It’s “a story as old as time itself, told across cultures and among all people.” One in which “a man is thrust into something beyond him and that is not his own, and somehow, by a stroke of luck, he succeeds in it.” But Chigozie Obioma’s The Road to the Country reminds readers that success in peacetime affords people the opportunity to dream; here, one young man is compelled to fight for the Biafrans who seek independence in 1967 Nigeria and, in the context of war, success is survival.
Obioma’s third novel opens with a description: “The road to the hills is tenuous in the dark. When approached in daylight, it presents itself as a straight path. At night it acquires a mystic character, appearing sinuous and much farther.” Readers perceive the geography, but also the novel’s nature—its own mystic character and sinuous structure. Obioma’s storytelling is richly layered as he holds a torch aloft so readers can follow his pathway through different times and perspectives.
Voices from other realms regularly reside in Obioma’s fiction. In his debut novel, The Fishermen, an archetypal coming-of-age story, he offers readers the character of Abulu, who enters another state “in sudden gusts” as if raptured into a dream world. Abulu has “one leg in each domain, like “an uninvited intermediary.” His second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities, is narrated by a chi, “a font of memory—a moving accretion of the many cycles of existence,” that tells the story of its human host.
In this new novel, readers meet Igbala, a prophet who predicted the war in 1947, who—like Abulu and the chi—has a unique perspective on the protagonist’s loves and losses. He is the Seer, who “gazes through the unborn man’s eyes” in fable-like gusts, surrounded by longer chapters that immerse readers in this as-yet-unborn man’s intimate future-memories. These events were, once, simply possibilities, before they were news, before they were recounted in an historical novel.
With this interplay between past and future, between archetype and intimacy, Obioma becomes another kind of seer. Readers feel Igbala’s powerlessness as Seer, alongside his visions of the young man, who’s not yet born but navigating guilt over his younger brother’s accident (in boyhood), in young adulthood. Still viewing himself primarily as Egbonmi, the older brother, readers not only witness but also share his shock at being immersed in a civil war. He is desperate to escape—until he accepts that his new identity as a soldier is inescapable.
The visceral battlefield scenes fundamentally alter readers’ experience of time in the novel; they seem to comprise the bulk of the novel, because details accumulate but, simultaneously, blood quickens. “Everything has happened quickly, as if time in war possesses a different, hyperactive character.” These scenes do not occupy very many pages, relatively speaking, but they resonate so profoundly that each feels like a novella.
The military aspects of the novel also alter readers’ understanding of character, reinforcing the idea that the protagonist is comprised of more than one self. It’s as though he’s been renamed, previously having been Egbonmi with his role of older brother all-consuming, when he becomes a soldier as Kunle, part of another kind of family. Readers’ attachment grows alongside his own increased understanding of his own identity and importance, as he experiences a pantheon of emotions: moments of triumph when he’s “elated from an action that still feels like something an unfamiliar part of him has done” and sorrow when he’s “hugging himself and watching his shadow on the wall of the hospital, his weeping shadow.”
Despite this sense of fracture, he is one person; compounding the fracture, he is also aware of what the prophet foretold. “Had the Seer truly seen his future? Could anyone see the future?” The Seer, the author, the readers: all observe Egbonmi/Kunle. “One watching from above can tell that Kunle has changed,” Obioma writes, next itemizing the physical impacts, the visible costs of war.
But he has not only paid but received outward and inward dues, and here resides the heart of the novel. For he recognizes now, in himself, the other soldiers’ propensity to tell stories about their lives: “this strange desire to reveal every thought.” Now he understands why: first to “check their own disintegrating minds against the stability of others’” but also because there’s no point in “keeping secrets when tomorrow, or even tonight, they could be dead.”
As such, he gives everything: “dreams, stories about their intimate relationships” and, even, profound silences that Kunle feels “intensely, like he’s never felt anyone’s before.” Obioma’s The Road to the Country is a powerful testimony to the importance of stories: the stories that came before us, the stories we create for our own selves, and the stories left behind.
FICTION
The Road to the Country
By Chigozie Obioma
Hogarth Press
Published June 4, 2024
