Book Review
Novels of houses of horror, Somalia and Uganda

By Michael Upchurch
Seattle Times book critic

	E-mail this article Print this article Search archive

You can go home again, even if home is nothing but a place of power struggle, death and anarchy.

But is it really a good idea?

That's the question posed in two new novels about Africa: "Links" by Nuruddin Farah, set in contemporary Somalia, and "Snakepit" by Moses Isegawa, set in the 1970s Uganda of dictator Idi Amin. Both writers now live in exile from their native countries. Read these books, and you'll have a fair idea why.

Farah, winner of the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, offers Somalian exile Jeebleh (no last name) as our guide to warlord-ruled, violence-torn Mogadishu. Once a political prisoner there, Jeebleh is now a professor in New York City and has come home to see friends, pay respects to his dead mother's memory, and face the villain who caused him and his friends such suffering.

	Moses Isegawa

Memories of socialist dictatorship, civil war and the United States' abortive intervention are still fresh, and Jeebleh has trouble crediting the wreckage he sees around him. He has even more trouble crediting the consequences of his actions in this changed city — the threats to his life he incurs, for instance, when he stops a boy from beating a dog or turns down his family clan when they ask him for money for weapons.

There's some nice ambiguity at the start of the book about who's a villain, who's a victim and who's to be trusted ("We are at best good badmen, or bad badmen," one new acquaintance tells Jeebleh). And the novel effectively surrounds you with the sights and sounds of a country fallen to pieces.

Author appearance Nuruddin Farah reads from "Links," 7:30 p.m. Thursday, at Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St., Seattle (free; 206-624-6600 or www.elliottbaybook.com)

Yet Jeebleh and his well-intentioned friends fail to cohere or develop as characters. An overly schematic author-imposed thesis that Somalia's woes may stem from its citizens' violations of taboo and/or failures in personal relationships doesn't help matters. Nor does a subplot about the kidnapping of two small girls, one of them credited with supernatural peace-making powers.

Isegawa's "Snakepit," by contrast, draws you directly, and scarily, into contact with pure bedlam. No moral compass is offered here. All expectations of just deserts, or even logical consequences from actions (or inaction), are tossed aside. Isegawa's early years coincided with Amin's 1971-1979 reign, and it must be his impressionable childhood/adolescent memories of the period that let him tap so viscerally into its chaos and cruelty, yet find a kind of amoral normality within its parameters.

The prose here is terse, charged, scalpel-like. And Isegawa (author of one other novel, "Abyssinian Chronicles," about life under Amin) has been canny in his choice of protagonist: he's gone with an opportunist rather than a man of conscience.

"Links" by Nuruddin Farah Riverhead, 336 pp., $24.95 "Snakepit" by Moses Isegawa Knopf, 272 pp., $24

Ugandan native son Bat Katanga, fresh from his studies at Cambridge, has come home "to seek his fortune." There must be lots of civil-service jobs open, he reasons, given the tens of thousands of Asians that Amin has expelled from the country. Sure enough, Bat soon lands a position in the Ministry of Power and Communication. "All I have to do," he thinks, "is do my job well."

What he's overlooking is that in Amin's Uganda — with its spy agencies and assassination squads — there are no limits to what's acceptable in an employer-employee relationship. Blackmail, imprisonment, torture or even a pay-raise are possible ... and not necessarily in the sequence you'd expect.

	Nuruddin Farah

"Snakepit" twists, turns, goes on brisk tangents, then snaps back into focus with almost sadistic aplomb. A prostitute-spy whose conscience is a "feeble agitator"; a venomous English mercenary who finds Amin's Uganda to his liking; a renowned astrologer whose clientele includes several African leaders; Bat's murderous lunatic of a boss — all figure in the taut, intricate action of the novel. So do Bat's bewildered academic friends, saintly sister and dissident brother. The varied landscapes of rural Uganda are beautifully caught, as are the mean streets of Kampala ("The city had long since become a catacomb, swallowing its people while keeping a straight face").

Amin is glimpsed only secondhand, his paranoia "swelled to the size of a cathedral." But his presence pervades the book, warping every character's thoughts and actions — from Amin's henchmen, at the top, to the humble "surgeons" of the garbage dumps, who hire themselves out to families trying to find the corpses of relatives killed by Amin.

There's a hyperbolic grotesquerie floating through the book that serves, almost, as comic relief. (Could Amin really have "launched a new million-shilling banknote, with a picture of him defecating on Europe"?) On the downside, Isegawa can be overly abrupt in dropping you into the mind of a new character, and a few digressions (including a surreal quickie visit Bat makes to the U.S.) feel "off."

Still, his vision of what happens when justice enjoys only "a weak existence in an age of gun rule," is sharp, harrowing, indelible.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company