Reviewed by Moby

How do you review a book like Half of a Yellow Sun? Do you (or, in this case, I) discuss the narrative and the character development? Do you use the review as a jeremiad against the legacy of colonialism and the seemingly arbitrary indifference western powers have maintained in the face of the Third World tragedies that colonialism created and exacerbated?

This is a gigantic book, seemingly impossible to review in the 500 words I've been allotted. It's a very good book. I’m hesitant to say that it's a great book, because as good as it is I don't know if it's entitled to take its ranks in the canon of truly great books: it's not really up to me which books do/don't get included in the canon.

The book begins in Nigeria in the early 60s. This is an idyllic Nigeria, populated with petite bourgeoisie revolutionary academics and post-colonial anglophiles and polo playing Muslims and easily cowed 'peasants'. The first third of the book has a langorous and comfortably domestic quality that lulls the reader into thinking that everything is ok and shall most likely stay that way. It's the early 60s and the characters (there are quite a lot of them) fall in love and eat skinless chicken and engage in the sort of benign routines that characterize civil society. Revolution is discussed, but while drinking whiskey in the cloistered confines of a university.

This is the set-up, the calm before the storm. The storm begins relatively innocuously with a coup. And then a secession. And then the civility ends as Nigeria and the new nation of Biafra go to war with one another.

Where once the characters filled their days with driving Peugots to the airport to pick up friends returning from London, they now find themselves being shot at and starved to death and violated.

As I said, given the historical accuracy of the writing, it's a very hard book to review. About half way through I didn't know whether I should be responding to the characters or to the horrors to which they're being subjected. The most fleshed out character, Ugwu, probably deserves a book of his own, and I personally (although very slightly) resented that he had to share the pages with the rest of the characters, all of whom felt less developed and substantial. It's not that the other characters felt two-dimensional, far from it. It's just that, for me, Ugwu had much greater full-ness and humanity.

At the end of the book I was left with the hope that Chimanda Ngozi Adichie's next book would be true fiction, unfettered by history or historical accuracy.

Not to diminish the importance of Half of a Yellow Sun, I just think that after such a heavy and serious undertaking she probably deserves to have some writerly fun.