12 The New York Reviewpredating Boko Haram. The Maitat-
sine, for example, warred against or-
thodox Muslims and, incensed by “all
who rode in any mechanical convey-
ance,” strangled cyclists with their
own bicycle chains. He builds a new
church and religious movement: Chris-
lam, a unifying hybrid of Christian-
ity and Islam. More than a building,
though, it’s a religious city that rises
on an island near the town of Lokoja
where two rivers met. His new ministry
also becomes a political hangout, and
Davina is appointed the prime minis-
ter’s official spiritual adviser.
In Soyinka’s critique of the rule and
confluence of politicians and religious
figures, obsequiousness is the govern-
ing characteristic; the nation is on its
knees. Sir Goddie’s office is “a heaving
Uriah heap of oozing unctuousness.”
His assistant, Shekere Garuba, whose
job appears to be little more than “en-
suring that the prime ministerial kola
nut bowl was steadily replenished,”
is the personification of this attitude.
Soyinka devotes a page to describing
the simple act of Garuba preparing to
knock on the PM’s door as he adjusts
his demeanor for a favorable response
from the boss. The message appears
to be: in a society of scoundrels, you’d
best get up off your knees and work
your way into a position where others
will genuflect to you. “Victims act in-
humanly,” Soyinka has argued, “to
become the very things that had de-
graded them as human beings in the
first place.”
Soyinka readily admits that he’s
more of a dramatist than a novelist. He
has struggled to capture the unwhole-
someness of the tumult and collective
lack of self- awareness of Nigerian so-
ciety and has proposed that the novel
offers the best format for composing a
contemporary tapestry of the country.
Chronicles is energetic and sets off at
quite a pace. The ambition is admirable
but the book bulges with a superabun-
dance of characters barely sketched
beyond caricature; as a consequence
it soon becomes unbalanced and un-
wieldy. Even a significant character
such as Papa Davina is absent for long
passages.
Nevertheless, a lacerating satirical
sharpness propels the book, and if at
times it appears overwritten, that is con-
sistent partly with the feeling of hysteria
and a country careering out of control:
bombs explode with sickening regular-
ity and the collapse of buildings “had
become the companion sounds of exis-
tence”; bizarre killings happen on the
streets in broad daylight, including at
one point a decapitation, succinctly de-
scribed: the assailant “whipped off the
brown paper wrapping and out flashed
a machete.... [He uttered] a violent
curse in some unfamiliar language... a
swish, and with that single stroke the
man lopped off the head” of another
man standing in line at a bus stop.
Elsewhere, hapless victims pile up
on Lagos’s treacherous roads from ac-
cidents, and sometimes a driver caught
in traffic risks becoming a statistic of
“accidental discharge” from a police-
man’s or soldier’s gun. The randomness
of state violence following an unwitting
transgression is rendered in one of the
most chilling passages of the book:All it took was for even a low-
ranking sergeant to take offence at
another motorist, who perhaps re-
fused to give way to his car, a mere“bloody civilian,” never mind that
the latter had the right of way. An
on- the- spot educational measure
was mandated. Guns bristling,
his accompanying detail, trained
to obey even the command of a
mere twitch of the lip, leapt from
their escort vehicle, dragged out
the hapless driver, unbuckled their
studded belts, whipped him sense-
less, threw him in the car boot or
on the floor of the escort van, and
took him to their barracks for
further instruction. However, the
wretch sometimes created a prob-
lem by suffocating en route.The idealistic Dr. Menka is one of
four friends who style themselves the
“Gong of Four”— an allusion to the
Chinese Communist Gang of Four, but
these Nigerians are socially engaged
and altruistic. The Gong of Four have
remained close since their days abroad
at university, when they pledged on re-
turning home to do something, as re-
payment for the investment in them, for
the betterment of the country. With the
passage of time, pragmatism has tem-
pered their ambition. Now, seasoned
and in their fifties, none is so naive as
to doubt the wisdom of the assertion
once made by Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie: “To live in Lagos is to live on
distrust.” That distrust is most evident
in electoral corruption, which elicits
a collective shrug of the shoulders in
Soyinka’s novel: “International observ-
ers had their say, then went home to
document their findings. What differ-
ence did it make? mocked the victori-
ous, lamented the losers.”
