AS Lit - Beasts of no nation - Book review 2

Books of The Times | 'Beasts of No Nation'

A Conscripted Soldier's Tale From the Heart of Darkness

 

By JANET MASLIN

Published: November 17, 2005

"Beasts of No Nation" views the monstrousness of war through the wide, innocent eyes of an African boy who has been conscripted as a soldier. Before this fate befell him, Agu was an eager student. He learned just enough English to give Uzodinma Iweala's debut novel an argot that is distinctively blunt.

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BEASTS OF NO NATION
By Uzodinma Iweala
142 pages. HarperCollins Publishers. $16.95.

Forum: Book News and Reviews

Agu has been forced by circumstance - and by armed guerrillas in his unnamed country - to commit unspeakable transgressions and then suffer bewildering, excruciating crises of conscience. The most important parts of his story are distilled by his dialect into simple but horrific acknowledgments. "The sun is just dropping down behind the hill like it is not wanting to be seeing us anymore," he thinks at one point. And: "All we are knowing is that, before the war we are children and now we are not."

All we are knowing about Mr. Iweala is that his book will be readily embraced by readers. Its nuances may not be subtle, but its nobility is impossible to miss. The author, who in his own voice thanks his relatives for listening to him "and tolerating my never washing the dishes," is a young Harvard graduate who divides his time between Washington and Nigeria. He has already won prizes and aligned himself with the angels.

As an indictment of war, "Beasts of No Nation" is relentlessly, pre-emptively clear. It begins as Agu is captured and beaten by rebel soldiers and forced to join their ranks. He is given a machete and ordered to use it; he must comply. "I am not bad boy," he tries to tell himself afterward. "I am not bad boy. I am soldier and soldier is not bad if he is killing. I am telling this to myself because soldier is supposed to be killing, killing, killing. So if I am killing, then I am only doing what is right."

Throughout the novel, the reader is invited to congratulate himself for grasping the paradoxes of such statements. While "Beasts of No Nation" is indeed a wrenching book, its thoughts can be painfully self-evident. None of the book's brutality exaggerates recent African history; none of its scenes would be out of place in a melodramatic war story, either. This outstanding first novel would be even better if it did not deliver so much more shock value than genuine surprise.

In a drastically different context, "The March," E. L. Doctorow's current best seller, offers interwoven war stories in which no one's next move can be predicted. But "Beasts of No Nation" keeps the terrible and the obvious more closely linked. So in the midst of civil war, Agu remembers being read the story of Cain and Abel by his mother. He remembers how his mother and sister disappeared and how his father's fate appeared to be worse. "I am seeing bullet making my father to dance everywhere with his arm raising high to the sky like he is praising God," Agu recalls. He will not see his father's arm raised again. This will prove a gentler death than his mother's.

The young soldiers are kept in line by what Agu calls gun juice. ("Everybody is always wanting gun juice because it is drug and making life easy easy.") They are also under the thumb of their Commandant, sometimes literally. When Agu is forced to be alone with him, he is treated "the way the man goat is sometimes mistaking other man goat for woman goat," just when he feels that no further humiliation is conceivable. The Commandant is enough of a stock villain to be big and strong, towering over these helpless boys. "I am thinking that only big man can be making such big shadow," Agu observes.

Pederasty does not spare the book a bordello scene as well. "I am having plenty plenty womens in the back if you are having plenty plenty money to be giving me," its proprietor explains. And the soldiers are ready for any comfort, anywhere they can find it, after the atrocities they have been forced to commit. Mr. Iweala is at his most eloquently indirect in describing the book's most unthinkable sights, like the grisly massacre of civilians. "We are finding farmer and his goat on the road and we are killing them," Agu says. "Now I am not knowing what is farmer and what is goat."

A book capable of that speaks so powerfully that no dramatic manipulation is necessary. But "Beasts of No Nation" feels obliged to find some light at the end of Agu's tunnel. So he has his dreams - being a doctor or an engineer some day, finding some way to help his countrymen. The book also introduces an eleventh-hour white American to serve as a minor, possibly even ironic deus ex machina. And at the right moment in his storytelling, Mr. Iweala magically gives Agu what has seemed unthinkable during the war's escalation from evil to diabolical: a way out. Like many of the book's twists, this one is manipulative yet genuinely effective.

"Beasts of No Nation" leaves the reader with one resonant, beautiful sentence that captures everything the author has set out to say. That sentence deserves to be read in the full context of this universal soldier's story.