Zimbabwe’s answer to ‘Animal Farm’

Mugabe is Old Horse, his wife Grace a young, ambitious donkey. Does this allegory pass the Orwell test?

416pp, Chatto & Windus, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £18.99, ebook £13.60

The pitch for NoViolet Bulawayo’s second novel is, roughly: Zimbabwe, but with talking animals. Glory opens with the geriatric Father of the Nation – aka the Old Horse – addressing an Independence Day rally in the capital of the imaginary African nation of Jidada. His Excellency is by this stage a hopeless dotard. His young and ambitious wife (a donkey, since you ask) is plotting to take over after his death. Her principal foe is the Father of the Nation’s longtime ally and presumed successor Vice-President Tuvy. Tuvy gets the sack, flees into exile – then returns to be installed as president after a military coup. That much is history. For Old Horse read Robert Mugabe, for Dr Sweet Mother read Grace Mugabe, and for Tuvy read Emmerson Mnangagwa.

The story takes us through the 2018 election and the political violence that surrounded it (spoiler alert, the new boss turns out to be just as much of a monster as the old boss). It then goes on to dream. The main subplot follows the story of a young goat called Destiny, who returns from exile to reunite with her mother in a small town that becomes the crucible of a streetlevel resistance movement. Is it possible, Bulawayo seems to ask, to break a historical cycle, described in one of her many felicitous phrases: “We trip on our own hopes, we teeter, hurtle into a red past we now know has been here all along, lurking like a crocodile.”

The obvious touchstone for Glory’s approach is Orwell’s Animal Farm, and that – at least to my mind – is where it falls down. Orwell’s animal allegory has the narrow scope and the spareness of a fable. Glory sprawls over 400-odd pages, and its allegorical purpose is hard to make out. It’s more like a straightforward novel in which we are, from time to time, reminded – with no great practical effect on the story’s development – that the characters are animals.

You could, I suppose, read it as a species of magical realism rather than allegory – but the worldbuilding feels cursory or muddled in a way that tends to vitiate the novel’s force rather than enhance it. Literal-minded readers will find themselves distracted by trying to imagine how a hoofed animal (or in one instance, a hen) manages to operate an assault rifle or type on a smartphone, or wondering how the novel’s distinction (in racial politics) between “black animals” and “white animals” is supposed to work, and (when, for instance, the Sisters of the Disappeared hold a naked protest) what it means in this world for animals to be unclothed.

Plus, apart from the fact that the thuggish security forces are all dogs and the president and his successor are both horses, there doesn’t seem to be a strong reason why, among the minor characters, this one will be a peacock and that one a pig. Tribal connections are important in Jidada – there are, as in Zimbabwe, rivalries between Shona and Ndebele clans – but whether and how they map onto species distinctions is left vague. Everyone seems to eat human food and drink human drink, and predation – at least of the traditional animal kind – is essentially absent. That’s not to say there aren’t glories in Glory. One of the novel’s strengths is its fluid and sassy narrative voice – sometimes sort of omniscient; at other times a “we” that stands for the populace of Zimbabwe/Jidada – which riddles the prose with oral tags and formulae. The word “tholukuthi” (which means something like “if you please” or “gosh”) appears almost every other sentence; we’re often told what “those who know about things say”; and Jidada is frequently “Jidada with a –da and another –da”.

It’s a novel with heart and energy – in several passages, you can see why her 2013 debut We Need New Names won several big prizes, and a Booker shortlisting. Glory, too, has affecting passages – not least a horrific account of the (real life) Gukurahundi massacres in the early days of Mugabe’s rule. But it’s baggily put together. Magical elements jostle uneasily with quasi-realist passages. And as the novel reaches its climax, Bulawayo relies, with diminishing returns, on great runs of repetition for rhetorical effect. And I can’t, as I say, really figure out why she felt the need to turn Mugabe into a horse in the first place.

The literal-minded will wonder how a hoofed animal or hen fires an assault rifle

‘We trip on our own hopes’: novelist NoViolet Bulawayo