Iweala...gives his hero a voice that is unliterary yet poetic, sometimes sliding into the present tense when describing the past … After only a few pages, this idiosyncratic style, at first so awkward, comes to seem quite natural; the story is unimaginable without it. Iweala, although still in his early 20's, knows instinctively to avoid bolstering an uneducated narrator's tale with pointedly skilled phrases of his own. Instead, he allows Agu to speak in a simple, authentic way, which can produce startlingly original expressions … The acute characterization, the adroit mixture of color and restraint, and the horrific emotional force of the narrative are impressive. Still more impressive is Iweala's ability to maintain not only our sympathy but our affection for his central character.
Beasts of No Nation is totally and shockingly alive from its very first paragraph … This blend of immediacy, innocence, sensual apprehension and tiny animalistic nuance starts small but within pages has gravitated into a cartoon fastness — ‘KPAWA! He is hitting me’ — and a very graphic cartoon foulness, highlighting both the smallness of the child and the monstrousness of what he finds himself doing … It's an apocalyptic piece. Everything in it is a kind of stripped-back fact, though carefully controlled images of pointless sacrifice, starved people and spoiled meat recur throughout, and images of soldiers shift from pride to horrific sexual degradation … It reads, in all its truth, like fable — as if Amos Tutuola had been mated with Isaac Babel.
Uzodinma Iweala has written a novel about the perversity of war, and the fragility of humanity. It's all the more shattering viewed through the eyes of a schoolboy who is both terrified and seduced by the meaningless slaughter which first claims his father, then his own childhood … Iweala graphically details Agu's atrocities, but never fails to relay, with aching poetry, the most shocking act of all — an unwilling child plunged into the physical horrors of war. Yes, the evil here is banal. Yet it is also the corrosive agent gnawing at the divided soul of a boy, who seeks both survival and redemption, in a nation shrouded by menace, and soaked with the blood of its own people.
Agu has been forced by circumstance — and by armed guerrillas in his unnamed country — to commit unspeakable transgressions and then suffer bewildering, excruciating crises of conscience. The most important parts of his story are distilled by his dialect into simple but horrific acknowledgments … While Beasts of No Nation is indeed a wrenching book, its thoughts can be painfully self-evident. None of the book's brutality exaggerates recent African history; none of its scenes would be out of place in a melodramatic war story, either. This outstanding first novel would be even better if it did not deliver so much more shock value than genuine surprise.
When we first encounter him, Agu is cowering in the darkness, hiding with other villagers as rebels ransack their homes. His father has been butchered; his mother and sister are missing. The world as he knows it has been permanently ruptured. He quakes in fear, a mosquito-like droning in his ears, as the soldiers decide to recruit him and spare his life … Iweala's novel lurches through the days and nights of Agu's transformation into brute and brutalized soldier, awash in blood and gore … Iweala's personification of an African child soldier is stripped-down and terrifyingly immediate.
This stark, vivid book derives much of its immediacy from Agu's fragmented consciousness. Elements of his voice — its urgent testimonial quality; a raw, naive forthrightness; and an almost ruthlessly disarming spontaneity — recall Jamaica Kincaid's narrators in novels such as Annie John. This child seems to be propelled into his narrative almost as recklessly as he's thrown into his careening acts of violence. Telling this exquisitely painful tale seems almost another form of trauma, another form of violence … One dimension missing from this spare little novel is a context for the larger narrative of the war itself. While the personal narrative is intensely revealing, after finishing the book, one wants more — more history, scope and length. Still, what it seems to lack in pages, it compensates for in depth.
This is grim reading, and it doesn't require an epic for us to understand the Beckett-like bargain of forced choice — of being asked to kill while having a gun pointed at one's head. Nor does the author bring redemptive uplift into a story where the rivers of blood prove the pointlessness of such gestures. In fact, the only redemptive thing about this story is the fact that is being told at all … The novel is an act of pure imagination.
Beasts of No Nation is that kind of book: you have to dig in, stiffen the upper lip, and brace yourself because the narrative is unrelenting … The use of present tense throughout gives the narration an immediacy that heightens the impact of the language and the urgency of the story. It took me all of about a page to get accustomed to this style, and I never sensed that the writing intruded on the story. Agu’s voice is not just distinctly African, it is the voice of a young person, and this aspect of the narrative is essential to the success of the story. Agu describes the horrors to which he is subjected in straightforward, unflinching language. His youth, the nakedness of his feelings, give his words added power and the story more credibility.
