seeceeread 's review for:

The Road to the Salt Sea by Samuel Kolawole

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💭 "When he had asked why they stole from desperate migrants, he said it was to make them even more desperate. "Some of them will end up in the hands of Medecins Sans Frontières, they will bring them to the shelter—that's more money from the EU and UNHCR. We also have more people to send to Tripoli: business moves. The chain must remain unbroken."

Able God has job whose pay barely covers his meager room and uses not one of skills he learned at university. He's trying to imagine ways to parlay proximity to others' money into his own opportunities when he begins to notice a patron who seems to leave battered women in his wake. Attending to one woman's well-being sends Able God sputtering away from all he's known—onto a bus crammed with migrants who have agreed to exchange work for passage over the Sahara and into Italy. 

The next three quarters sharply diverge from the opening thriller and into a visceral narrative of the absolute misery of Africans fleeing their countries for Europe: relentless heat, cramped everything, unattended wounds, savage beatings, perpetual filth, enforced hunger, escalating extortion, callous non-burials and on and on. Able God's caravan becomes slave labor to their smuggler and his network. Even his escapes are fraught with corruption and tinted with humiliation.

This is a solid debut. Kọ́láwọlé excels at writing shifting dynamics between central characters, layering chess as a motif and bringing readers' full senses into aching, dusty, urine-soaked scenes.

On the other hand, this is two works squished into one: An opening novella

that nods to Crime & Punishment

. And a ripped-from-the-headlines novel on labor trafficking and peril along both sides of the Mediterranean Sea. The second is all we need but the author kept wandering back to the first. Aside from the overextended framing, I also wondered at Able God being so sure of his own powers of deduction, prescience and problem-solving: He needed a really good advisor or confidante and seemed to rightly miss his mother.