All the members of the Gong of Four
hope to swim free from this sea of cor-
ruption but cannot entirely; to do so
would be to surrender to its tyranny.
Prince Badetona (aka the Scoffer), a
fastidious government accountant, be-
comes embroiled in a financial scandal
(engineered by the authorities) and is
imprisoned. Farodion is an elusive pro-
moter in the entertainment industry
who has strayed from the gang and is
barely mentioned.
Duyole Pitan- Payne remains the
most upbeat of them, buoyed by a per-
manent amusement that helps him rise
above Nigeria’s squalor, physical and
psychological. He’s an engineer and en-
trepreneur who, to the bewilderment of
civil servants such as Shekere Garuba,
is promoted to a post at the UN as a
consultant to its Energy Commission
on the basis of his actual experience
and expertise. “He was sufficiently im-
modest to know that he had earned it
on merit,” the narrator notes, and that
in itself presents a problem. Pitan-
Payne is not a party man, cannot be
influenced, and is not biddable. Why
then, the PM’s adviser wonders, would
such a man be rewarded when there are
other more deserving candidates who
are eager to pay for the honor of repre-
senting their country at the UN?
One of the frustrations of the book
is that Garuba, along with a handful of
other characters whom So yinka spends
only a brief time developing, primarily
serves the satire. They include Pitan-
Payne’s siblings: the feckless rascal
Teahole, whose illogic gets the better
of any logical thinker; and Selina, a
disparaging snob whose brittle voice
resembles “a piece of grit scratch-
ing on the windows.” Both exemplify
the elite Nigerians who loathe theirpoor compatriots and unsophisticated
country. They exist in a vacuum, un-
encumbered by any sense of morality;
they are delightfully despicable, and
drive the conscientious Dr. Menka to
distraction.Soyinka places his surgeon at the moral
center of the novel; he is the touchstone
of empathy. It’s a fascinating choice. If
there’s one character who can possibly
act as a “repairer of the breach,” then
it is the doctor. For much of the time
Menka appears sanguine, accepting, as
all surgeons must, the brutality of their
profession even when they are obliged
to violate the medical code that has ex-
isted for millennia: First, do no harm.
In yet another backstory— the book
is replete with reports of seminal mo-
ments from characters’ pasts— we learn
that Menka carried out the instruction
from a sharia court to amputate the
arm of a convicted thief. Slowly the
good doctor’s resilience starts to un-
ravel. In the past, witnessing each
abuse “merely sealed up channels of
emotional response except one— rage.”
Soyinka appears to be saying that in a
society like Nigeria, the temptation is
to surrender to despair, but as long as
we still have the capacity for rage, then
hope remains.
In the midst of the chaos and jeop-
ardy Menka takes refuge in his gen-
tlemen’s club, the Hilltop Manor at
Jos, in the Plateau State. The elegant
imperial hangout— with glazed wood
paneling; bleached, outdated British
journals; and a welcoming banner in-
scribed “Manners Maketh Man”—
offers respite from the ill- mannered
chaos beyond its doors. But Menka
causes consternation when, his nerves
beginning to fray, he lashes out in an
extraordinary “round of self- savaging”
at his own complacency and especially
that of his fellow members. Dr. Bedside
Manners (as they call him) suffers men-
tally not from the escalating horror of
Boko Haram’s increasing atrocities but
rather from the “civilian demonism”
pervading the land. Perversely he finds
relief in attempting to rationalize be-
liefs that justified the horror, and in
trying “to configure visions of that fu-
ture whose gateway some could only
glimpse through mangled humanity.”
