this is a long but effortless and very readable novel about five people caught in the biafran war of 1967-70. The five people are olanna and kainene, estranged twin sisters, their parterns odenigbo and richard, and odenigbo’s and olanna’s houseboy ugwu. olanna and kainene are daughters of an obscenely rich nigerian couple. odenigbo is a highly educated, left-wing math university professor. richard is an english writer who falls in love with kainene and decides to make nigeria and then biafra his mission. the most sympathetic, maybe the only really sympathetic character is ugwu, the houseboy, who’s resourceful, intelligent, fun, and remarkably unproblematic. the other four have a number of personal and interpersonal issues that are meant to be the focus of the book but ultimately go nowhere.

chimamanda ngozi adichie writes like someone with a great talent for telling a good story. for the first three quarters, this novel flows like melted butter on the tongue, and just as deliciously. the language doesn’t draw any attention to itself, but the story clips along very beautifully. adichie builds good dramatic tension, intermingling the story of the relationship between the five characters with the story of nigeria and biafra. why is kainene so angry at olanna? how will the two couples work out? will their members figure out their differences? will the two sisters and their husbands reconcile? how does ugwu fit in all this? there’s a lot on this novel’s plate: siblings’ rivalry, male sexuality, women’s independence; class, race, ethnic conflict, post-colonialism; political activism, nationalism, the role of writing. but adichie is much better at putting all this juicy stuff on the plate than at making it work. i am tempted to say that, apart from learning why biafra was born and why nigeria went to war with it, i didn’t get anything out of this book other than the pleasure of reading the first three quarters. the twins’ rivalry, maybe the most intriguing of the interpersonal tensions, fizzles into nothingness, and so does just about any other topic raised by this book.

the most striking of these topics, the one that adichie really, really should have addressed, is class. in the postscript she mentions her sources, singling out a book that was “indispensable in creating the mood of middle class biafra.” clearly, presenting the war from the point of view of the middle class was an explicit concern of hers. but it is not enough, of course, to describe how the middle class fared in the war. maybe adichie thought we needed to be told that biafra was not only masses of undifferentiated skin-and-bone people, and maybe we did. but telling takes only one page or two. if you give us the middle class, then you have to give us an analysis and critique of the middle class. it is ultimately a bit sickening to see these four people alternate between benevolence towards the starving masses and grief at their personal tragedies, none of which seem as tragic as those of the destitute refugees. when odenigbo falls completely apart over news of his mother’s death, it’s really hard to sympathize. the whole freaking country is dying! (and no, adichie is not suggesting the odenigbo’s self-involvement should be put into question; i don’t see a critique there at all).

it is entirely possible that the rapport between these people should be seen as a large metaphor for what happened to nigeria, but adichie should have tried to make it work in its own terms, first.