Wúràolá is a doctor from a wealthy Lagosian family, cruising through the early stages of her medical career. Yet her family are more fixated on her fast-approaching 30th birthday and her marriage prospects to Kúnlé, a superficially charming family friend who in reality has a vicious, violent temper.
For Eniolá, meanwhile, a boy who lives in Wúràolá’s neighbourhood, life is on the skids. Barely 16, he carries the weight of providing for his family on his shoulders. Ever since his father lost his government teaching post, school has been a struggle and money tight. Eniolá’s best hope of redemption seems to be an apprenticeship in his aunt’s tailoring business – or perhaps the local Mr Big, a man known as “Honourable”, who needs big, strong lads to help him contest the election for the governorship of the province.
The lives of Wúràolá and Eniolá tessellate convincingly in contemporary Nigeria in Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s Booker-longlisted second novel, A Spell of Good Things. As in her debut, Stay With Me, Adébáyò, who grew up in Lagos but now lives in Norwich, refracts the issues of her homeland – its violence, its inequality, and the arbitrariness of its waste and corruption – through personal relationships, rendered with deceptive delicacy. She writes novels, not theses, and Stay With Me is a thumpingly good one.
For much of the book, Wúràolá and Eniolá’s stories run parallel. At first, I was more taken with Wúràolá’s world. Comfortable and cosmopolitan, but brittle with aspiration and ambition, it will be familiar to readers of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or, in a different context, the immigrant experiences depicted in Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction.
Eniolá’s story is initially harder to parse, its characters less fully rendered. His father, deflated with depression, is a blank, while his mother and sister teeter towards cliché. His mother is wrung out and hassled, consumed with how she’ll scratch together enough garri (roasted cassava) for the evening meal; his sister is an archetypal sparkier younger sibling, throwing his plodding efforts at bettering himself into the shade. But his story jump-starts when he naïvely pledges himself to the marvellously malevolent “Honourable”.
