Customer Reviews

Beasts of No Nation: A Novel (P.S.)

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A young boy named Strika pulls another young boy named Agu out of his hiding place and into the middle of a senseless civil war in an unnamed African country. Agu is dragged before the Commandant, the ruthless leader of a troop of soldiers, and given a choice: join or die on the spot. It is a devil's bargain, since the price of Agu's joining and saving his own life is to hack another person to death with a machete. "I am not a bad boy," Agu reasons to himself (in so many words) over the killing. "I am a soldier now, and soldiers kill, so I am only doing a soldier's job and not being a bad boy."

Uzodinma Iweala's stunning first novel tells the story of Agu's indoctrination into an adult world of civil warfare, a world of fear and hardship and stomach-churning violence. More significant, Agu enters a world of loss - separation and possibly death of his family, loss of his faith, and loss of his childlike (and sexual) innocence. If he survives the war, regardless of its outcome, he is clearly scarred for life psychologically as well as physically.

Two aspects of BEASTS OF NO NATION contribute to its narrative power. The first is Iweala's ability to convey a sense of blind irrationality. He gives us no sense of what country we are reading about, we have no idea who the competing factions are or what they are fighting for (or against) -- we don't even know into which side Agu has been conscripted. At the same time, Iweala offers no plan of attack, no pattern to the Commandant's movements, and no military objective being sought. The Commandant and his troop are little better than the scurrying ants to which Agu constantly refers, skittering about the countryside pillaging and destroying whatever they find and otherwise simply fighting the enemy and their hunger and fear to stay alive.

The second source of narrative power derives from the author's choice of narrator and narrative style. The entire story is rendered through Agu's eyes and voice. We see the civil war through a child's uncomprehending eyes and we are as confused about the issues and reasons for killing as he is. We hear the story in Agu's voice, a mixture of childlike innocence and a broken, pidgin English that makes us see events and feel emotions through a child's limited vocabulary and his struggles to articulate the utter senselessness of what he is witnessing. This language may grate for some or seem like a novelistic contrivance (after all, assuming Agu really thinks and speaks in his native tongue, why must we see it translated in such mangled English from a boy who appeared to be moderately well-educated?). It is also fraught with the writerly complication of having a semi-articulate narrator who somehow has enough command of the language to summon up words like camouflage, crater, masquerade, junction, verandah, catarrh, vomit, and insubordination.

In the end, despite the inhuman violence and sexual degradation he has experienced, Agu claims for himself the mantle of humanity. "I am having mother once," he asserts, "and she is loving me." This is a marvelous short novel and a deeply disturbing look at genocidal civil war through the eyes of one of its innocent young victims.

Titled after the classic Fela Kuti album, this debut novella from the son of Nigerian immigrants tackles the horror of child soldiers with mixed results. In an anonymous West African country torn apart by civil war, a young boy named Agu is dragged from his hiding place by rebels destroying a village and given the traditional choice: Join or die. In the harrowing scene, his initiation into the rebel forces involves killing a screaming man with a machete. In psychological self-protective logic rather unlikely for a young boy, he tells himself that since he is now a soldier, he is only doing his job by killing. Agu has no clue what the civil war is about or what constitutes an enemy, he is simply another weapon in the hands of the charismatic brutal leaders, pointed toward the enemy and told to kill. Of course, when humanity is degraded to the point children are forced into soldiering, the reasons why aren't really of any relevance, and Iweala is wise to avoid trying to explain the context for Agu's nightmare. Instead, the dislocation of his kidnapping is felt all the more, as his rebel unit wanders around, apparently aimlessly, often on the brink of starvation. Agu's experience is awful and certain scenes are moving, but it is somewhat lacking in drama or tension. There's a certain roteness to the story: gentle child (check), sexual abuse (check), flashbacks to better times (check), carnage (check), caring Western aid worker (check), triumph of the human spirit (check). Agu narrates his tale in a kind of pidgin English that will either enchant or enervate the reader -- I found it exceedingly tiresome, inconsistent, and artificial. It is tragic that child soldiers exist, however to truly move the reader, fiction has to work a little harder than this does. It's not a bad book, just not great, and not even the best novel about child soldiers this year. That would be either Johnny Mad Dog by the Congolese writer Emannuel Dongala or Moses, Citizen and Me by Delia Jarrett-Macauley, the daughter of Sierra Leonians. Another worth checking out is Peter Dickinson's 1990 Whitbread-winning novel, AK.

