Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Soldier in Biafran War, 1968
Witness to destruction ... A soldier in the Biafran War in Nigeria, 1968. Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/ Corbis
Witness to destruction ... A soldier in the Biafran War in Nigeria, 1968. Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/ Corbis

Guardian book club: Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This article is more than 14 years old
The Biafran war is an unlikely subject for a bestseller, but I was hooked by the quality of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's storytelling in Half of a Yellow Sun

This month John Mullan's book club is looking at Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a book that's sold a cool half-million copies in the UK alone.

This commercial success is perhaps something of a surprise for a book about the Biafran conflict. The year 1967 is marked in our collective memory as the Summer of Love – not the year when the Igbo people in south-east Nigeria declared independence and a three-year war began in which three million people died. Even at the time, as a character in the novel says, "the world was silent". Now – shamefully – we've all but forgotten about the whole thing. Aside from discussions of Half of a Yellow Sun, I've only ever heard it mentioned in vague relation to episodes of mass starvation.

But the reason for the book's popularity becomes apparent within a few pages of reading. It's damn good.

Chinua Achebe's claim that Adichie is "endowed with the gift of an ancient storyteller" may sound a little over the top, but there's no doubting that she has a good, old-fashioned ability to immerse you in her world. This is one of those books, rare since childhood, that made me unaware of the physical act of reading. I became lost in it – to the extent that I could hardly tell you what her prose is like, other than it gives a strong feel of the various different languages spoken in Nigeria (and the barriers to communication that result), and that it has the admirable virtue of never getting in the way of the story. A story that is urgent and engrossing.

It opens before the war, shortly after Nigeria wins independence from the UK, when middle-class life at Nsukka University is rich in food, booze, revolutionary rhetoric and hope. The narrative focus shifts between various characters attached to the university: Ugwu the houseboy of Odenigbo, an eloquent and eccentric mathematician; Olanna, the woman who becomes Odenigbo's wife; and Richard, an English ex-pat who falls in love with Nigerian art and then Olanna's twin sister. At first it plays out like a sophisticated soap opera, with bed-hopping, troublesome parents, familial strife and plenty of warm humour surrounding Odenigbo's pomposity and his frequently preposterous academic friends, Ugwu's various lusts and his attempts to reconcile his village upbringing with life on campus, Olanna's ability to make everyone fall in love with her and Richard's weedy impotence. These are intelligent, funny, but also faulty human beings. No one is perfect, but they seem more real and more lovable as a result. So when their world is blown apart, it really hurts.

We see the horror – the massacres, the panic, the children who starve and wither and die – through the eyes of Adichie's frightened and bewildered characters, and we in turn are made to feel like witnesses. It is an exemplary demonstration of how literature provides the soul of history. The author makes this forgotten war real again. She makes us aware of the tragedy behind the statistics and reminds us that each of those three million deaths eclipsed a being capable of love and hate and everything else.

So vividly brought to life is this nightmare that it seems churlish to attempt to play the critic and hunt the book's literary failings. When it contains the deaths of so many hundreds of thousands of real people, the fact that I didn't like, say, some of the poetry in the book, or a few scattered extracts from a book-within-a-book, seems beyond irrelevant. And it seems like nit-picking to complain that a few of the descriptions of combat don't ring true when there are elsewhere such harrowing descriptions of rape, wilful destruction, fear and grief. I'll remember for a long time a description of a woman carrying the severed head of her daughter in a bag, telling strangers how long it took to do the braids in her hair.

I also hesitate to complain that the final chapters seem rushed. I half-wonder if I felt that the process of recovery from the war is dealt with too precipitately just because I didn't want to leave behind the people I felt I had got to know so well. I certainly didn't want to step away from the glow of humour and human warmth that lightens even the darkest passages. For this book is impressive as a testament to human gentleness as well as cruelty. It overflows with good spirit, in spite of everything, and so becomes a novel that is easy to love as well as admire.

But what do you think? Did it move you? Did you feel a new understanding for Nigerian history? Did you agree that all those prize committees who rewarded it so extravagantly made the right choices? Or did it leave you cold? All comments will be even more gratefully received than usual, since they'll help inform John Mullan's final column of the month on readers' responses to the book.

More on this story

More on this story

  • Guardian book club: week one

  • Book club: week three

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed