Wizard of the Crow

Ngugi's most recent novel is a sprawling, fierce, scalding epic that turns a pitiless gaze on a postcolonial African dictatorship in the fictional country of Aburiria.

Full of righteous outrage and bitter humour, and unsparing in its chronicling of the madness that lies at the very heart of the regime, it drips with contempt for the powerful, for the obsequious, for the grasping and mercenary. Yet beyond the satire is also a debate about political action; a reflection on true love; and an inquiry into the nature of masculinity, and of femininity.

Power, and those who scrabble to get close to it, or maintain their ties to it, is here subject to a fairly thorough and pretty scathing examination. No idiocy and no mendacity slip past the watchful and sharp eyes of the author. From the obsessions of the Ruler, condemning his wife to repeat the day she first questioned him (and thus fell from grace) in an endless, unchanging routine, to the men under his command who have literally attempted to turn themselves into the eyes and ears of the state through bizarre and extreme operations, it is a brutally satirical vision.

Yet those who stand in opposition, and those who are forever shut out from power, by no means embody the superior virtue of the oppressed. They too can make themselves ridiculous, and they too are responsible for the shaping of their own paths.
One of Ngugi's greatest gifts lies in his boundless empathy and affectionate solidarity with what I hesitate to call ordinary people - for what he really does with his generous pen is offer up the full spectrum of complicated, confused, struggling humanity. His cast of characters - charming and repellent, courageous and humiliated, insightful and thoughtless (and sometimes all these things) reflect eloquently the truth spoken by one of them: 'we humans are complex'.

Ngugi's genius is on full display here, showing us the human comedy - and tragedy - in all its glory.