Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon (2014)

We’re in Lagos, the city that takes its name from the Portuguese for ‘lagoon’, hence this novel’s title. Something falls out of the sky—I like that it lands in the sea not with a BOOM! but a more maternal MOOM! Three strangers on the beach, all with names beginning with ‘A’ (a marine biologist called Adaora, more-or-less this crowded work’s protagonist; a too-truthful-for-his-own-good soldier called Agu; a famous rapper called Anthony), see a beautiful woman walk out of the sea. She’s a shape-shifting alien, and she is bringing change. So: the novel is in three parts. The first is slow moving, though it builds a believable Lagos world, the interactions of various characters as they encounter the alien, now called Ayodele, who has taken the form of an Igbo woman (Okorafor is herself a Igbo woman). To begin with the alien is benign. But in the second section ‘Awakening’ the Nigerian army open fire on her in Day The Earth Stood Still mode, and she becomes angry. Lagos descends into vividly written chaos: rioting, millennial Christian hysteria, the full works. Meanwhile all manner of alien manifestations pop up, from individuals to giant Lovecraftian structures. The third section is called ‘Symbiosis’ and loses some of the drive of section 2.

It’s a strange book, in a good and bad sense—good in the way it properly captures the strangeness of alien encounter, less good in the sometimes jumbled, skittish way it agglomerates its multiple characters into a single story. This latter I take to be a deliberate strategy on behalf of the author, for in other respects Okorafor is evidently a very accomplished writer—for instance, she very skilfully glides between the hard-sf and the magical-realist takes on her extraordinary events, and the African mythical underpinnings to events are compellingly elaborated. The deliberateness of the aesthetic jumbling (if that's what it is) didn't quite convince me, though. There are other elements in the book that also seemed to me to misfire (for instance: there’s a repeated sort-of Douglas Adams theme where the alien’s presence gift sudden intelligence to a tarantula, a bat and so on, only for the newly uplifted creatures to get run over or splatted moments later. If these were supposed to be funny, then they didn't connect with my funny bone). I liked the scene in which Ayodele manifests as Karl Marx in order to impress the Nigerian president. I liked less all the spider related stuff. But then I hate spiders. *shudders*. Overall, though, this is a notable book, and you should read it.