A boy lost in Africa
Simon Baker WHAT IS THE WHAT by Dave Eggers Hamish Hamilton, £18.99, pp. 475, ISBN 9780241142578 £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 what is the What cuts through the strata of criticism, and gets straight to a fundamental question, one which echoes the title: What is a novel? The plot is the journey to Ethiopia, Kenya and finally America of a Sudanese refugee, Valentino Achak Deng, but what makes this 'novel' unusual is that Valentino is a real person, who told his story to Dave Eggers over a number of years. Eggers now presents it in a voice pitched to approximate that of his subject. The reason this is not called a memoir, however, is that some passages are fictional, although the real Valentino himself states in the preface that they are faithful to the overall tenor of events. This, then, is a book at the crossroads of forms, one which takes issue with the very labels 'fiction' and 'non-fiction'.
The Valentino of this book is living in Atlanta, Georgia. Over the course of a day and a half, he is beaten up and robbed in his apartment, before being left tied up, and then waits vainly in a hospital for 14 hours, finally making his way to the gym where he works, for a 5.30 a. m. start. During that time he silently addresses his life story to the people he encounters, the burglars, the hospital workers, the insomniac exercisers.
He was born in Marial Bai, in the southwest of Sudan. His father, a shopkeeper, was wealthy by local standards, but neither Valentino nor his friends owned even the most basic accoutrements of a Western child. When he was only six or seven (he is not entirely sure of his age), civil war broke out. In his explanation, rebel soldiers fled to Ethiopia, and in retribution the government hired Arab mercenaries to gain revenge, which meant the murder and rape of southern Sudanese citizens, whom the rebels were seen as representing. As payment, the Arabs could keep what they plundered, which provided an unfortunate incentive for brutality.
Separated in the mêlée from his parents, Valentino ran from his village and eventually joined the Lost Boys, a group of children travelling on foot away from Sudan. Originally containing just a few, the group enlarged to comprise hundreds of emaciated youngsters walking half naked through unfriendly terrain, first to Ethiopia and then to Kenya, where a decade-long stay in a refugee camp followed. Finally, Valentino was chosen as one of 4,000 Sudanese people to be relocated to the US.
Since beginning his career with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), Dave Eggers has produced writing that is witty, perceptive and charming, but too often has allowed that to degenerate into a cliquey, post-modern irony that occasionally undermines the power of his narratives. In this book, though, all bad habits have melted away. The voice is completely authentic — direct, familiar with hardship, engaging but not urbane — and through 500 pages the story remains compelling and elegant. If anything, you want the narrator to investigate the horrors beneath the comradeship even more than he tends to, but this is purely because when he does so the effect is stunning, as here, when he describes burying a childhood friend who died of starvation during the long walk: I could not watch the first dirt fall on William K's face so I kicked the first layer with the back of my heel. Once his head was covered, I spread more dirt and rocks until it bore some resemblance to a real grave. When I was finished, I told William K that I was sorry. I was sorry that I had not known how sick he was. That I had not found a way to keep him alive.
Miles from home, not yet ten years old, and uncertain whether he himself will last much longer, all Valentino has left here is an immense and humbling humanity.
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