HALF OF A YELLOW SUN begins with an uprooting. The 13-year-old Ugwu leaves his village for the university town of Nsukka, where his aunt has secured him the coveted job of houseboy to Odenigbo, a university professor.

Odenigbo’s erudition, fiery spirit and passion for politics and education will transform Ugwu’s life. He assimilates experience as rapidly as he absorbs the formal education that Odenigbo pays for, and he observes middle-class academic life with wondering but ruthless accuracy. His spirit is fed by his love for Odenigbo, for Olanna, Odenigbo’s beautiful partner, and for Baby, the child who becomes theirs.

Ugwu’s role is complex and subtle, and he is probably the novel’s most satisfying character. He is a moral touchstone, an artist in words who knows how to “make new” everything that he describes. He sustains the connection between the tradition of his race, the Igbo, and academia. His full force becomes apparent as he matures. From the first night, when he stuffs roast chicken into his pockets for his sister, Ugwu commands attention.

Olanna and Odenigbo are also Igbo and, like Ugwu, will live through the horrors of civil war, when the Igbo secede from Nigeria to form Biafra, which is then destroyed by famine and massacre.

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• Pictures: Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007

The consolations of civil war

Helen Dunmore reviews Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

• Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A nation's memory

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

BACKGROUND

• Review: Fiction: Purple Hisbiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

• Hugo Barnacle reviews Half of a Yellow Sun

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• A nation's memory

Chimamanda Ngozi Adi-chie writes of events that took place before her birth — she is still under 30 — and in her Afterword, she says: “This book is based on the Nigeria-Biafra War of 1967-70 but I have taken many liberties for the purposes of fiction; my intent is to portray my own imaginative truths and not the facts of the war.”

Half of a Yellow Sun clearly does not intend to be purely realistic. Like Chinua Achebe or Flora Nwapa, Adichie uses rich layers of history, symbol and myth. When Olanna is introduced, Odenigbo’s friend Okeoma remarks: “I thought Odenigbo’s girlfriend was a human being; he didn’t say you were a water mermaid.”

Immediately, Olanna’s beauty takes on another dimension. Like Efuru, the eponymous heroine of Nwapa’s debut novel, Olanna is set apart not only by her beauty but by her spiritual qualities and her kinship with water and its associated divinities. Olanna also resembles Efuru in her lack of children. Efuru bears one child who later dies; Olanna has long hair — traditionally a symbol of fertility — but cannot become pregnant.

Adichie uses language with relish. She infuses her English with a robust poetry, and the narrative is cross-woven with Igbo idiom and language. The novel reflects on language both as a means of communication, and of identity, which may be a threat or a means of belonging. Speaking Igbo instead of Yoruba may lead to a beating or death, as war erupts.

Adichie explores this theme through Richard, a white Englishman who falls in love with Olanna’s twin sister, Kainene. Richard not only learns fluent Igbo, but also wants to belong, to be a Biafran and to assume a culture in which there seems no place for him. But this promising theme is undermined by poor characterisation. Richard remains a set of ideas and ideals rather than a person.

Adichie returns again and again to the idea of belonging. What does it mean, how do people belong to one another, and how do cultures create networks of belonging and exclusion? The novel circles these questions, although they can never be resolved. Perhaps, after the catastrophes of civil war and defeat, Olanna’s answer is as good as any. She mourns her sister, and looks for signs of the other world.

The dibia [spirit doctor] gives her no consolation, but Olanna’s nature draws her close to traditional belief and allows her to make it movingly real in her own life. “ ‘Our people say that we all reincarnate, don’t they?’ she said. ‘Uwa m, uwa ozo. When I come back in my next life, Kainene will be my sister.’ ”

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