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My first Onyebuchi is an interesting one to characterize as to genre. Harmattan Season is a PI story with some classic noir elements: protagonist Boubacar is down on his luck, a little self-sabotaging, unsure of what he’s working toward, fighting some old demons and secrets. It’s historical fiction, set in a West African nation under French colonial rule in a not-quite-modern timeline. It’s fantasy, or speculative fiction: there is magic afoot. One could argue it’s dystopian, but the colonial rule bit kind of covers that already.

Onyebuchi has a firm grasp of pacing and suspense, and Bouba is a compelling central character. He’s mixed race, or deux fois (“two times”), half French and half indigenous, and struggles with that identity: does it mean he gets part of each of two worlds? Or none of either? Does he fit in a little bit everywhere, or nowhere at all? The reader will learn slowly that his in-between status is further indicated morally by some of his past actions.

“Fortune always left whatever room I walked into, which is why I don’t leave my place much these days.” In the opening scene, Bouba is awakened in the middle of the night by banging on his front door. A woman stumbles in, holding a bleeding abdominal wound. She asks him to hide her; he does, as the police arrive next. One of them, it turns out, is an old associate of Bouba’s – you might even say a friend, or the closest thing he has. They leave. The woman has vanished. Unpaid, Bouba spend most of the rest of the novel trying to solve the mystery of the bleeding woman: who she was, what happened to her. He will uncover many layers of intrigue, wrongdoing, and attempted corrections, in spheres both political and personal.

I think a better grasp of West African history and politics would have given me a deeper understanding of some plot elements – and some linguistic background might have helped as well. There were a few unfamiliar words, some of which I got from French (like deux fois), some of which seem to belong to Onyebuchi’s fictional world (dugulenw), but some of which are not his invention (like the title’s harmattan, a dry seasonal West African wind). How many of the latter, or how many slight variations or references, did I miss? This is a good example of how reading ‘the other’ can be a bit more challenging but also why it’s important to do it. I’m just noting where I might have missed some nuance. Partly, I think, for this reason, I had a slow time getting engaged with the momentum of the plot, but we got there, and I wound up feeling involved with Bouba’s wellbeing and that of the community he gradually decided he belonged to.

I think Onyebuchi is a skilled writer with a fascinating and fresh take on genre intersections, and I’m curious about what else he’s done.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: historical fiction, mystery, noir, race, speculative fiction |