Beasts Of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala

The story of a child soldier.

This is an absolutely incredible, masterful book; it's also a book about a child soldier that doesn't flinch, so be warned that it's pretty horrible.

As best I can tell, the book is very true-to-life; I obviously don't really know what that life is like, but it feels like an unromanticised, undramaticised depiction of child soldiering. There's seventeen different things about this book that are so well-done that you forget how bad they would be if 99% of authors tried them; one is the depiction of the horrors and the violence, another is the vernacular the book is written in (a kind of gerund-filled perpetual present?), which ought to get very annoying but somehow never does.

It took me a while to realise but I think the real genius of the thing is making the protagonist a child soldier, who can therefore describe horrific evil (and evil men) without fully understanding them, or being fully morally culpable for them. I think a lot of the challenge of books like this is somehow making them "palatable", making it possible for the reader to engage with them without just raising internal emotional defences. I guess the usual way for books to do that is either to not confront evil at all, or to have very clear and separate good and evil, with "our" side being good and fighting evil.

And there's obviously also various ways to complicate that, to present good that then becomes evil or vice versa, but I've never seen a book use the approach that this one does. It's hard to describe, because the evil is still very much there and fully described, but somehow making the protagonist an... innocent participant in it?, I don't know how to put it, lets you actually take seriously the horrors of the book, and to "be part of them" in some way without immediately distancing yourself and throwing up defences to them.

I keep on saying it, and yet it's completely hollow to say it: we're just so @£$@)ing lucky to live in our tiny corners of space and time where we can read books and send emails and, for all our struggles and challenges, live in a society that is basically stable and largely safe. I will never stop (mostly) forgetting how lucky I am, then suddenly being shocked out of the forgetting by books like this, and almost drowning in the knowing of it.