Kunle’s battle successes improve his ranking, but beyond the conduit through which we observe the war, one wonders what he has been chosen for. Perhaps, the novel’s argument is that witnessing is enough. The novel’s title isn’t just about the failed journey to Biafran nationhood, it is gotten from the metaphysical road Kunle embarks on after he fulfils his prophecy and dies, inhabited by the just-dead in the war, who tell their stories. The novel says, ‘It occurs to him that the only true thing about mankind can be found in the stories it tells, and some of the truest of these stories cannot be told by the living. Only the dead can tell them.’ But questions emerge here, too: in this valley are soldiers from the Vietnam war, which was happening concurrently with the Biafran war, but there are no Nigerian soldiers, or if there are they are not telling their stories. That Calabar man’s brother, when he dies, where does he go? Are there no souls who find themselves on the wrong side of the battle entirely due to happenstance? Are the dead grouped according to tribe? Shared oppression? How does it all work? 

One thinks similarly of the seer. He opens the novel; everything that happens he sees through Ifa’s bowl. Atop a lonely hill, over eight hours in a night, he sits watching all the horrors Kunle embarks on. That we register and then dispense of this device is a testament to how gargantuan the narrative of the war is. The seer’s sections come after every two to four chapters of Kunle’s, and they mostly go on for less than two pages. The sections help with time management: when the seer looks away from the vision, we can get past weeks and months in Kunle’s timeline. But it’s a difficult structure to maintain. This depiction of immobility feels repetitive. In response to Kunle’s travails the seer is ‘ecstatic’, ‘lost’, ‘struck’, ‘stifling a gasp’, ‘shocked’, ‘revelling’, ‘invested’, ‘heavy-hearted’; sometimes an animal intrudes upon him, or we get a brief backstory. The seer creates continuums: what is past for us is both future and present in the novel, his helpless watching re-enforcing Obioma’s own prophetic warning for our troubled times. The seer doubles as writer and reader. When he yells words over the fragile bridge of the bowl, Kunle can hear them; he can hear the soft flapping of birds and the barks of foxes. Given that this technology isn’t utilized any further, is it simply a prophecy for our own outstretched despair, reading? (The novel likes to predict our responses: a dead woman’s story fills Kunle with ‘profound sorrow’; a dead lieutenant makes him think, ‘What a calamity, what a waste of lives.’) Outside the seer’s sections, we are not allowed to forget there are eyes above Kunle. Often, the narration will declare, ‘Someone looking from above Kunle can see…’ Obioma has always been interested in these multiplicities, what he calls ‘mystical realism’, a subject he has explored in his earlier works, the Booker-shortlisted The Fishermen and An Orchestra of Minorities. Man acts and the gods act, and none is extricable from the other. Who can decipher their methods?