Author of Fishermen reviews Jowhor Ile’s debut novel

Set in the bustling town of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Johwor Ile’s And After Many Days is one of the most highly anticipated and much talked-about African novels of 2016.

Ile’s work has already been lauded by brilliant and awesome writers such as Taiye Selasi, author of Ghana Must Go; who described it a “brilliantly executed whodunnit,”, Uzodinma Iweala, author of Beasts of No Nation; calls it a “wonderful debut,”and Igoni Barrett, Author of Blackass; calls it a “smooth-singing, hard-hitting novel.”

“There’s a young man called Jowhor Ile who is just finishing a novel, who I think is really spectacular,” said Award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in 2013. “His novel, when it comes out, will be very good.”

Earlier this month, the New York Times published Chigozie Obioma’s honest review of And After Many Days.

Author of The Fishermen, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, had very good things to say about the first three chapters of Ile’s novel.

According to Brittle paper, Obioma isn’t too excited about this “political subplot” that pops out of nowhere.

Here is how he explains it:

"In the absence of plot, however, the novel gathers a different kind of energy, and a political subplot. It shuttles between settings and years to tell the story of Nigeria’s troubled oil-rich regions, and the families who are frustrated to find their fate in the hands of powerful oil corporations and every disagreement settled by violence. “Disputes are no longer settled with raised voices in a meeting,” Ile writes. “People no longer write strongly worded petitions to voice their dissent. If you disagree with someone these days, you simply go over to the person’s house with your face unmasked and shoot him. . . . The body count is on a steep rise.”

But some harm is done with this swerve in pacing and focus. Paul’s disappearance loses its impact, so by the time the novel circles back to him, most readers will not care. And the close third-­person perspective is poorly handled; too often observations and reflections feel implausibly, and even erroneously, forced on Ajie. The voice that distinguished the early sections turns passive and awkward, reappearing only intermittently until the last act, in which we discover Paul’s fate. The novel ends with Ajie turning on a light, ending a story that has scarcely just ­begun."

Read full review here.

Jowhor Ile was born in 1980 and raised in Nigeria, where he currently lives. His fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly and Litro Magazine.

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