Memory of Love, The [Paperback]

Incalculable grief cleaves to profound love in this elaborate, helical tapestry of a besieged people in postwar Freetown, Sierra Leone. Interlacing two primary periods of violent upheaval, author Aminatta Forna renders a scarred nation of people with astonishing grace and poise--an unforgettable portrait of open wounds and closed mouths, of broken hearts and fractured spirits, woven into a stunning evocation of recurrence and redemption, loss and tender reconciliation. Forna mines a filament of hope from resigned fatalism, from the devastation of a civil war that claimed 50,000 lives and displaced 2.5 million people. Those that survived felt hollowed out, living with an uneasy peace.

Over 99% of people suffered from unrelieved post-traumatic stress disorder, and those that survived often hid shameful secrets of forced betrayal. Here you have children, now adults, trying to cope after their brutal coercion with rebel soldiers. They are living with the aftermath of "nothing left to lose." If you can imagine an unspeakable atrocity, it was likely executed. Blood on the hands of the people who remain seep into the pores of the newly arrived.

Three principal characters form the locus of this story--a psychologist, a surgeon, and an academic. The story goes through seamless temporal shifts--from 1969, a period of unrest following a military coup--to 2001, following ten years of civil war begun in 1991.

Adrian Lockheart is a British psychologist on sabbatical from his failing marriage to accept a (second) post in Freetown. He is compassionate and dogged in his pursuit to treat the population of mentally disturbed and traumatized citizens, to help them find hope and resolve, yet he feels emotionally dislocated from his own family at home.

"The truth is that since arriving here his life has seemed more charged with meaning than it ever had in London. Here the boundaries are limitless, no horizon, no sky. He can feel his emotions, solid and weighty, like stones in the palm of his hands."

Adrian treats tortured men and women in the fallout of war, finding a particularly poignant interest in Agnes, a woman who is suffering from a fugue disorder. He contends that the endless miles she compulsively roams on foot (and subsequently forgets) indicate a search for something meaningful from the ruins of war. He believes she is going toward somewhere, a place he determines to find out.

Adrian's most prominent patient is the unreliable narrator, Elias Cole, an elderly, retired history professor dying of pulmonary disease. In this city of silence, Elias is compelled to tell his story, his confession, to Adrian. It begins in 1969, when Elias first laid eyes on Saffia Kamara, a charming and comely botanist married to the gregarious, fearless Julius, an academic at the university.

"People are wrong when they talk of love at first sight. It is neither love nor lust. No. As she walks away from you, what you feel is loss. A premonition of loss."

Julius, Elias, and Saffia embark on a friendship that inextricably points to the destiny of the next generation. The military coups of the late 60's followed Sierra Leon's hard-won independence from the British colonial rule. Political unrest led to widespread paranoia, which in turn led to wobbly allegiances. Elias's confession to Adrian is the rallying point, which heightens all the other narratives. Adrian's probing of Elias reaches to encounters outside of the hospital, and will alter the course of his life, and too of the story.

Lastly, there is Kai Manseray, a talented, young orthopedic surgeon, a tireless and tormented man plagued by chronic insomnia and a suppressed and devastating history. Kai chose to stay and help the damaged and impoverished, rather than abscond two years ago with his best friend, Tejani. He is torn between his loyalties in Sierra Leone and his desire for a more elite station in the States. The woman he loved has gone, the city ravaged, the people embattled, but his little cousin, Abass, and the patients who need him keep him anchored. He has secrets that he won't share with anyone, that threaten to undo him in the operating theater.

As the story highlights the contrast of their professions, Kai and Adrian form a tenuous bond of friendship. Kai's achievements are measurable--stitching, sewing, patching, cutting, and saving lives. Adrian, however, can't measure his patients' success with an X-ray or point to approximated edges of a wound. Psychotherapy is a process of encounters, wending your way through the dark channels of a person's interior and facilitating change through conversation. Kai and Adrian's bond is ultimately the most hypnotic, with consequences encroaching on the dark side of hope.

Forna constructs a mesmerizing collision of forces and people that slowly propel the reader toward a towering climax. This story is for the committed reader, the patient literature lover who will undertake many hours of dedication for the inevitable reward. Think of a blank canvas, and every sentence as a mindful brushstroke, a bloom on the page. It takes a while for the picture to materialize. The writing is carefully crafted, and yet imperceptibly so, not in the least self-conscious. She is steadily augmenting, fuller and deeper, contrasting the light and the darkness, capturing nature and sound. Even her secondary and tertiary characters are wrought with polish and care.The story's leisurely pace builds its emotional cathedral one stone at a time; at about the halfway point, it becomes riveting and impossible to turn away.

This is a personal and natal undertaking for Forna, whose father, Dr. Mohamed Forna, was a dissident in Sierra Leona and was killed on trumped up charges when she was only eleven-years-old. Her non-fiction book, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest, is the story of her search for the truth of that harrowing time. She continues her exploration of healing and recovery in this deeply researched and ambitious book.

There are coincidences in this novel that nevertheless do not disturb the beauty or the impact of the story. In lesser hands, this may have come across as artifice. However, Forna's characters and themes are ultimately grounded, and the patterns that emerge from the disparate stories--the unguarded moments, the link of love that ties all the characters together--transcend her intention. The potency of storytelling and the refrain of love in the aftermath of tragedy is evident and sublime in her fluent prose.

"There exists, somewhere, a scale for love invented by one of his [Adrian's] profession...And there are others still who say love is but a beautiful form of madness."

The injured voices of her characters mesh into a voice of hope and holding on, to a startling story of redemption. At various intervals, the lyrics of Jimmy Cliff's "The Harder They Come" drift onto the page. It sang, I sang.

"Well, they tell me there's a pie up in the sky, waiting for you when you die...The harder they come, the harder they fall."

Love endures. One and all.

Brief summary and review, no spoilers.

This story takes place in the African nation of Sierra Leone and takes place over a period of time starting in the late 1960's. One of the main characters is Elias Cole, an ambitious British professor who strives to become both published and respected. He finds himself friends of sorts with a man named Julius - also a fellow professor who is both popular with his students has a beautiful wife named Saffia. Elias becomes obsessed with Saffia at first sight, and his jealousy and mixed in with some affection for Julius become a central part of the story.

The other main characters in this novel are a British man named Adrian who has come to Sierra Leone to work as a psychologist in a local hospital. Adrian is married and has a child still in England, but he is obviously dissatisfied with his work there and with his marriage, and feels the need to matter and feel some passion about what he does. The other central figure in this story is a native born doctor named Kai Manseray, who is an extremely bright and dedicated surgeon. Kei and Adrian become friends, when Kei starts staying at Adrian's home on occasions to sleep and make meals.

The chapters alternate and we go back and forth in time, with alternating narrators and stories. We are taken through these incredibly turbulent and disturbing years in Sierra Leone, with all its violence and horror suffered by the people due to war and government instability. In fact at one point Adrian is told that most everyone in the country has post-traumatic stress syndrome - and their mental hospitals are filled with many such damaged individuals.

More than just a story about these characters, this is also a story about Sierra Leone. I did not know very much about this country, but you do learn a lot by the time you turn the last page. Many characters in this novel love their homeland, yet we see the price they pay (and paid) for staying. In this story we also meet a woman, a patient of Adrian's named Agnes, who has a strange disorder that causes her to wander in a fugue-like stake, and over time we come to know her story, and why she is the way she is.

What's very good about this book is the plot itself - in the parts that take place near the most present time, Elias Cole is dying and wants to tell his story to Adrian. We get the sense he is seeking some sort of absolution, but we won't find out why till the end. We also know from that Kei is a broken man who was once passionately in love with a woman named Nenebah, though we don't know what happened to her or what caused the end of their relationship.

It's just a great story, and I found it very moving with a terrific resolution and denouement.

In criticism, I believe that there were parts of the novel that were over-written - and at times the constant hints and sense of foreboding overwhelms the novel. It was just too much, and if anything trying to add the drama and sense of apprehension took away from the rest of the story. I truly think this novel could've been edited down and would have made for a better story.

Even with this critique, I highly recommend this book and I know it will stay with me for a long time. This is not just because of the startling depiction of the horrors experienced during wartime, but also because this author has really come up with a terrific story with memorable and true-to-life characters.

One of the most beautifully written books I've read in quite a while. But if you're looking for some light summer fare, go elsewhere. This book requires the reader to put some real effort into it, but the rewards are pretty worthwhile by the end of the tale. The book takes place almost entirely in Sierra Leone and the story shifts back and forth in time and back and forth among the major characters. We learn over time just how closely related all of these people are and how their stories are intertwined, but slowly over time.

The main characters are quite complicated constructions, capable of both good and sometimes, profound evil, and it's not always possible to trust their personal narratives as several of them are trying desparately to convince others and perhaps themselves of their comparative innocence in the events that unfold in the horror that became Sierra Leone in the 90s. One of the major characters is a British psychologist who visits the oountry after the war, with the intention of staying a short time to help mental patients damaged by the events of the war. One of the more interesting themes becomes what does it mean to cure someone of mental illness only to turn them out into an insane world? The well meaning but rather shallow and ineffective doctor, Aidan, becomes a major focal point of the entire chain of events, both as actor and observer, as we discover over time how his patients and friends became these people we come to know after the war.

One of the peculiarities of the novel for me is that all of the major active characters are men. There are important female characters, but we hear very little in their own voice. We meet them as wives, daughters, victims, etc. but we learn very little from them directly, which given the fact that the author herself is of course female as is the face on the cover of the book, but the women here are almost as silent as that face. We hear their stories but from some distance. I don't know what to make of that, other than to observe it.

But, the book is quite moving in its study of the human character under extreme duress. And, as I said while it will take some effort to make it through its storyline, the trip is quite worthwhile and memorable.