Namwali Serpell’s impressive first novel is an indulgent, centuries-spanning slab of life marbled with subplots, zigzagging between characters and decades to play snakes and ladders with the bloodlines of three Zambian families with roots from around the world.
Starting in the company of a Victorian photographer following the footsteps of Livingstone and ending in a near future where Aids vaccines are injected by micro-drones, the novel shifts in tone and style over multiple storylines. In postwar Piedmont, we see a partisan fighter murder his brother to steal his job on the Zambezi river as well as his African-born lover. In 60s Surrey, a tennis player losing her sight sets tongues wagging when she stumbles into a relationship with a student from northern Rhodesia. Besides romance and mystery, there’s comedy, when a teenage girl in newly independent Zambia joins the nation’s short-lived space programme, a thread drawn on fact.
For 200 pages or so The Old Drift is electric with the sense that Serpell is laying down pieces in a puzzle kept teasingly out of sight. “And that was how Agnes met Lionel Heath,” one paragraph ends, with the latter character not yet introduced. Added buzz comes from interludes told by a punning chorus of mosquitoes, which seems in keeping with other fantastical touches, including someone who grows so much body hair she needs to shave three times a day, and another woman who weeps so much she’s able to offer her bottled tears to an unsuspecting guest.
A growing sense that The Old Drift could go on for ever is tribute to its inventiveness but also a feeling of weightlessness in what begins to resemble a series of vignettes strung together with lusty sex scenes (the main source of interaction between characters, with diminishing returns). The novel’s pleasures are largely local, in its multi-accented brio and pin-sharp scene-making, from the dinner party in which a colonial governor holds forth about Rhodesia’s “post-racial paradise”, to the independence activist who steals a corpse from a mortuary and douses it with goat’s blood to scare diners at a whites-only hotel in 60s Lusaka.
What initially seems an old-fashioned saga proves more interested in genre than in character. By the end, set in a near future involving a new digital device embedded in the user’s skin, we realise how slyly Serpell is testing our assumptions, before a cunning last-minute swerve forces us to question why we don’t consider science fiction a viable mode for the great African novel.
• The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell is published by Hogarth (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