By the time Beasts of No Nation was published it was the subject of mass critical acclaim. I had read reviews that had nothing but good things to say about the novel that that it was an important work by a new author. Because it is a novel set in Africa the first association is automatically Achebe, because any African set novel written by an African will always be compared to Achebe. Beasts of No Nation was called a very strong debut. I'm of two minds. The first mind is totally and completely impressed by Iweala's work here. He has written a brief novel with very raw power about something we in America almost never read about in fiction or non-fiction: How is it that a young man or even a boy would join one of these militia's in Africa and go on killing rampages and act as a private army? What drives these men to do such barbaric things? Beasts of No Nation gives us one possible answer and as brutal as the militias are to the commonly perceived victims, the brutality extends to the militia itself. There is a veneer of a haven that the militia extends, but it is tenuous at best and Uzodinma Iweala shows all sides of the brutality where the humanity is stretched as thin as it could possibly be and still call itself human.

My other mind is far less impressed by the actual craft of writing employed in this novel. The book reads as if it were written in the voice of an African who does not speak English very well and so is stating things in a broken English that feels appropriate to the character and the story, but is also distracting. Because the author is a Harvard graduate with honors for his writing, I choose to believe that the style of the novel is a conscious choice rather than his own broken English. It is fully appropriate on one hand, but on the other it is very distracting and pulls me, as a reader, out of the story. I would hate to suggest to an author to not use dialect because many very fine books use dialect to great effect. In the case of Beasts of No Nation I felt the story was weakened by the overuse of dialect.

Beasts of No Nation is, at the surface, a novel about a young man who is quite intelligent and wants nothing more than to learn and go to school. Life does not quite go the way he would like when war comes to his country and militias start forming and roaming around attacking anyone who gets in their way. Our protagonist gets involved in one such militia, but not because he believes in its cause. His involvement is completely selfish: it is to save his own life. Thus begins the examination of these roaming militias and the damage they cause to the people they come in contact to as well the people who comprise the militias.

If I consider Beasts of No Nation in terms of the story it is telling I will quite willingly admit that it is superior. The raw power and pain contained within the 140 pages is very real and it is a case of the story far overshadowing the storytelling. It is the execution of the storytelling that I find fault with. Iweala has written a very powerful novel, there is no question about that. But the overuse of dialect was so distracting to me that I feel just a little bit of pulling back on the dialect would elevate this novel quite a bit. Rather than simply portraying the protagonist as an intelligent and thoughtful young man who has not had nearly as much eduction as he deserves and speaks in broken sentences, it rather feels like Iweala is the one who is lacking. I do not mean this as a personal attack because I know Iweala is a Harvard graduate and thus quite intelligent and skilled. Considering that the protagonist would not be speaking or narrating in English during this novel, there is no reason why his thoughts wouldn't translate into full and well crafted sentences like I am positive Iweala can write given the collegiate awards he has won.

So, Beasts of No Nation is a novel where the story rises above the manner in which it is told. It is worth reading and Uzodimna Iweala surely has a fine career with excellent novels ahead of him, but I hope that years down the line this will be viewed as a worthy first novel and not the best he was able to produce.

-Joe Sherry

I am not sure how to write this review. I was profoundly affected by the book. I've tried to re-edit it to convey just how special and moving it is, and words fail me. Fortunately, they did not fail the author.

The author chose his words well, using them to convey the youth, innocence and intelligence of Agu. Each sentence is a gem.
The character in this book is a child who has gone through hell. I understand a little through the book about how and why he became a mercenary (or rebel soldier, which was he? and is it different?)
What makes a child kill for a cause he does not completely understand? This book answers both everything and nothing.

