Set in Nigeria in the late 1960s, The Road to the Country is the story of a shy, bookish student haunted by long-held guilt who must go to war to free himself.
Despite the seemingly endless ambushes and explosions, The Road to the Country offers a story with few surprises. It can feel as if Obioma is searching for pieces of a puzzle that has already been solved ... The novel’s reflections and warnings bear repeating, though, particularly because war is a hell that we keep revisiting and especially when the writing is as skillful as this.
These magic realist strands may not be to everybody’s taste, but the clash of literary styles effectively speaks to Nigeria’s multifarious traditions and the broader thematic concerns of a hybrid nation under strain ... A sledgehammer of a war novel, soaked in bloody fate.
Large-scale action scenes are notoriously hard to write and Obioma’s skills sometimes fall short of his ambitions. Conversely, his descriptions of the "terrible beauty of the freshly dead" in the aftermath of battle are compelling ... At other times the writing is uneven and would have benefited from more assiduous editing ... The Road to the Country is a literary quest, the hope being that fictional invention will be more convincing than any history book, a vital part of the attempt to keep the past as living memory. In this, Obioma has succeeded masterfully.
