Q: How to write imaginatively about the developing world? The old Naipaul-style methods of tragicomic ironising seem to be on the way out. Magic realism, where the butterfly clouds float reliably over the parched savannah, is not what it was. On the other hand, allegory-cum-fable — a tradition that extends at least as far back as J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) — is still going strong. Joining it on the rails is what might be called the documentary approach, in which great stretches of past, post- colonial time are populated by characters who, whatever their individual quirks, are above all representative of the historical currents flowing around them.
Measuring Time, the follow-up to Helon Habila’s award-winning Waiting for an Angel, falls squarely into this final category. Dense, compendious and solemn, it is essentially a recapitulation of 30 years or so of Nigerian history seen from the vantage point of a single, fractured family.
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