“Fiction is indeed revelation . . . a great novel ceases to be about something and becomes the thing. There is an act of transformation there . . . the revelation.”

Earlier this summer, acclaimed author Chigozie Obioma released his third novel, The Road to the Country. Obioma, a Nigerian author living in the United States, is the author of two other novels, both of which were short-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize, so the release of his latest work was highly anticipated. The Road to the Country has been reviewed widely, including in the Wall Street Journal, Times Literary Supplement, Washington Post, and London Review of Books. In addition to more mainstream reviewers, Obioma’s work has attracted attention in conservative circles; the president of Hillsdale College, Larry Arnn, sent out a mass email encouraging people to read the book and calling Obioma “one of the leading novelists of our time.” 

Most mainstream reviewers agree with Arnn that the book is a great one and that Obioma is a talented writer, but few of them can clearly explain why they hold such an opinion. The novel is set during the 1967-70 Nigerian Civil War during which 1.5-3 million people were killed. Most reviewers note the obvious, that the novel portrays the brutality of war; but beyond that, many reviewers are stumped. The Guardian published: “It is not clear what to take from the book, except that war is brutal.” Kirkus Reviews says the book is about “the consequences of violence,” and the Times Literary Supplement categorizes the novel as part of the “anti-war tradition.” 

But if The Road to the Country is simply about the horrors of war, then it is redundant: as many of these aforementioned reviewers note, several able Nigerian novelists and memoirists have already explored the Nigerian Civil War—notable examples include Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country (2012), Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Tree (2015), and Emmanuel Iduma’s I Am Still With You (2023).  

Further, as these reviewers also note, Obioma is not always exceptional in his ability to portray these brutalities, occasionally miscalibrating his descriptions. Writing for the Guardian, Aminatta Forna points out two examples: at one point, the group of protagonist soldiers find a “house, half of which has been damaged into a pile of rubble,” and later, a soldier’s face “twists as if coated with something deformed.” To be sure, Obioma does wield his descriptive powers to tremendous effect at times (descriptions of a pilot jumping from a burning plane, a caterpillar crawling on a dead soldier’s foot, and a woman begging for death after the murder of her family spring to mind), but if the success of the novel is to be measured purely in its ability to convey the horror of war, The Road to the Country is not particularly exceptional.  

Further, it is no wonder that those who read the novel as simply proclaiming that “war is hell” are mystified by the more magical elements of Obioma’s work. Most of the novel follows Kunle, a university student from Akure, who travels to the secessionist eastern region of Nigeria in order to locate his brother, Tunde, and remove him from the war zone. After a series of misunderstandings, Kunle is drafted into the secessionist Biafran military, fights on the front lines, makes friends and learns about their motivations for declaring Biafran independence, and falls in love with a female commander. This otherwise relatively straightforward storyline is framed by short chapters which describe the mystical visions of a “Seer” named Igbala, who, in 1947, predicts the Civil War and foresees the death and destruction of millions. Igbala sees every detail of Kunle’s life unfold even before Kunle is born; Igbala’s connection to Kunle is so intimate that several times his vocal reactions to what he foresees pierce the veil of time and intrude into Kunle’s consciousness in the form of interior voices. Igbala foresees that Kunle will be an “abami eda”—one who will die and return to life. Indeed, at almost the exact midpoint of the novel, Kunle is struck by shrapnel and dies. For twenty-six pages, Kunle roams about the “endless fields” of the dead, speaking with deceased soldiers from Biafra as well as Vietnam and Asia Minor. Some of the deceased make their way toward the “Hills of the ancestors,” while others linger, telling the stories of their lives. Upon learning Kunle is “not dead,” the others urge him to return to life, to walk down a path—the “road to the country”—and to not look back.  

Many, if not most, mainstream reviews of the novel entirely omit engagement with this startling supernatural interlude. At the limit, some reviewers, such as Jake Cline at the Washington Post, criticize these supernatural elements as a “labored framing device.” Indeed, if Obioma merely sought to tell a story about the horrors of war, the added mystical element—the very titular image—could appear superfluous.  

If Obioma’s novel merely teaches us a lesson we could learn from a myriad of other anti-war novels and does so through occasionally miscalibrated descriptions and belabored framing devices, why should we consider it a great novel (as the reviews mentioned here universally do)?  

I don’t think these elements are superfluous, and I don’t think Obioma has merely written an adequate but unexceptional cautionary tale about the horrors of war. I think the supernatural elements are the key to interpreting the novel and that such an interpretation reveals the magnitude of Obioma’s accomplishment.   

I had the privilege of taking a creative writing course with Prof. Obioma during my time at Hillsdale College, and I devoured his other two novels, The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019). (I personally favor both of these novels even above The Road to the Country—An Orchestra of Minorities in particular—but those are reviews for another time.)  

Obioma is deeply familiar with, and interested in the classics of western literature. His other two novels consciously draw upon this tradition: The Fishermen is acclaimed as a sort of retelling of the story of Cain and Abel, while An Orchestra of Minorities can be read as a version of The Odyssey mixed with some elements of Paradise Lost. I believe The Road to the Country similarly draws upon a great of the western tradition for inspiration: Dante Aligheri’s Divine Comedy. 

