Chronicles From The Land Of The Happiest People On Earth by Wole Soyinka; Pantheon, USA; 2021; 464pp

By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

It’s good advertisement for myself as I broke the world exclusive news that Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka would publish his third novel, Chronicles From The Land Of The Happiest People On Earth, after a 48-year hiatus in novel-writing.

Soyinka has won world acclaim for his plays, poetry, memoirs and political activism such that most people do no actually remember that he had earlier published two novels – The Interpreters in 1965 and Season of Anomie in 1973.

When the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic put all of the world in prison, Soyinka escaped to his friend’s seaside cottage in Senegal and then to the palatial home of another friend, the former Ghanaian President John Agyekum Kufour, to write Chronicles From The Land Of The Happiest People On Earth.

Unlike his first novel The Interpreters, which starts with the uninterpretable sentence, “Metal on concrete jars my drink lobes”, Chronicles From The Land Of The Happiest People On Earth begins on solid ground with characters such as the religious maverick Papa Davina who mixes Christianity and Islam – Chrislam – in his Ekumenica faith; the suave electrical engineer Duyole Pitan-Payne who is poised to assume an influential position in the United Nations in New York but has to do battle with dark forces about to thwart him; the gifted surgeon Dr. Kighare Menka from whose hospital the hideous entrepreneur steals and sells body parts, etc.

Soyinka is not a novelist of plotting, and in Chronicles From The Land Of The Happiest People On Earth, he lets the characters and the atmosphere to drive the story. This way, the reader can hardly have enough of Prime Minister Sir Goddie, Bishop Teribogo and the steward Godsown whose long monologue in Pidgin English near the end of the novel puts out so much fun.

 Chronicles From The Land Of The Happiest People On Earth clearly shows that the black world’s first winner of the coveted Nobel Prize in Literature is still at the height of his powers.

Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is a renowned poet, journalist and author.

Ayodele Johnson

Ayodelé is a Lagos-based journalist and the Content and Editorial Coordinator at Meiza. All around the megacity, I am steering diverse lifestyle magazine audiences with ingenious hacks and insights that spur fast, informed decisions in their busy lives.