Title: The Shadow King Author: Maaza Mengiste
Published: September 24, 2019
Genre(s): Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
Page Count: 448
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:With the threat of Mussolini’s army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid in Kidane and his wife Aster’s household. Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie’s army, rushes to mobilize his strongest men before the Italians invade. His initial kindness to Hirut shifts into a flinty cruelty when she resists his advances, and Hirut finds herself tumbling into a new world of thefts and violations, of betrayals and overwhelming rage. Meanwhile, Mussolini’s technologically advanced army prepares for an easy victory. Hundreds of thousands of Italians—Jewish photographer Ettore among them—march on Ethiopia seeking adventure.
As the war begins in earnest, Hirut, Aster, and the other women long to do more than care for the wounded and bury the dead. When Emperor Haile Selassie goes into exile and Ethiopia quickly loses hope, it is Hirut who offers a plan to maintain morale. She helps disguise a gentle peasant as the emperor and soon becomes his guard, inspiring other women to take up arms against the Italians. But how could she have predicted her own personal war as a prisoner of one of Italy’s most vicious officers, who will force her to pose before Ettore’s camera?
Sometimes, a book can fail under its own weight. Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King is a bloated, overwritten novel that buries every good idea the author had under a suffocating layer of flowery metaphor and imagery. The cast of characters is too large, the omniscient narrator distances readers from the action, and the conceit of a Greek Chorus that “sings” (editorializes) about the ongoing plot adds nothing to the story except unnecessary pages. Oh, and the author eschews the use of quotation marks to delineate spoken dialogue, a technical choice I’ve never understood and will never get behind.
Inspired by true stories of female soldiers during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, The Shadow King is (theoretically) the story of Hirut, a young Ethiopian slave who eventually fights against fascist Italy. The story is very much hers, and the discernible emotional arc of the book belongs to Hirut alone. However, Hirut herself is buried amidst all the other noise of the story. Mengiste gives every single “main” character an extended backstory and a touch of humanity. Which is lovely, but I can’t say that extended forays into the minds of Hirut’s numerous rapists and torturers were useful, nor did I feel at all sympathetic to the Jewish Italian photographer who documented Hirut’s experiences under the oft-repeated excuse of “just following orders.” Still more unnecessary: interludes where Emperor Haile Selassie listens to the Verdi opera Aida and has imaginary (?) conversations with the characters.
It seems to me that Mengiste attempted too much with this book. While I’m all for sprawling historical fiction that “explores both sides” of a particular historical event, I also appreciate the power of a sharp, well-focused story that says what it needs to say without unnecessary frills. I would have enjoyed The Shadow King more if the author had been willing to pare down the scope of the narrative to just Hirut and those closest to her. But if that wasn’t an option, I absolutely feel that Mengiste’s editor needed to Do The Thing and order her client to “kill your darlings.” (A somewhat cringey phrase, but sometimes appropriate.)
Mengiste’s prose is…honestly not very good. The narration is lyrical to the point of being florid, and no opportunity to insert an awkward “light vs. darkness” metaphor is wasted. I believe that the power to write beautiful imagery comes from knowing when and where to use it—not every paragraph needs to be inflated into a near incomprehensible mess of similes and adjectives. The result of the unrelenting purple prose here is that the story becomes almost impossible to follow at times. Because of the excess of image-heavy language, even simple actions become a matter of deciphering, which was both exhausting to read and also served only to push me away from the immediacy of the plot.
Take, for instance, these two passages from a single scene depicting a skirmish between Ethiopian resisters and Italian troops. In the first, the Italian commander sees a group of women coming to the battlefield to tend to the dead and wounded:
This is impossibility itself, he thinks as he looks down on the smoky field and spies a bloom of white dresses, skirts rippling in the wind. They are tumbling down the hill as if gravity were of no consequence, as if sharp stones and tender feet did not matter, as if a human figure could be propelled at improbable angles and still maintain such effortless grace. He sees them but does not believe. He hears them but cannot grasp. Where he is in this place amongst steel and rubber and bullets will not allow for distortions and fissures. They are not women, he decides, but illusions. They are a mirage, a glimmer on this mountaintop overlooking the churning valley. What is real is the distant warble of planes that are coming. What is probable is the assault that will rain down from his sleek flying machines.
Then, a few pages later, when the women observe the promised planes, which shoot at them and drop mustard gas:
Blackbirds. The rip and tear of childbirth, of stillbirth, of first nights, of a body come undone and splitting at the seams. The women hold their stomachs, bend to the ground, gaze up in wonder. Blackbirds, they think. Dust rising from the carnage below. Hirut looks past the thick air but it is only a plane. Only two. Three. So low. Then four. Five. Then they are birds in formation, flying so close to Aster’s head she can see the grinning face inside, mouth open and gleeful.
Right. So imagine that every single paragraph reads like that. Imagine that there are no quotation marks. Imagine that there’s a “Greek Chorus” that shows up every now and then to chant in first person plural about whatever it is that’s happening in Hirut’s journey. Imagine extended dialogues between the Emperor of Ethiopia and fictional characters.
It’s too much.
I appreciate what Mengiste was trying to do here. I truly do. But her writing is, frankly, gratuitously bloated and pretentious. The rawness of Hirut’s story is wrapped in so many layers of metaphor that it ceases to have impact. Pretty writing, for the sake of pretty writing alone, is far worse than utilitarian, barebones prose. The Shadow King is, in my opinion, a book that shows that the author has true talents that are still in need of a little more refining.
Until then, I leave you with this passage:
This: a human form staring down from the hilltop, a slender figure sheltered by trees and fog. There is a hand, not impossible to discern from such a distance, stretching forward as if to cup the rays of an early sun. It is a gesture both imperial and merciful, arrogant and generous: to hold the heaven-sent beams of light, to suspend them before they tumble down and add new punishment on an anguished man’s bleeding back.
(What’s happening here, you ask? Somebody is shading a man from the hot sun. That’s it.)