Even Menka, though, cannot re-
ally fathom the overtures from sinis-
ter businessmen— who are aware of
the amputation he performed on the
thief— to involve him in their venture,
trading body parts, which the narrator
describes as “Human Resources.” This
dark commerce— one that will have a
deleterious impact, especially on the
heroic Gong of Four— is the turning
point of the novel and the inevitable
conclusion, the narrator suggests, of de-
cades of dehumanizing the population:Indifference turns to active toler-
ation, butchery turns vicarious, a
form of grim but gleeful participa-
tory theatre. How was it possible
not to anticipate the logical end,
the terminus of remorseless logic
of a progressive dulling of sensi-
bilities that underlay the furtive
patronage of a once unthinkable
commerce.Notwithstanding some perfunctory
plotting about the alignment of church
and government in the business of
Human Resources, it is a riveting con-ceit; the trade in human body parts—
centered in Badagry, a small town close
to Lagos from which enslaved Africans
were dispatched during the Atlantic
slave trade— is a metaphor for the state
devouring its own people.
When Pitan- Payne comes close to
discovering the scheme, he is sent a
mail bomb and blown up, an event as
calamitous as “a sinkhole opened up in
the midst of a crowded intersection.”
Here Soyinka reprises the trope of
The Man Died about the dangers and
necessity of resisting tyranny. Pitan-
Payne is a fictional stand- in for Dele
Giwa, the Nigerian investigative jour-
nalist who was assassinated in 1986, the
same year that So yinka won the Nobel
Prize. (Giwa is one of the three people
to whom Soyinka dedicates his novel.)
The assassination of Pitan- Payne—
the best the country has to offer— is a
shock and a travesty that diminishes
everyone; it should not be possible or
countenanced. Could it help rejuvenate
others, a challenge to the notion that
“once breath is gone, the rest is sen-
timent”? The narrator notes that the
intense and torturous preparations for
the repatriation of the body of Men-
ka’s friend from Salzburg (where he
had been airlifted for emergency treat-
ment) serve “as a palliative for the ne-
glected areas of [Menka’s] existence.”
But the state’s cynicism is unending.
Pitan- Payne is declared a martyr, and
Sir Goddie and his advisers plan for a
regular festival to be inaugurated in his
name.
Satire is always difficult to get right.
If a writer has to spell out his inten-
tions, then satire fails. It was the sa-
tirical edge of many of Soyinka’s early
plays and essays that made his writing
so forceful. The satire here is more of
a blunt instrument. This long- awaited
novel, a fusion of dark comedy and
grotesque exaggeration, invites sympa-
thetic reverence for the author, now in
his eighties, and the kind of unrealistic
hope for another masterpiece found in
admirers of genius artists whose best
work is behind them.
Even so, Soyinka has created a por-
trait of a nation that has lost its way, is
inured to corruption and violence, and
can seemingly no longer be shocked
beyond a pervasive ennui. It’s a bleak
picture that nonetheless has cracks of
optimism about the possibility of find-
ing allies to retrieve humanity. Soy-
inka is neither defeatist nor downcast.
His book is sometimes vexing and at
other times exhilarating. Its form—
loose yet always charged with explo-
sive potential— perfectly mirrors the
elusive idiosyncrasies of a society that
others, less able and emotionally in-
telligent than he, whether writers or
broadcasters, have struggled to convey.
Soyinka saves some of his most droll
and visceral writing for the denoue-
ment of the final chapter, when a power
outage sends swaths of Lagos into
darkness:The huge gloved hand silenced
him and blotted out the neighbour-
hood.... A thin streak of residual
light lingered over a distant rim of
rooftops, treetops, and hilltops,
the last being sometimes camou-
flaged mounds of multi- textured
garbage jutting out between the
glove’s widespread fingers and
unseen ooze.... [A] progres-
sive orchestration of generator
spurts, gearing up for extendedGrantGreenhouse 10 _ 17 .indd 12 3 / 10 / 22 4 : 00 PM