Best known to English-language readers for his novels African Psycho, Broken Glass and Black Moses, Alain Mabanckou, a social satirist of breathtaking originality, is a leading name in contemporary Francophone literature. His books, which draw on his Congolese heritage, tend to be exuberantly imagined, a tad absurd, very funny and focused on off-kilter and off-centre perspectives. In his piquant and spunky new offering, Mabanckou tells the story of Liwa Ekimakingaï, who returns from the dead in search of closure. Told in the second person and engagingly translated by Helen Stevenson, the novel opens in a cemetery in the port city of Pointe-Noire, where the 24-year-old has risen from his grave in a seismic flurry, attired in an orange crepe jacket, a fluorescent-green shirt, purple flares and shiny red shoes. (If you are new to Mabanckou, you might be interested to know that he employs a personal stylist, and that his own sartorial preference tends toward the bold and bright.) Liwa is a classic Mabanckou character: orphaned, irresistibly charming but cruelly bereft of luck.
Once risen, Liwa falls asleep and begins “the longest dream of his death”, in which images from his four-day funeral mingle with memories of growing up: being raised by his maternal grandmother in the Trois-Cents neighbourhood; getting into mischief with his friends; turning for guidance to the Pentecostal church, officiated by a man later executed for ritual murder; and landing a job as a commis chef in the kitchen of the French-owned Victory Palace Hotel.
Mabanckou recounts the funeral with his trademark cheeky humour. Women arrive in their hundreds to sing, dance and weep; Liwa watches himself succumb to their charms and “lose the habitual serenity of a corpse. It’s hard not to get up off your death bed and put your arms around the waist of the prettiest one and dance”. On waking up, undead Liwa meets Prosper Milandou, a fellow resident of the cemetery. Once a successful HR manager in France, Prosper returned home to serve in a key role in the National Electricity Company. His life came to a tragic end when he was murdered by the jealous husband of an underling. He later found out that his death had been orchestrated by a minister who had wanted to free up his post.
Other stories follow, adding to the novel’s grim view of the nation. Liwa meets a woman who was executed for avenging children who had been preyed on by powerful men, several of whom occupied high positions in the government. He learns of a young boy and girl whose uncle, acting on the counsel of a sorcerer, poisoned them to secure his political rise.
A key figure in the book, periodically invoked but not quite a character, is the head of state, Papa Mokonzi Ayé. A loose caricature of the self-serving president of the Republic of the Congo, Denis Sassou Nguesso, he came to power through a military coup funded by the country’s rich and then amended the constitution so that no elections could take place during his lifetime. Mabanckou skilfully weaves him in with the events that led to Liwa’s death. It’s a twisty and convoluted story in which the supernatural and the whims of the powerful entwine.
Dealing With the Dead confronts some out-and-out ghoulish realities, to be sure, but like all Mabanckou novels, it is possessed of an exhilarating hunger; it flits and forages between genres and registers, never lingering in any one place for long. Its pleasures, as a result, are manifold: it can be read as a whodunnit, a reimagined picaresque, a tragic bildungsroman, an occult homecoming story, a fable on the corrupting influence of power and a biting satire on Congolese history. It is at once serious and comic, spooky and cheerful, grave and bitter, erudite, gossipy, moralising and excoriating.
As always, Mabanckou’s prose is delectably intertextual; the young Liwa, we are told, relished The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, identifying with the orphan. “You believed that the fictional town of St Petersburg – where the little American Tom Sawyer lived supposedly, somewhere on the River Mississippi in the state of Missouri – was a real place, the sister town to Pointe-Noire. You imagined the river Mississippi as a cousin to the Atlantic Ocean at Pointe-Noire.” Other references include Robin Hood, Zarathustra, Dracula and Quasimodo, not to mention classics by Dickens, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Achebe, Camara Laye, Dumas, Pessoa, Dostoevsky and Buzzati. Reading Mabanckou, one sees the novel as a meeting place of worlds; the specious borders that separate literatures – Francophone from French, African from western – are made delightfully porous.
Mabanckou’s fiction has always drawn heavily on his own life. His approach to putting himself in a novel, he told the late Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina, was to also “put a lot of magical, surreal ideas in it”. As I read this book, I wondered about the parts of his life reflected in the story. Could Mabanckou, unwelcome in the Republic of the Congo on account of his outspoken criticism of the president, be writing here about his own exile; the untimely death of his hero an allegory of his involuntary separation from the cherished landscape of his early years? The ache and political ire make this novel, for me, a work of deeply personal grief and outrage.
• Dealing with the Dead by Alain Mabanckou, translated by Helen Stevenson, is published by Serpent’s Tail (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
