Beasts of No Nation

Uzodinma Iweala
2005
Rating: 5

Beasts of No Nation is a first-person narrator novel about a child soldier named Agu in an unnamed African country.

It’s depiction of Agu’s subjective experiences as he is torn from his family and forced to fight and to commit a long list of atrocities and warcrimes is effective and compelling. The use of the first-person narrator makes a lot of sense in that regard.

Overall, however, while the book was engaging generally, it felt slight in some ways, and not just because it’s only 142 pages. Maybe, I’m just riffing, the issue was the lack of narrative tension. For the overwhelming majority of the book, bad things happen to Agu, who is passively victimized. He wants, presumably, to be reunited with his family, and to be freed from the trials of his life as a child soldier, but that is not much of an element in the story.

Most of the book is concerned with Agu’s reactions to and thoughts about his various ordeals, at the expense of a broader/larger plot, although there was enough of a plot to keep me reading.

And while Beasts does the thing that it does well, what it does not do is develop Agu fully as a person. We get only a narrow slice of his subjectivity, although that slice is vivid and moving. Agu has no distinguishing characteristics.

I’m also not certain that there was as much of an arc as there should have been for his character. He is worn down physically, emotionally, and spiritually by what he’s subjected to, but I did not get the sense from the book after one read that much thought was given to how this slide into hell was manifested. Typically something like this is demonstrated by establishing a routine for the character, and then showing how the external circumstances impact that routine.

I suspect it was intentional, but maybe one problem I had with the story was the lack of specific details. The entirety of the narrative takes place in this kind of ethereal, abstract interiority. It could have felt more anchored to the times and places it described.

Little effort was put into describing his life pre-abduction, the book kicks off as he is being inducted into the guerilla army. Later there is a flashback or flashbacks detailing his life in his village, although these are cursory. Part of me wondered if the narrative would have been more effective if it had been more linear. Like his losses would have been more powerfully felt if we knew what the losses were.

Quibbles aside, I’m glad I read it, and if it is not an epic, searing representation of the tragic consequences of child warriors, it is at a minimum an affecting one.