Margeret's latest suggestion was this widely acclaimed and International Booker long-listed book set in the People's Republic of Congo in the aftermath of the Marxist-Leninist Revolution of the late 1960s. In 1970 our first-person narrator is a boy in a harsh orphanage, taking succour from the pastoral approach of the visiting priest, Papa Moupelo. It is Papa Moupelo who has given him his name, a long name in Moupelo's own language, Lingala, which means 'Thanks be to God, the black Moses is born on the earth of our ancestors' - inevitably shortened to Moses - which imbues Moses with a fundamental if primitive sense of mission and justice. His sense of injustice will lead him to avenge his bullied best friend, Bonaventure, with chilli pepper, which earns him the nickname 'Little Pepper' (the title of the original French edition). One day Papa Moupela fails to appear: the new, anti-religion regime has taken over the orphanage, and there is a suggestion that he may have been disappeared. The harshness increases. Eventually Moses escapes with two others for the metropolis of Pointe-Noire (leaving Bonaventure behind), where their only choice is to join a street gang of petty thieves. Eventually Moses finds a kind of peace with a house of prostitutes, and the madam finds him a job in the docks and a hut in which to live. But then, during a purge of 'Zairian whores', Moses turns up one day to find the brothel house razed to rubble and the prostitutes 'disappeared'. Distraught, Moses descends into madness, vainly consulting various doctors, eventually dressing himself as a latter-day Robin Hood and setting out with a knife to avenge his 'little adopted family'.
The book is written with a kind of naif, po-faced wit we all enjoyed - Moses refers to his 'kilometrically extended name' - and on the whole we found it an interesting and engaging read. However, we all found the book 'front-heavy', as I think Clare put it. It is divided into two Parts of equal length. Part 1 deals with the time in the orphanage, covering only the few years of Moses' early adolescence. The period is dealt with in detail, with much concentration on the fascist idiocies of the regime. The pace is consequently measured, and in fact Doug said he found the section repetitive. It ends with Moses's escape. Part 2 opens when Moses has already been in the street gang for three years, and goes on to cover the years right into his middle age. There seems no real narratorial significance in this initial leap, and the absence of any portrayal of Moses's arrival in the city and his adjustment to life there seemed to all of us a lack after the detailed treatment in Part One. In fact, as Doug pointed out, Moses's escape at the end of Part 1 seems rushed and inadequately explained, as if the writer was just impatient to get on with the street scenes, and it is perhaps telling that most reviews give the impression that the more eventful Part 2 constitutes the main bulk of the book.
Doug said that although Moses's mix of childish, sometimes clumsy, yet insightful vocabulary is amusing, there are sentiments and a political understanding expressed in Part 1 that wouldn't in fact have been available to a young boy, and which smacked of the author's own voice and perspective. Others agreed. I thought this could to some extent be excused by the fact that, as we discover at the end, the whole thing is in fact a memoir written by Moses in a penitentiary for the criminally insane, and that the problem perhaps was that there was no indication of this at the start to make us read the book in that context.
At the end of the book, Moses is back where he started: the penitentiary is built on the sight of the orphanage, and Bonaventure is still there (using a different name, rather than that of the father who abandoned him), still obsessed with the planes flying over and expecting one some day to take him away. That, as someone pointed out, should make for a very sad book - and on one level it does - but there is a feel of survival in the lively prose of this fictional memoir, and the very act of writing it, of course, constitutes for Moses a triumph.
Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here
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