How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

How Beautiful We Were was
published in 2021

Imbolo Mbue was born in Limbe, Cameroon in 1983, and now lives in New York. After reading Toni Morrisons Song of Solomon she decided to write a novel of her own. Her debut was Behold the Dreamers, a multi-award winning and much lauded novel about two families (one of which were Cameroonian immigrants) in New York during the 2008 financial crisis. It has since translated in multiple languages and been optioned for a film with George Clooney set to direct.

Mbue actually started How Beautiful We Were before Behold the Dreamers and came back to it later. It is set in a fictional African village in an unnamed African country - although the details of the country are fictionalised, I have assumed it to be Mbue's native Cameroon for the purposes of my Reading Round the World Challenge.

The novel is an epic spanning many decades, following the villagers of Kosawa and their various disputes with both the petrol chemical company Pexton and their government.

Disputes is putting things lightly. Petrochemical companies are not know for their philanthropic work, and the area around Kosawa has been decimated by oil drilling and piping, the waterways poisoned, the soil tainted with spills, the children dying from strange disease which Pexton deny are anything to do with them.

The villagers of Kosawa are at first helpless, their government has granted Pexton the rights to drill, and enforces these rights with automatic rifles. Yet over time they start to fight back. 

Imbolo Mbue at the release of Behold the
Dreamers

This is a very hard novel to review. In some ways it was truly excellent. There are many villagers, and we hear things from a lot of their view points during the novel. The main protagonist, Thula, and many of her cronies grow from children to adults over the span of the novel, and the point of view chronicles this change with great skill, as their hopes and dreams morph, yet their kernel of personality remains the same. 
The villagers are all sketched with affection, but also a realisation of the moral ambiguity that inflicts us all. Though the problems that affect the villagers are all much the same, their responses are different, their priorities are different. In short, even the villagers we only get to know tangentially are fully fleshed individuals.

Which brings us to the parts of the novel which didn't work for me. Mbue does not extend the same

There is no agreed upon size for the central
star on the Cameroonian flag

approach when it comes to Pexton. The company is simply an amoral, souless, money-grabbing cooperation. Now I'm sure this is largely true about most petrochemical companies - but surely the executives must have someway of justifying the atrocities to themselves? The best bad guys are ones that we can kind of see where they are coming from, even if they use warped logic, but here we get none of that, Pexton is a faceless corporation who simply don't care what happens to Kosawa. I get that this may have been deliberate, to show the disparity between the very personable Davids and the transglobal goliath - but because the one side was shown with such nuance, it felt lacking from th other side of the arguement.

My second gripe is that towards the end the various threads, which up to this point had been balanced and woven together with exceptional skill, because a bit jumbled, and everything kind of petered out. One of the most interesting aspects - I won't say too much for fear of spoilers but it entwined Cameroonian folklore with Christian imagery - was touched upon a couple of times then seemed to be forgot, never coming to anything at all. To misquote T. S. Eliot it ends not so much with a bang as a shrug. Again I can see what Mbue was trying to do, (spoilers ahead, avert your eyes now if you haven't read it yet) the little guys were never going to win - the world still needs oil and it will continue to get it, ignoring the inconvenient truths. But we really needed some big epiphany, some pivotal moment to round things off, as it is we just get to the end and everyone wanders off for their tea.

Having said all these drawbacks, it is still a very good book.

★★★★☆