The lost boys

Ali Smith is impressed by Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation, a brutal novel of child soldiers
Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala
Buy Beasts of No Nation at the Guardian bookshop Public domain

Beasts of No Nation
by Uzodinma Iweala
184pp, John Murray, £12.99

Earlier this year Granta published Delia Jarrett-Macauley's first novel, Moses, Citizen and Me, the considered and multi-layered story of a Sierra Leone family blasted apart by one of its children turning boy soldier in the civil war. It is a novel remarkable for its slowed, measured pulse and its calm analysis, its keenness to promise hope and rehabilitation even after the worst. It is chilling to compare Beasts of No Nation, a first novel by Uzodinma Iweala, who is 23 and a Harvard graduate and has worked with Nigerian child soldiers in rehabilitation. This is the live underbelly of such a situation, in a novel so scorched by loss and anger that it's hard to hold and so gripping in its sheer hopeless lifeforce that it's hard to put down.


This blend of immediacy, innocence, sensual apprehension and tiny animalistic nuance starts small but within pages has gravitated into a cartoon fastness -"KPAWA! He is hitting me" - and a very graphic cartoon foulness, highlighting both the smallness of the child and the monstrousness of what he finds himself doing: "I am bringing the machete up and down and up and down hearing KPWUDA KPWUDA every time and seeing just pink while I am hearing the laughing KEHI, KEHI, KEHI all around me." In Beasts of No Nation hope is a word mentioned only three times in passing, once in its epigraph from Rimbaud's A Season in Hell ("je parvins à faire s'évanouir dans mon esprit toute l'esperance humaine"), and twice as the casual name of another of the boy soldiers, who's dead the second time we hear of him.

The story is simple, basic, near non-existent. "One day they are closing school because there is no more government." A boy is dragged out of a village hut, beaten by another, smaller boy nearly to death, then given the choice between life and death by a man called Commandant. He chooses life. "What else can I be doing? They are all saying, stop worrying. Stop worrying. Soon it will be your own turn and then you will know what it is feeling like to be killing somebody. Then they are laughing at me and spitting on the ground near my feets." The boy who beats him, Strika, becomes his friend. Strika is dumb. "Are you Strika, and he is nodding yes. Are you having parent, and he is shaking his head no. Are you liking plantain? Nodding yes. Fish? Yes. Pear? Yes. Are you stupid? No. Why are you not talking talking? No answer. What is it like to be killing somebody? No answer."

Our central character, Agu, was a scholarly boy. He liked books. His father was a schoolteacher with an eye to African tradition, his mother loved a Christian God. "But these things are before the war and I am only remembering them like dream." He joins the rebel troops, who raid a village and kill as many people as they can, high on hunger and "gun juice", which turns everyone into the same kind of undifferentiated beast and leads to the kind of bloodshed that means "I am not knowing what is farmer and what is goat".

It's an apocalyptic piece. Everything in it is a kind of stripped-back fact, though carefully controlled images of pointless sacrifice, starved people and spoiled meat recur throughout, and images of soldiers shift from pride to horrific sexual degradation. Agu ponders what it was, in the past, to dance the warrior dance that meant you were a man in your village's eyes, and what it is now to be too small to carry a gun without the weight of it pulling you to one side - so small that they give you a knife instead. The book resounds, too, with simply put questions. "What am I supposed to be doing?" "How can I know what is happening to me?"

It is a work of fevered mourning. Its final chapter, with Agu in a fantasyland of rehabilitation, is tremendous; it is as if the whole book existed to point up the terrible lostness in its very last line. It reads, in all its truth, like fable - as if Amos Tutuola had been mated with Isaac Babel. Its brutality is unendurable, and at the same time the life of the voice of it provides all the moral analysis there is. As terrifying as this pure, ruined child-voice is, Iweala suggests, a silence here would be much more terrifying.

· Ali Smith's latest novel is The Accidental (Hamish Hamilton). To order Beasts of No Nation for £11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875.