Wow, I was not expecting this to be so good. My prior experiences with Will Ferguson have been through his light, ‘humourous’ travelogues (ie: Beauty Tips From Moosejaw), which I remember being just ok, and not really that funny (I always felt like he was aping Bill Bryson and falling short). This novel is a big departure from those earlier travelogues, in both subject and tone: it is a tight, character-driven thriller about the fall-out from a Nigerian email scam, nicknamed ‘419’ scams after the fraud section in Nigeria’s penal code. There are 4 main characters whose stories we are introduced to, in more or less detail: Laura, a Calgary-based editor; Nnandi, a boy growing up in the oil-rich Niger river delta; Amina, a pregnant woman from northern Nigeria; and Winston, an email scammer living in Nigeria’s commercial heart of Lagos. Laura’s story sets off the action- the car crash that killed her father is ruled a suicide, likely motivated by the loss of his savings (and the family home) to a 419 scammer (possibly Winston). From this inauspicious start, Ferguson moves into the other characters’ stories which eventually converge in the sticky heat of Lagos.
Aside from Ferguson’s precise and almost poetic language, the main highlight for me was the detail and attention paid to people and places that don’t often feature in big award-winning novels. Ferguson lives in my hometown, Calgary, and the city details he inserted were spot-on without being distracting- they give a real sense of place. It also feels like he has done his homework on Nigeria- the histories of the different regions and the people that live in those places are given space and time rather than being nameless victims or villains.
I’ve seen some criticism that novel was good but not ‘Giller Prize (Canada’s biggest literary award) good’, and this is the question I’m rolling around in my mind now. My initial thoughts are that a) giving the award to a thriller feels like giving the Best Picture Oscar to Black Panther- it’s the genre that is giving people second thoughts, not the quality of the work; and b) a lot of the complainers may be Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver-based (Canada’s biggest population centres), so there is less in this novel that speaks to them (as a Calgarian, I disagreed, and I also really appreciated the juxtaposing of two very different oil economy cities). I’m going to look out for some other Giller Prize winners so that I have more reference points to consider the merit to these criticisms.