#BookReview ‘Making Wolf’ by Tade Thompson

About the book….

Weston Kogi, a police officer in a supermarket in London, returns to his home in West Africa for his aunt’s funeral. After catching up with his family, his ex-girlfriend Nana, and an old schoolmate over good food and plenty of beer, it seems like a bit of harmless hyperbole to tell people he works as a homicide detective. But when he his kidnapped by separate rebel factions to investigate the murder of a local hero, Papa Busi, Weston soon finds out that solving the crime may tip the country into civil war. A noir novel set in the blazing sunlight of the tropics, Making Wolf is an outrageous, frightening, violent, and sometimes surreal homecoming experience of a lifetime.

‘Making Wolf’ is published in paperback by Constable on May 7th, I am so grateful to the publishers for gifting me with a review copy of this thrilling noir story.

Weston last saw Alcacia as a child, fleeing a-fictional-Nigerian state deeply entrenched in corruption, deceipt and death.

Death brings him back once more, to do his familial duty to the aunt who set him free, who saved for him and his sister to get to London before they could become a part of a system that turns men into killers and women into bargaining chips.

Grumbling from the start that it should have been his sister taking this journey, he does something small,seemingly  insignificant and what many of us have been guilty of-he tells a white lie to Church, his old school bully, who shows an inordinate interest in this familiar, yet not, man.

And from such inconsequential starts, promoting himself from store detective to real one, Weston finds himself out of his depth, knee deep in blood and conflict ,waving a private detective card to anyone who will listen. 9 times out of 10 this lands him in mre trouble than it frees him from, but his journey from start to finish is pitch black and broiling over with trouble and cultural conflict.

At the center of his investigation into the death of Papa Busi, the state mandated intermediary between 2 warring factions of civil unrest -the Liberation Front of Alcacia (LFA) and the People’s Christian Army (PCA)-Weston’s neutrality and London centric sensibilities being seen as a neutral ground. Both sides blame each other, but are prepared to let Weston, with his ‘experience’ investigate, seemingly beyond the touch of both.

Immediately picking up with the girlfriend he left behind, Nana, Weston has no real comprehension of the situation he has landed himself in-this was supposed to be, ostensibly, a couple of days away from home, maximum.

It turns into a hellish nightmare as the casual, everyday violence explodes into some truly shocking scenes of torture, brutality and corruption. Weston is in way over his head and the reader knows this before he does. You sense the crescendo of the plot coming, the crashing of his idylls and sense of self importance like an oncoming hurricane.

There is no attempt at exploitation of culture here, Weston (so cleverly named, reflecting hopes which look West) has grown up in London, but his opportunities have begun, and stalled with his lack of ambition and general apathy.

Within a couple of days of arriving in Alcacia, he has done and seen more than his years in London could ever have prepared him for. His Western-ness is the key to his exploitation, contrasted so neatly with his very identity in Africa which has always been fractured, as has his sister’s. Both are known as ‘Holloway Babies’, children whose cultural and literal birth were damning of the woman who bore them, and caused irreperable damage to their mother.

There is a bitter sweet taste to the fact that this man who straddles two continents is investigating a the death of a man who straddles two armies, and as a reader, you get the growing sensation that this just might cost Weston his sanity at least, his life at worst.

The violence is unflinching, the representation of women cruelly accurate yet not exploitative-I hope that comes across correctly phrased without causing offence, the women in the book are not conduits or lazy representations in any way or shape, they do not fulfil a role of plot devices, they are living, breathing creatures who drive the story forward in a way I found believable and shocking.

The underlying current of the story is , what we call in Wales, ‘belonging‘. When you see people you know, you tend to say ‘Oh I know you, you belong to such-and-such’ rather than you are the cousin of whoever. The familial identity is almost tribal in a way , predicated on dubious connections of genetics and marriage, and very hard to shake off -so and so’s so and so eradicated by that one word, belonging.

As Weston discovers, you cannot simply stay neutral, lines must be drawn, sides taken and decisions made-the consequences of your actions can be swift and deadly.He , like the other Alcacians the reader comes into contact with, are all making wolf. Very few of the characters are what they appear to be and on top of this there is an narrator whose entire identity is up for grabs. The narrative he creates for himself becomes his reality as his homecoming develops into making a necessary choice to avoid further conflict.

For a relatively small book-259 pages-there is so much story packed into it yet the noir detective story traditions are richly mined and re-intepreted into what I hope will be the first in a series.

About the author…

Tade Thompson is the author of ‘The Wormwood Trilogy,‘ winner of the 2019 Arthur C. Clarke (‘Rosewater’) and Nommo Awards, nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award (‘Rosewater Redemption’) and British Science Fiction Association Award (‘Rosewater Insurrection’). He is also the author of the ‘The Murders Of Molly Southbourne’ Books (Shirley Jackson Award finalist, winner of Nommo Award and Prix Julia-Verlanger, nominated for the British Science Fiction Association award, among others) and ‘Making Wolf’ (winner of the Golden Tentacle Award). Several of his works have been optioned for screen adaptation, including the short story ‘The Apologists’. Born in London to Yoruba parents, he is a medical doctor who lives and works on the south coast of England where he battles an addiction to books.

Twitter @tadethompson @LittleBrownUK