The return of storytelling to literary fiction is often hailed as a welcome relief, after what some see as recent excesses of style over content. This debut work, in the best tradition of the coming-of-age novel, serves as a reminder of what serious, committed storytelling can do: in showing us how an adolescent tests out her version of the past, it puts a shape on trauma and makes it bearable, mends what has been broken, works with the bits and pieces of shattered lives to see what might be made with them. Remembering thus involves re-membering, and is a political act, particularly if the official historians of a culture ignore the experience of certain sections of the people. This Nigerian story, intertwining the personal and the political, opens with images of violent breakage and ends with the protagonist nursing a lapful of knowledge, able to live in the present tense, to look towards the future.
Fifteen-year-old Kambili, the first- person narrator, and her elder brother, Jaja, live harshly confined lives ruled by their tyrannical father, a wealthy factory owner and passionately devoted Catholic. This domestic ogre is obsessed with order: he devises schedules for how his child- ren spend their time, with every minute accounted for, punishes them for not coming top of the class, whips them when they dare to transgress or fail. Brother Eugene, as he is known at the local church, has been thoroughly corrupted by the white man. His ardent espousal of capitalism and Catholicism is shown to be at the root of his domestic cruelty. Having violently repressed his sense of the ancient culture that formed him, he takes his rage for what he has lost out on his family.
At first Kambili simply tries to pretend she does not understand the noises coming from her parents' bedroom. Once her mother is so badly hurt that she suffers a miscarriage, Kambili retreats into silence, physical symptoms, passivity, hopeless prayer. Adichie describes very well how a girl aware of no other options can continue to love a bullying father, continue believing in him as a god even when he tortures her "for her own good". That is the secret of this father's power: to convince his victims that he adores them even as he hurts them. After the infliction of pain come the bear hugs and caresses.
There is a military coup, and Kambili and Jaja are sent away, for safety's sake, to stay with their independent-minded aunt Ifeoma and her gang of lively children. In this less repressive atmosphere, Kambili learns to speak again, to engage with others, even to question her father's warped values. Two people make this possible: her grandfather, whom her father has banished from his house as a dangerous pagan influence, and a young Nigerian Catholic priest. The former offers her a nourishing portrait of an existence lived in the presence of gods and ancestors, while the other, sensitive, handsome and sensual, demonstrates that Nigerians can adapt Christianity for their own positive ends. Inspired by these two father figures, Kambili finds the strength to become a less dishonest witness to the conflicts at home that act as a warped mirror of the conflicts raging in the street and the capital.
Adichie draws us inside Kambili's world through her rich descriptions of physical and domestic environments, her artful deployment of suspense and drama. There are moments of melodrama, such as when her father walks downstairs with his unconscious, bleeding wife slung over his shoulder like a sack of rice, as there is also a romantic division between goodies and baddies. We forgive these, because the moral structure of the novel, after all, reflects an adolescent's search for certainties. It also owes something to the folk-tale backdrop of saints' lives, their tendency to idealise and demonise. Storytelling strains at the leash of realism's attempt to portray complex, messy truth; that is its allure and perhaps its danger.
Michele Roberts's most recent novel is The Mistressclass (Little, Brown)
