One of the great joys of trying new authors is when you find one that has long been writing for you, if only you'd known it. Mabanckou with his wonderful mix of comedy, social commentary and psychological insight has long been writing for me. I just didn't know it.
In Congolese (and some wider African) folklore certain people have spirit doubles - animal familiars which grant them powers and through which they can work magic on the world. Many of these sorcerers use their powers for good, giving healings and blessings and so on. Some however use them for evil, in particular magically murdering their enemies.
If that sounds fantastical, well it is. It's also however still a fairly widespread idea and even now suspected evil sorcerers are sometimes killed, blamed for deaths people otherwise struggle to explain. It's not a belief system we have in the West, but we do have fairly widespread beliefs in ghosts and clairvoyants and mediums and faith healers (in which I'd personally include homoeopathists). How superstition manifests varies, but the instinct to it is all too human.
The narrator in Memoirs is the porcupine familiar of a just-recently killed sorcerer named Kibandi. Kibandi's father, Papa Kibandi, was a sorcerer in turn and when Kibandi turned 11 forced him to drink a secret potion which killed Kibandi's instincts for empathy and good and granted him an all-too physical porcupine as a spirit familiar.
Doubles don't normally outlive their humans, so Porcupine (as I'll call him) is now sitting under a baobab tree with nothing to do other than to reflect on Kibandi's life and his part in it. At surface level it's what it says on the tin - memoirs of a porcupine including how the sorcerer Kibandi used magic to kill nearly 100 people before finally being defeated. On another it's the story of how Kibandi let jealousy and resentment rule his life and ultimately destroy it.
As a young man Kibandi is a skilled roofer. He makes good money and is much in demand. He lives with his mother, his father dead some years before. When Kibandi's mother dies, on "a grey Monday, a Monday when even the flies couldn't get off the ground, [in which his home village of] Séképembé seemed empty, the sky so low a human could almost have plucked a cluster of clouds without even raising his arm," Kibandi's sole restraint goes with her.
Kibandi had been courting the beautiful daughter of a rich villager, but when the father doesn't attend Kibandi's mother's funeral Kibandi realises that he along with several other suitors are just being strung along so the father can extract gifts from them. Kibandi's pride is outraged, and he decides to get revenge on the father by sending Porcupine to "eat" the daughter's spirit so slaying her. Porcupine finds it all a bit unfair, but it's not his job to second-guess his human.
If you're the sort of person who sees slights you'll see them everywhere. Kibandi stops taking care of himself, notices every insult or harsh glance and hits back by using Porcupine. The money stops rolling in as he spends more and more of his time nursing his grievances and taking his sorcerous revenges. A young man, abused, wastes his life spending his energies on imagined feuds and blaming others for his failings. Take away the sorcery and the story remains the same.
If that were all this was that would be interesting enough, but what makes this glorious is Porcupine himself. The tale he has to tell is a simple one, but he struggles to keep to the point. As he says "perhaps I've strayed too far from the subject of my confessions [...] it must be the human in me speaking, in fact I learned my sense of digression from men, they never go straight to the point, open brackets they forget to close".
Porcupine reflects on village life, on the attractions of villainy over goodness, on the lessons taught him by the old porcupine who ruled his little porcupine family. Kibandi used his powers to magically learn to read and what he knows Porcupine knows, so Porcupine can read too and indulges in a little literary analysis as he looks back disapprovingly on the books read by the one man he doesn't regret helping kill, a vain Europeanised intellectual named Amédée:
if there's one person whose disappearance I really don't regret it's that young man, he was such a show-off, a braggart of the first order, he thought he was most intelligent person in the village, in the region, not to say the whole country, he wore Terylene suits, sparkly ties, the kind of shoes you wear if you work in an office, those dens of idleness where men sit down, pretend to read papers and put off till tomorrow what they should be doing today, Amédée walked around with his chest puffed out, just because he'd studied for years, simply because he'd visited countries where it snows, let me tell you this, whenever he came to Séképembé to visit his parents, the young girls on heat went running after him, even married women cheated on their husbands, they'd bring him things to eat on the quiet, round the back of his father' s hut, they'd wash his dirty linen for him, the guy went round doing things he shouldn't have all over the place with married women and the young women on heat,
It's a lovely commentary too of course on the returned expat, now a big man in his home village and a great success though who knows how great a success he actually was abroad. Amédée is a big reader and seduces girls by telling them stories he's learned from his books. Porcupine is sceptical:
novels are books written by men to recount things which are untrue, they'll say it all comes from their imagination, there are some novelists who would sell their own mothers or fathers to steal my porcupine destiny, draw inspiration from it, write a story in which I'd have an rather less than glorious role, make me look like low life, let me tell you this, human beings find life so boring, they need novels so they can invent other lives for themselves, by diving into one of these books, dear Baobab, you can take off round the world, leave the bush in the blink of an eye, turn up in a distant country, meet foreign people, strange animals, porcupines with even murkier pasts than mine,
There are indeed some novelists who might take a porcupine's life and make him look like low life. It's shocking.
Porcupine also takes the time to directly critique some of Amédée's reading. For example: "Amédée would tell the young girls all about a wretched old man who went deep sea fishing and had to battle all alone with a huge fish, if you ask me this huge fish was the harmful double of a fisherman who was jealous of the old guy's experience,". Most of the descriptions are less obvious than that one, and there's some fun to be had working out which novels Porcupine is talking about since he tends to be a very literal reader.
Porcupine is a lifelong rogue, but he's a likable one. He has charm. Whether it's his occasional attraction to human women (he picked up Kibandi's tastes there too, porcupine females do nothing for him), his cowardice or his all-too-human ability to rationalise away his own failings he's one of the more human characters I've read recently (though he'd probably find that an insulting observation).
Memoirs is a book full of sly asides. In one scene Porcupine is sent to kill a palm-wine tapster, an old man who Porcupine kills and leaves at the foot of the palm tree he was tapping when Porcupine found him. It couldn't be a clearer shout out to Tutuola's Palm-Wine Drinkard and it's a nice touch of homage to Mabanckou's predecessors.
Porcupine then is a very funny novel, but it's also one with an underlying serious point. Take a young man, expose him to brutal abuse (here a sorcerous potion, but the world is hardly free of more prosaic horrors), and see how his life warps and distorts in consequence. Stu in his review over at his Winston's Dad's Blog draws parallels between Kibandi and the fate of child soldiers and I think he has a point.
I'll end with a short observation on style. Mabanckou writes here in a free-flowing style reflecting the Porcupine's garrulous speech. Mabanckou partly achieves this through avoiding use of full stops (I don't think there are any), though just as with Enard's Zone that doesn't mean it doesn't have sentences but simply that they're structured using commas and natural pauses.
Mabanckou gives Memoirs the feel of a spoken rather than written work. Like Tutuola, like Lord, he draws on the rhythms of oral storytelling to give life to the page. It works well, and allows a final little end-joke on how Porcupine's tale found itself published in book form. It's a typically deft touch of levity in a novel that could easily have been rather bleak, but which never is.
Other reviews
The review that put me on to this book specifically and Mabanckou generally was this one from Stu's Winston's Dad's Blog, as mentioned above. Given how much I enjoyed this I owe Stu massive thanks for this one, not for the first time.
As an aside, it occurred to me that Memoirs of a Porcupine might have been an inspiration for Lauren Beukes' rather good Zoo City given the use of animal familiars in that. I asked Lauren Beukes however on twitter and she'd never heard of it. Different writers drawing on the same mythic references clearly.
