BEASTS OF NO NATION. By Uzodinma Iweala. 180pp. John Murray. Pounds 12.99. - 0
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This slim first novel is so choked with unrelenting, graphic violence that if it were any longer it would collapse under its own force. Set in an unnamed African country, it transports us via a claustrophobic first-person narrative told in pidgin English into the tortured psyche of nine-year-old Agu. When civil war fractures his country, Agu is wrenched away from all that is familiar as his father is shot dead and his mother flees. He runs unwittingly into the path of the rebels who enlist him as a child soldier, sweeping him into a nightmarish world where cruelty confounds understanding. Uzodinma Iweala, a twenty-two-year-old Nigerian, gives a raw, urgent voice to Africa's countless child soldiers whose stories have largely gone unheard.
"War is making it very hard to be fixing anything", observes Agu, who loses all sense of fixed positions -both geographical and ideological. Iweala leaves the country unnamed, and the heightened sense of displacement makes the reader understand the feeling that "the whole world is washing away beneath your feet".
Agu wades though the world as if he were a ghost: "I am floating on top of my body and just watching". The unrelenting present-tense narrative increases the feeling that he has been wrenched out of history, his past and future stolen from him.
Things fall apart: the government is abolished, his school closes, his best friend disappears, he is sexually abused by the Commandant, and he begins to murder people. Agu is desperate to be a "good boy"; but in war murder is praise worthy: "I am soldier and soldier is not bad if he is killing . . . . So if I am killing I am only doing what is right", he reasons.
Charting this decline into bestiality, the novel is full of sickening imagery of humans seen as animals -"It is just like killing goat". The markers of individual humanity are erased: "his whole face is not even looking like a face"; "I am holding my machete closer. I am liking how it is feeling in my hand, like it is almost part of my body". After an initial repulsion, Agu takes pleasure in killing, revelling in the sound of a knife chopping up human flesh.
Language struggles to keep up with the horrors; words curdle into cumulative repetition, crashing against impasses in meaning: "there is just blood, blood, blood".
This is a dystopia in which it is dangerous to have a mind; the child soldiers are commanded not to think, for "the second you are stopping to think about it, your head is turning to the inside of a rotten fruit". However, Agu begins to think, and this drives him towards insanity, although it saves him from his immediate environment: "My thinking is like the road, going on and on, and on and on, until it is taking me so far far away from this place". He is sustained by dreams of a future, of being a doctor or an engineer, "when the war is over and I am alive".
