Review: Harmattan Season

More than being a crossover of detective mystery, postcolonial work, and urban fantasy, Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi is a journey through a dark tunnel of unyielding stone and depths that are no longer safe to plumb. And yet, like Octavia Butler before him, Onyebuchi leaves room for change and for hope, a lighted space beyond that some may reach.

Harmattan Season follows Boubacar who works as a chercher (a private detective). “Bouba” has all the makings of the hard-boiled protagonist—a man with no family, few friends, and a lot of bad luck. Unsurprisingly, as a narrator Bouba is also not particularly interested in holding your hand while you follow his story. He will give you the basics, with the occasional glimpse into his softer side: he becomes the rough uncle to a streetwise kid. Bouba empathizes with members of his community, even if he doesn’t fit into it.

Bouba’s story begins when a young woman dying from a stomach wound pounds on his door late at night. While he is unable to learn anything from her that night, this sets off Bouba’s investigation. His work as a chercher usually involves finding missing people or things at the behest of a client, but in this case, there is no client. And yet Bouba feels compelled to find out what brought that dying woman to his door. This leads him ever deeper into his city, its recent history, and the lives of both the dugulenw, the natives of the city, and the French colonialists who have recently moved in.

While the plot has the makings of a fast-paced investigation, Harmattan Season is as much a character study of Bouba and his home as it is a murder mystery crime novel. Bouba is deux-fois, born of both the colonizers and the dugulenw and therefore unable to be part of either. He mourns the loss of community in the changing culture brought in by the French and also the loss that he feels himself because he cannot fit easily into either group. Over the course of the book, he enlightens the reader to both his own torn history and eventually to the recent history of the city itself. As Bouba follows leads around the city, we are introduced to different factions from scheming dugulenw street kids to underground elements to members of activist political groups. Through it all, Onyebuchi paints a picture of the city as a whole, how it got where it is now and how it might move forward.

As amazing as this tour of the city is, both Bouba and Onyebuchi shy away from sharing too much. Part of this aligns Bouba’s personality—there are things that he doesn’t know; there are also things that he isn’t ready to say. At the same time, this approach towards storytelling can lead to confusion in the reader, especially in dialogue exchange where speakers get muddied. There are many new words to describe people and different parts of the city, but Onyebuchi does manage to give the reader enough breadcrumbs to follow the implications.

At its root, I also think that there are also things that the reader simply isn’t meant to understand. Even as we are witness to Floaters, who they are and how or why they come to be is part of a fuzzy myth. Bouba may know more than he is saying, but we aren’t invited into the circle of understanding. At the same time, some of this is confusing. We learn that Bouba is a Floater in the first couple pages of the book, and yet he also doesn’t seem to understand much of its meaning or its causes, even as he accepts it as reality.

Overall, being dropped into this world mostly works, guiding the reader through a circle of understanding that is foggy but with enough enticement that I found myself considering various parts of the novel days after I’d finished reading—wondering about change and hope and community. For this reason, Onyebuchi remains on my must read list as Harmattan Season offers not only delightful character work but gives the reader the gift of new ways to think about our history, our present, and what we might make of our future.

Recommended Reads 

• Dead Cat Tail Assassins by P. Djèlí Clark
• The Unbroken by C.L. Clark
• Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie