Wayétu Moore's ambitious debut novel is, as the title suggests, preoccupied with governance. In her reimagining of the founding of the African country of Liberia, Moore explores slavery, tribalism, colonialism and a brand new regime of self-governance that brings its own problems. Her book is an uneasy cross of genres – fable, historical fiction, magic realism – that anchors its narrative around a mystical Vai woman, Gbessa, who is destined to help rule Liberia.
References to kings and queens populate the pages of She Would Be King, but there is a whiff of another monarch off this uneven debut: the emperor and his new clothes. The book, published last autumn in the US, comes with a stream of plaudits, including a very positive – if brief – review from the New Yorker. An author interview in the New York Times deems it expansive and ambitious, terms that are fair and accurate, but without an in-depth critical analysis. Meanwhile, Sarah Jessica Parker has picked it for her book club, with a strong endorsement: "This novel dazzles with beauty and transcendent, transformative humanity."
While the subject matter of Moore’s novel is certainly focused on humanity, specifically the lack of humanity shown by white people to black people down through the centuries, it is a stretch to say her novel dazzles with anything close to transcendence. The problem lies less in the genre mixing – Moore is an inventive writer who makes good use of African myth – but in the language, which is for the most part functional and forgettable, and eventually struggles to hold up the weight of all the subplots.
For Gbessa is but one of three main characters, each of whom has their own superpower. To Moore's credit, this is a clever and interesting reimagining of a history of subordination. In indigenous Liberia, Gbessa is exiled from her village as a young girl who has the misfortune of being born on a cursed day. Decreed a witch by the elders, the tribal misogyny soon turns prophetic when Gbessa, surviving severe neglect and hunger, realises she cannot be killed. The second narrator, June Dey, is the son of two African-American slaves on a Virginia plantation. His supernatural strength sees him fight plantation owners before fleeing for Africa. Along the way he meets the book's third hero, Norman Aragon, the son of a white coloniser and native Jamaican Maroon woman who has inherited his mother's magical powers of disappearing. The plot momentum comes from the three characters gravitating towards each other, with Liberia as a troubled Mecca.
Press hype
Moore, who spent some of her childhood in war-torn Liberia in the 1990s, is an Africana studies lecturer at John Jay College in New York and lives in Brooklyn. Her writing can be found in the Paris Review, Frieze Magazine, Guernica, the Atlantic Magazine. She is also the founder of One Moore Book, a non-profit organisation that encourages reading among children of countries with low literacy rates and underrepresented cultures.
With such a commendable biography, it is tempting to get caught up in the press hype that surrounds this book, which includes comparisons to Yann Martel, Gabriel García Márquez and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This does a disservice not just to the writing of these authors but also to Moore herself, whose debut does have commendable elements – the new landscape it brings to readers, the original way it treats its themes of slavery, identity and governance, the window into Vai culture, from the shame it places on its women to the heroes it makes of its men.
Occasionally the descriptions are noteworthy: “There, lying lifeless and striking, was a woman with oil-black skin and long red hair.” But more often than not – particularly as Moore tries to make the strains of her narrative cohere with an effortful omniscient voice that watches over the characters – there is frequent exposition and convoluted expression.
Plodding prose
In 19th-century Virginia, “Edith searched the Missus’s eyes, the expression of which was diametrically opposed to the way the old woman had looked on the day of their arrival at the plantation, when she could not finish her cup of tea without gushing about her new husband.”
In a later section, the violence is related in plodding prose: “Seeing this from where he stood, restrained by two men, June Dey was transformed into an enraged brute in both his body and soul … Some men in the circle were badly beaten; it seemed they had resisted the attacks that had resulted in their present circumstances.” Compounding the issues with language is the book’s final section in Liberia, where a roll of new characters pile up in fleeting, barely sketched scenes.
There have been some remarkable debuts from African authors in recent years that bring new stories of under-represented cultures to light in vivid, arresting prose, among them the Booker-nominated The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Imbolo Blue’s Behold the Dreamers and, most recently, Namwali Serpell’s epic Zambian novel The Old Drift. Sadly, Moore’s debut does not earn its place in this kingdom.
