Veteran and private eye Boubacar doesn’t need much—least of all trouble—but trouble always seems to find him. Work has dried up, and he’d rather be left alone to deal with his bills as the Harmattan rolls in to coat the city in dust, but Bouba is a down on his luck deux fois, suspended between two cultures and two worlds.
When a bleeding woman stumbles onto his doorway, only to vanish just as quickly, Bouba reluctantly finds himself enmeshed in the secrets of a city boiling on the brink of violence. The French occupiers are keen to keep the peace at any cost, and the indigenous dugulen have long been shattered into restless factions vying for a chance to reclaim their lost heritage and abilities. As each hard-won clue reveals horrifying new truths, Bouba may have to carve out parts of himself he’s long kept hidden, and decide what he’s willing to offer next.
Moves with a thrilling briskness but sometimes its pace works against its other pleasures. Onyebuchi’s West Africa is compellingly imagined but the reader is so quickly rushed from locale to locale that one might struggle to stay grounded. Some of the novel’s more intriguing characters get somewhat flattened by this haste ... There’s a lot of coincidence here, and sometimes characters seem to make plot-crucial choices without clear or pressing motivations.
Onyebuchi writes a compelling mystery, adds corrupt politics, a feet-on-the-ground exploration of postcolonialism that isn’t all that 'post,' and a jaundiced discussion of the supposed good old days, all told through the eyes of a Raymond Chandler–style detective ... The novel’s setting is reminiscent of the historical fantasy of P. Djèlí Clark, whose work, along with that of Nnedi Okorafor and Moses Ose Utomi, would be an excellent read-alike for Onyebuchi’s highly recommended hardboiled fantasy mystery.
Despite its hardboiled trappings and its almost Gothic (but judiciously employed) fantasy elements, Harmattan Season mixes genres in a way not quite like any other novel I’ve read. Onyebuchi’s decision to drop the reader in medias res into a world with specific historical allusions but few guideposts initially had me off-balance, but the narrative threads eventually weave together in a disturbing and provocative political story of the horrors of colonialism, identity, exploitation, resistance, and survival. Now that I think of it, that theme of resistance may be what really links it to Onyebuchi’s earlier work, and it’s never been more thoroughly explored than it is here.
