"Measuring Time" | Time well-spent on brothers' quests

"Measuring Time"
by Helon Habila
Norton, 383 pp., $13.95

"Cheat death, be famous."

That's the dream of the teenage Nigerian twins, Mamo and LaMamo, as they watch a plane filled with "famous people" pass over their home. But Mamo has sickle-cell anemia, and he's too sickly to join his healthier, adventurous brother when he leaves their village behind.

Helon Habila's engrossing African epic, "Measuring Time," is the story of the very different educations these near-orphans receive. Their mother died when they were born in the mid-1960s, and they're so estranged from their philandering father that they plant scorpions in his shoes. He's oblivious even to this proof of hostility, so it's left to the villagers of Keti, especially an optimistic aunt and a worldly uncle, to raise the boys.

LaMamo joins a rebel army, loses an eye and soldiers on in Liberia and Guinea, where he hopes to smuggle diamonds. Ironically, even though he stays home, Mamo ends up with a stronger claim to fame: he discovers a written history of Keti and publishes a scholarly paper that attracts the attention of the local ruler and his chief propagandist.

Soon Mamo is writing an anniversary book celebrating their regime, but they prove to be so corrupt that the villagers violently turn on them. At this point, LaMamo reappears, and Habila seems to be embracing a fatalistic view of his characters.

No matter what they do, their intentions are compromised. Mamo's attempts at running a classroom end with a government shutdown. While LaMamo says he's fighting for freedom, he often sounds like a mercenary. Reaching an especially low point in his battle with illness, Mamo claims that "It is not life that is miraculous, it is death."

Habila sees the women in the twins' lives as almost equally lost. The recently divorced Zara is clearly the love of Mamo's life, but she runs off to an orphanage in South Africa (where she witnesses Nelson Mandela's swearing-in) and loses a child-custody battle. LaMamo's pregnant wife, Bintou, faces overwhelming personal tragedy.

Despairing as it often is, "Measuring Time" is filled with wry insights into African politics, as well as an enduring respect for the healing value of survival. In the end, Habila reaches for a surprisingly philosophical approach to the inevitability of disaster.

"In real life these things almost crush us," writes Mamo's publisher, "and we realize how like everyone else we really are."

"Measuring Time" is more straightforward than Habila's 2003 debut novel, "Waiting for an Angel," which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and used several viewpoints to tell the story of a resilient Nigerian arts reporter. The new book is deftly presented from Mamo's perspective, although LaMamo's semi-illiterate letters from the front provide welcome, down-to-earth variety.

Midway through their tale, Mamo sets out to write "A Plan for a True History of the Keti People," loosely based on Plutarch's "Parallel Lives." But ultimately he abandons his model, claiming that he won't be seeking parallels because "all lives are already parallel ... People desire the same things; they only differ in how they allow their aspirations to be modified by the dominant values of their society."