THE TWICE BOOKER-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR 'Obioma is truly the heir to Chinua Achebe' New York Times 'Incredibly moving and hopeful' Nadifa Mohamed 'Remarkable' Alice Walker 'A major voice' Salman Rushdie 'A wondrous novel' Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah At ...

NUBClub had a long and detailed conversation about The Road to the Country and we were largely split between two different takes, even as individuals. We felt Obioma's intent was to give a picture to the reality of the Nigerian Civil War and how young soldiers were recruited into it. On this theme, Obioma paints a compelling and enlightening picture. His depiction of battles as very local to Kunle (the protagonist) and without broader context, the limited resources and even clothing the soldiers have, the accidental way they travel and get promoted, and the way they engage with the enemy with almost camaraderie shows a complex reality that none of us had really understood before. Obioma also shows thoughtfulness giving us a moment to recognize the dead from that war and how much deprivation and suffering there was. But the book was marred by the plot that Obioma employed to show these themes. Kunle is not a very fleshed out character. His motivations in the beginning boil down to finding his brother and thinking about a crush from his childhood and he constantly returns to the same thoughts over and over in the novel. His counterparts in the army are very thinly sketched (the political poet, the chill one, the religious one) and even though they are Kunle's deepest relationships, there's no nuance or complexity to them. And Kunle's romantic journey with Agnes is almost laughably unbelievable. Our sense is that Obioma was using these elements to make the book readable, but he just didn't put enough color to them to make them compelling. The Seer frame perhaps exemplifies this issue. It's not really clear what the Seer is for in the book -- he doesn't have any motivation and he shows no interesting perspective as the voice that's giving us the story. However, at the very end of the novel, we realize that he violated his religious beliefs to warn people about the war, only to no avail in stopping it. That is an interesting and poignant message about war -- why didn't Obioma do more with the Seer the whole time if he's that important to the themes? Ultimately, The Road to the Country is a mixed bag and your mileage will vary here. Obioma has tackled an important topic and has written some very insighting and moving ideas about it. You just have to decide if suffering through two-dimensional characters and a really thin plot is worth it to find those gems.