Purple Hibiscus

Let’s not beat about the bush, I loved this novel. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a garden of writing skills that is in full bloom. She has a deft and steady hand, knowing for the most part exactly where to prune, where to cultivate and where to take her ancestors’ themes and grow from their cuttings. Like the flower of the book’s title, she is a rare debut novelist who made me care for her characters so much that, whilst travelling on a plane, I cried openly at their plight, completely engrossed and unaware of the looks from my fellow passengers.

Kambili, the 15-year-old protagonist, her brother Jaja, and their mother Beatrice would seem, from the outside, to have an ideal life under care of her father – the self-made businessman, newspaper proprietor and humble servant of the Catholic Church. However, within the high walls of their marble-floored compound, the trio live in fear of his repressive rules and the impossible religious zeal that he administers with violence and the fear of violence. When Kambili and Jaja meet their grandfather and later spend some time away in the home of their aunt and her children, they find that some of the fearful silences of their existence are filled with laughter, love and hope of a different way of living.

Returning home, their father’s tight regime starts to get challenged and things start to unravel, as they are also doing in their country following the military coup that forms the backdrop to the novel.

Like any good writer, Adichie calls on the wisdom of those that have gone before and she aims high. There are touches in this novel that bring to mind such writing ancestors as James Baldwin, where in The Fire Next Time he explores how the church and God sit in the tense silences created when traditional European and African tribal beliefs are on a competing mission for hearts and minds.

There are echoes, in the relationship between Kambili and Jaja, of the bond between Maya Angelou and her brother Bailey that Angelou captured so brilliantly in her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Adichie equals Angelou in the easy flow and construction of silent conversations and conveys this language of the fear-inspired muteness shared by the siblings, with consummate skill.

Perhaps the biggest ancestoral writing voice that shines through is that of Chinua Achebe, and with her very first line Adichie pays him homage by calling on the title of his most famous novel: Things Fall Apart. As in that novel we witness the message of the missionary causing confusion and unrest in a traditional Igbo family and, like Achebe’s protagonist Onkonwo, Eugene, the father in Purple Hibiscus, looms large over the action of the book. It is his fear, his confusion, violence, pride and ego that mainly pushes the plot. In fact the only point at which the novel briefly (and it was very brief) relinquished its grip on me, was when he was left at home in Enugu and we lost sight of his influence while Kambili fell in love with the young priest Father Amadi.

I wouldn’t want you to come away feeling that in my calling on the names of great writers like Achebe, Angelou and Baldwin that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has given us watered down versions of their novels. I mention them because there are echoes and Adichie brings fresh eyes and ears to where they left off. This is a book filled with love and longing for freedom.

Reviewed by Cyril Nri: actor, writer, director, filmmaker, and father. He came to England from Nigeria as a young child, escaping the Nigerian-Biafran civil war.