Chigozie Obioma's debut novel, The Fishermen, is a slow-burner book where not much happens right away, but it's OK because it's interesting. Set in the Nigerian village of Akure, it's the story of nine-year-old Ben and his three older brothers (and younger brother and sister as well). They've been raised in a household with a very strict father who keeps them in line until his job transfers him away. The children and their mother stay in Akure, much to the mother's distress. Although she tries to keep the kids from behaving badly, without their father there, the incentive to behave just isn't present.
Which is how the four oldest boys end up going to the river they've been forbidden to go to in order to try and catch fish they can sell. It's on one of these escapades that the boys encounter the local madman, who has the uncanny ability to predict bad things that will happen to others--and he predicts that the oldest brother will be killed by one of the others.
Will it happen or not? That I won't spoil. But the book raises some very interesting questions about what happens if you believe in prophecy. The oldest, apparently cursed brother, who previously acted as a surrogate (if more lenient) father, begins to withdraw from his family in his desire to not let the prophecy come true. That in turn frustrates and enrages some of the younger boys, who have always depended on him.
Throughout the book are references to Nigerian politics and situations of the mid-1990s. But also present, and mostly masterfully done, is a mythic structure that raises the story from the real-world and makes something other-worldly about it. Each chapter opens with the name of an object or creature:
"The Falconer
"Mother was a falconer:
"The one who stood on the hills and watched, trying to stave off whatever ill she perceived was coming to her children. She owned copies of our minds in the pockets of her own mind and so could easily sniff troubles early in their forming, the same way sailors discern the forming foetus of a coming storm."
The writing is often beautiful, with many unexpected and apt metaphors: "Boja's words had dropped like a piece of chinaware, its pieces scattered about."
There are some little nits and nats too--at times the metaphors are strained ("the dying sun pitched in a corner of the sky as faint as a nipple on the chest of a teenage girl a distance away"), and at times there are just so many of them that the story slows down. The author also has a tendency to dissolve into backstory just at a point when the tension is building up, and that's not great for pacing either.
That said, it's a compelling story, mostly well written, and I'll definitely look for the author's next book.