Maybe the answer is survival. Or, maybe it is in the words of Agu "I am also having mother once, and she is loving me."


What stikes me the most about this book is that Agu somehow keeps his true self alive, hidden in a part of himself.

The author does not tell us what Agu's future will be, but, I hope that with the love and education his parents have given him, he will do well. Yes, I know that he is only a character, but to me, he is real, and I worry about his future.

Trying out a debutante author can be a huge step into the unknown but, with praise from Rushdie, Ghosh, and a number of British broadsheets adorning the cover, it's a step I decided to take with Beasts Of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala, an unsentimental study of war through the eyes of a child soldier. And it doesn't disappoint, providing a detailed series of events that add background to the stories of civil war in Africa that we often see in the news, although its arching tale of chilling conflicts and unspeakable acts is somewhat let down by a somewhat fortunate conclusion - for the character, that is, and not the reader.

Agu, our narrator, tells us not where he is from or how old he is but begins by giving an account of how he became a soldier when his village was raided and he ran from the scene into the clutches of a band of rebels. Then, before he knows it he is following the command of two men (early twenties, at most) called Commandant and Luftenant as they lead their band of boy soldiers across the nation for the cause.

The cause itself is never mentioned; Agu doesn't actually know what he is fighting for. He is only able to differentiate between the time before war came (which becomes more and more a faded memory) and now. But, to aid the cause, Agu's troop find themselves killing at random, raping women, burning villages to the ground, and stealing. Beasts Of No Nation is a catalogue of man's inhumanity to man in the time of war and its lists expands to include prostitution, cannibalism, and child sexual abuse. While never explicit in his description, it's the suggestion of these acts, as described by Agu, that resonate.

As a soldier, Agu doesn't know what he is meant to be doing. In fact, the only soldiers who seem to have a clue are Commandant and Luftenant:

"Commandant is yelling, TENSHUN and I am seeing that now all of us is standing here and all of us is forming tenshun very quickly. Then, Commandant is saying to us that we should be behaving ourself and looking sharp and resting well well that we will be knowing what is happening in some time. Everybody is listening, but nobody is really understanding what he is saying about moving to the front and fighting the enemy in this place or that place because I am never seeing this place or that place for my whole life. Anyway, it is not mattering too much because I am just following order and not having to do anything else. After he is shouting on us like this, he is telling us to dismiss and make camp."

Rather than be soldiers, the kids are more interested in looking like soldiers. They carry guns or machetes and wear uniforms to show status. Uniforms, itself, becomes a loose term since any clothing they can find - soldier, policeman, etc. - is taken from the dead and wore with pride.

As you can tell from the quote above, Agu's narration is given authenticity by mixing tenses, incorrect use of plural and singular terms,. The effect, at times, can be poetic and his voice assumes a wonderful rhythm. There were a couple of times where I had to read the sentence again to work out what had just been said. My only criticism of using this style is that Agu has a limited vocabulary and I noticed him using the same similes (like bullets; like ants) on multiple occasions. Fair enough, given that it's the character's voice, but it felt like the narrative could achieve more with some extra vocabulary.

If I was to have any major criticism of Beasts Of No Nation it is that Agu is surplus to requirements within his own narrative. The conclusion of the novel (or, at least, the penultimate conclusion) is perpetrated by another character which renders Agu as observer and not master of his own destiny which one would hope for in a character study.

Of the aforementioned reviews on the cover of the book, the one that rings true most is Rushdie's, when he says "this guy is going to be very, very good". It's a good little novel, it shows some truth about conflicts we rarely think of when war is mentioned, and gives a voice to the images of child soldiers splashed occasionally on the news; but it's not quite perfect.

I found this book absolutely gripping. It's the perfect length for even the most time-pushed, attention deficient of us - this vital tale of becoming set in war-torn West Africa had me so immersed that I devoured it in one reading.

