the river, turns out to be the source of all the grief. Ikenna, says Abulu, will die at the hand of one of his brothers...

Whether this is a true - somehow supernatural - prophesy or the implanting of a destructive idea in the soil of sibling rivalry is one of the many ambiguities of the book. However you see how it, though, it triggers the spiral of tragedy which afflicts the Agwu family. 

MKO Abiola - robbed

Obioma himself, in various interviews, talks up the political aspect of this book. The period of the action, the early 1990's, saw Nigeria slide into military dictatorship, when the election rightly won by MKO Abiola (who features in the book), was robbed from him by the army, with the candidate later dying in detention. It is possible, yes, to build a political allegory around the story: the Agwu family a hopeful Nigeria, torn apart by its own latent divisions, its underlying irrationality, poisoned by the legacy of the madman, perhaps a coded reference to the destructive former colonial power, Britain. 

The political element is undeniably present, but the strength of this novel is its multi-layered nature, which allows it to absorb and express many different meanings and resonances. The is a timelessness about the tale of this family which transcends and encompasses any "mere" political frame of reference. 

Indeed, this is an incredibly rich novel, offering itself to all kind of simultaneous and overlapping interpretations. Moreover, it is beautifully and evocatively written, with an underlying simplicity which enhances its mythical qualities. 

To read.