It’s understandable that reviewers might have missed this literary parallel—none of Obioma’s novels are obvious or cliché in their adaptation of classic stories. After all, as Prof. Obioma often reminded our class (with an attention to words apropos of an author), “novel” means new. I can’t even say for sure that Obioma intended to draw upon the Divine Comedy—but I do think reading the text through that interpretive lens yields an intensely fruitful result which can account for the mystical elements neglected by other common readings, and confronts us with a much more forceful message than “war is bad.” 

In the Divine Comedy, the character Dante finds himself “in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost.” His life has gone astray, and he feels guilty for forsaking “the pathway of truth.” Dante meets the Roman poet Virgil, who tells him there is a way out of his guilt and dysfunction, but he must go all the way down into hell and back up again. During his visit to hell, Dante sees what a life of sin really looks like. For example, in the second circle of hell, Dante sees the souls of those overcome by lust: strong winds blow them around, preventing them from peace and rest. The lustful, Dante realizes, choose this fate during their earthly lives, allowing themselves to be blown from passion to passion and never achieving lasting happiness. The only difference between a lustful soul on earth and one in hell is that a veil has been removed and the true effects of sin can be seen in their full horror. Fundamentally, the Divine Comedy is about revelation, pulling the veil back, and seeing clearly. It is this clarity that helps Dante complete his spiritual journey, returning to his life a changed man and atoning for his sins. 

The Road to the Country opens with imagery of a dark, twisting road very similar to the Divine Comedy: “The road to the hills is tenuous in the dark. When approached in daylight, it presents itself as a straight path. At night it acquires a mysterious character, appearing sinuous and much further . . .” Like Dante, Kunle is suffering from a spiritual crisis: he is wracked with guilt for a sin committed years before the start of the book which resulted in the crippling of his brother. The first-person limited narrator remarks that “over the years, [Kunle has] come to sense, by some secret law of the soul, that he will someday be called upon to atone for his sin.” When Kunle is unexpectedly drafted into the Biafran army, he begins to believe that going all the way down into war as hell may be the way toward spiritual redemption and out of his guilt and dysfunction: “Perhaps instead of attaining the redemption he sought for so long in righting the wrong he once did, he could achieve it on a larger scale if he helped fight to save this people.” 

In certain ways, the war does redeem Kunle. At first a timid and introspective character, the war teaches him how to be a man of action, and to embrace love when he meets Agnes, the female commander. “The war, it seems, has remade him into the boy he was before the accident.” 

At the same time, the war removes the veil which ordinarily conceals the true horror of human sin. As Kunle’s comrade Bube-Orji remarks, “I was just saying, it is like we come to stand in front of one mirror, you know? The mirror is this war . . . It’av shown us different pictures of ourselves that we did not know existed.” Just as Dante saw the unobscured effects of sin in hell, war reveals the true depths of depravity man can reach, as well as the redeeming possibility of friendship and love forged in difficult times. Obioma has stated in interviews, and this is reiterated in the novel explicitly, that the story of a war “can only be told by the living and the dead.” Clarity is brought by the reality of death and the serious consequences of each of our actions; war is a stripping away of the veil to see the forces we often ignore in our daily lives. 

The theme of revelation persists throughout the novel, most obviously in the figure of Igbala the Seer. Like the prophet in the Book of Revelation, Igbala sees the future of destruction and death, and sees the roots of it spread up among him even in his current moment. In the midst of his visions, the distance between Igbala and Kunle is referred to as “hymen thin,” an invocation of the marital imagery of the consummation of time at the last judgment in the Book of Revelation. When the veil is pierced, the truth of life will become manifest, and that is exactly what Kunle experiences during his time in the war and during his visit to the afterlife. The book reflects on our inability to see the gravity of our sins, even with the help of prophecy: 

Lost in the thrill of it, most people will not look beneath its surface. Even the curious who do look will not see the grave thing that has descended among them, biding its time. Every day the fearful stream will continue its interminable flow, bearing within it the terrible secret vision, so that when the day to be feared arrives it will be as though a thing unwelcome has entered the midst of an unsuspecting gathering—unseen. And, as such, it will be too late to stop it. 

When we read this novel as a work of revelation, we can finally understand why this novel should be considered great. It’s not because it is always superb in its style or because it is at the right intersection of marginalized subject matter, or because it is considered great by the literary powers that be. In Obioma’s own words: 

I love that word [revelation]…fiction is indeed revelation, and I’m surprised by what is revealed to me once I have thought of those characters. I defined for myself what I think a good book is, a bad novel is, and a great novel is. And what I think is that a great novel ceases to be about something and becomes the thing. There is an act of transformation there…the revelation.

Obioma writes that—similar to, for example, Tolkien in Mythopoeia—creative acts are revelations more than creations ex nihilo. Obioma strives to imagine characters, and the plot reveals itself to him from there. Crucially, this means Obioma’s work—like the Divine Comedy—is fundamentally about a character, a soul, and not a plot. This war story is not just about national conflict; there is an individual, psychological character to stories about war which can not be overlooked—war happens within our souls every day. The art of crafting fiction is itself revelation. In the words of Marshall McLuhan, “the medium is the message.” The Road to the Country is great fiction because it ceases to be “about” revelation, and actually becomes revelation—exactly what Obioma describes as the characteristic of a great novel.