Although the overall theme of the book is extremely harrowing, Iweala doesn't overplay the horrific elements in his story. Instead, because the story is told from the perspective of a shell-shocked child in his naïve, unfamiliar, and awkward vernacular, such events are recounted with an emotional detachment similar in effect to the work of Primo Levi. There is more for our imagination to engage with, this serves only to make it more moving.

Momentum in the narrative is generated through the growing compassion felt for our young narrator, Agu, as he is wrenched from an idyllic and precocious childhood into complicity with a world of senseless violence and civil war that he is too young to understand. He faces an acute dilemma - to kill or be killed - and is in a permanent state of conflict as the morals he learned from the warm and peaceful community that nurtured him sit at odds with his instinct for survival, which lies in a tragic necessity to please the brutal guerilla group that pillaged his village and probably killed his father.

Detached descriptions of savage rape and murder are juxtaposed with touching recollections of his loving upbringing and the culture that he is now, unwillingly, helping to destroy. These pre-war accounts tell of a West African (we are never given a specific country) way of life and heighten a sense of loss and injustice, of innocents getting dragged into a conflict that they never wanted.

If you have read books like A Clockwork Orange (also a book about coming of age, but set in a fictional dystopia rather than in an historical anarchy) you will not have difficulty adjusting to the language Iweala deploys - it's all in English, you just have to mind the tenses. You will probably also really enjoy and appreciate the vernacular style that takes you much deeper into the character and the rhythms of the world that he describes.

These days it's all too easy to become absorbed with the war our government started in Iraq, and to forget all the other, often more atrocious wars taking place elsewhere. This book raises awareness of just how intolerable life is for so many people in West Africa, and inspires one to read more about this situation. If our governments were as committed as they say they are to creating world peace, they would address issues of poverty and dictatorship in Africa, rather than creating more death and disorder by channeling their resources on the oil-rich Arab states.

You almost feel sorry for the author. Draped in acclaim, among the books of the year, it can only mean that any reader approaches this book with high expectations. More worrying, the author's information on the back of the book talks mosly about all the prizes he won at Harvard. And that's what the book feels like, a very well executed assignment. It's written in a fairly convincing pidgin English, but when it wavers, it breaks the rhythm and the belief. It also feels entirely formulaic. It goes through the trials of dehumanisation (murder, rape, sodomy etc) but it never engages the reader's sympathy, just occasional admiration. There's no doubt that Iweala can write. I hope he dares to produce something fresh that doesn't feel borrowed from another culture, another life. I'd risk buying another book of his.

The abuse and systematic identity-destruction of this boy-child is stunning for its clarity in conveying the possibility of something that seems so impossible that it cannot even be imagined. Horrifying, compelling, dramatic. The ending suggests redemption, but it is hard to imagine that anyone ever fully overcomes such a horrendous experience. Iweala says in an interview in the back of the book that the "voice" of Agu is a character in itself. For whatever reason, I didn't want when I realized this book is his first to grant Iweala my uncritical support. But he won me over, i.e., I have to agree that the voice of Agu in this book is a remarkably creative literary achievement -- and not just for a debut novel. Sophisticated craftsmanship ... kind of scary coming from one so young, but also very impressive.

Iweala has a written a short but potent book about a West African boy named Agu (between 9 and 12 years old, according to an interview with the author) who is abducted into a unit of child soldiers. We follow him as he grows up far too fast, experiencing the horrors of guerrilla warfare. This book is not for the faint of heart: we see killing, rape of women by child soldiers, rape of child soldiers by cruel adult commanders. Yet the book feels real: Iweala read several autobiographies of child soldiers as well as reports from organizations like Amnesty International and texts of child psychology. This book is disturbing only because our world is disturbing.

The language of the book is challenging, written in a pidgin English adapted from what Iweala has heard on his many visits to Nigeria (he is American, born to Nigerian parents). As a result, it took me a while to work through the slim 150-page volume; but the work is rewarding, and it serves as a metaphor for the work of delving into the foreign world that the novel depicts. As Agu says, much of what he experiences is "making me to feel good and it is not making me to feel good," reflecting the duality of the war experience: the adrenaline reported by those who kill contrasted with the horror at the actions, both experienced simultaneously.

