Harmattan Season
Moves with a thrilling briskness but sometimes its pace works against its other pleasures. Onyebuchi’s West Africa is compellingly imagined but the reader is so quickly rushed from locale to locale that one might struggle to stay grounded. Some of the novel’s more intriguing characters get somewhat flattened by this haste ... There’s a lot of coincidence here, and sometimes characters seem to make plot-crucial choices without clear or pressing motivations.
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Onyebuchi writes a compelling mystery, adds corrupt politics, a feet-on-the-ground exploration of postcolonialism that isn’t all that 'post,' and a jaundiced discussion of the supposed good old days, all told through the eyes of a Raymond Chandler–style detective ... The novel’s setting is reminiscent of the historical fantasy of P. Djèlí Clark, whose work, along with that of Nnedi Okorafor and Moses Ose Utomi, would be an excellent read-alike for Onyebuchi’s highly recommended hardboiled fantasy mystery.
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Despite its hardboiled trappings and its almost Gothic (but judiciously employed) fantasy elements, Harmattan Season mixes genres in a way not quite like any other novel I’ve read. Onyebuchi’s decision to drop the reader in medias res into a world with specific historical allusions but few guideposts initially had me off-balance, but the narrative threads eventually weave together in a disturbing and provocative political story of the horrors of colonialism, identity, exploitation, resistance, and survival. Now that I think of it, that theme of resistance may be what really links it to Onyebuchi’s earlier work, and it’s never been more thoroughly explored than it is here.
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