This book was listed as one of the New York Times notable books for 2006; and Metacritic, a website that brings together professional reviews from major newspapers and magazines, collected 10 outstanding reviews and 8 positive reviews: none were unfavorable or even mixed. (I've never seen a book with such good reviews.)

I read another novel about child soldiers this year: Moses, Citizen, and Me, by Delia Jarrett-Macauley. That book leaves much more to the imagination, which fails when the context is so far from the reader's experience that the reader's imagination paints a vague, sanitized portrait. Iweala spells it out: it's ugly, but it's a piece of our world. It reminds me of an exchange at the end of the film The Mission, in which the Portuguese representative Hontar seeks to justify the church representative Altamirano's actions, saying, "The world is thus," to which Altamirano responds, "No, Señor Hontar. Thus have we made the world."

* Note: the background that I mention above comes from two interviews with the author, one by Andrea Sachs, published in TIME on-line on 29 November 2005, and the other by Robert Birnbaum, published in The Morning News on 9 March 2006. The exact language of the quote from The Mission is from the Internet Movie Database.

It doesn't matter that the West African nation, which provides the setting for this unsettling story, remains unnamed. It could be any country afflicted by hatred, and buckled by mistrust and murderous civil war. What resonates in this fierce, gripping novel is the harrowing narration of Agu, a child soldier forced into conscription at the point of a gun. In this staggering debut, ''Beasts of No Nation," Uzodinma Iweala, a 23-year-old Harvard graduate, has written a novel about the perversity of war, and the fragility of humanity. It's all the more shattering viewed through the eyes of a schoolboy who is both terrified and seduced by the meaningless slaughter which first claims his father, then his own childhood.

Though this is a work of fiction, this novel is based in terrible truths. In countries such as Sri Lanka and Somalia, children are coerced into the kinds of internecine conflicts that can claim hundreds of thousands of lives, even as they smolder unchecked and unreported for years. In his cadenced vernacular, Agu bears witness for those children.

Prior to his soldier's life, Agu loved to read, so much so his mother called him ''professor." The son of a schoolteacher father, Agu's favorite book is the Bible, both for its soft, gold-embossed cover, and its magnificent -- and violent -- stories about Cain and Abel, David and Goliath.

Such memories of his gentle family life, before his mother and sister were scooped up by UN peacekeepers and his father shot dead by guerrillas, sustain Agu through his brutal days and nights. Under the vicious sway of Commandant, a rebel leader, Agu becomes a killer, but what choice does he have? Only death awaits those who refuse these hard men.

Killing, Commandant tells Agu, ''is like falling in love." Yet when Agu thinks of murder, he imagines himself burning in the hell he once read about in church. Still, bullied by Commandant, who literally squeezes the boy's trembling hand around the handle of a machete, Agu hacks a man to death. ''I am hitting his shoulder and then his chest and looking at how Commandant is smiling each time I hit the man," Agu says. ''It is like the world is moving so slowly and I am seeing each drop of blood and each drop of sweat flying here and there."

For all the violence, the true war rages within Agu. He wants to be a good soldier and even finds himself sometimes ''liking how the gun is shooting," and enjoying ''how the knife is chopping" when he's killing someone. At the same time, like a child who dreads disappointing his parents, he fears becoming a ''bad boy."

''I am a soldier and soldier is not bad if he is killing," Agu says. ''I am telling this to myself because soldier is supposed to be killing, killing, killing. So if I am killing, then I am only doing what is right."

An American of Nigerian descent, Iweala graphically details Agu's atrocities, but never fails to relay, with aching poetry, the most shocking act of all -- an unwilling child plunged into the physical horrors of war. Yes, the evil here is banal. Yet it is also the corrosive agent gnawing at the divided soul of a boy, who seeks both survival and redemption, in a nation shrouded by menace, and soaked with the blood of its own people.

This novel is so scorched by loss and anger that it's hard to hold and so gripping in its sheer hopeless lifeforce that it's hard to put down.