Africa Junction : Ginny Baily

Image Credit: Exeter

I used to write reviews of books as soon as I used to read them. But perhaps it's the end of the year and the sluggishness of watching Time move past sets in, and then the reviews-to-be-written becomes another to-do-task in your smartphone or a mind if so I possess one. So, it's a bit late that I am writing this one. And if it's the sort of book that moves out of your consciousness as soon as you keep it down, then you are in trouble, and that's where I am at - in trouble.

Africa Junction by Ginny Baily was one of those books that I picked up almost blindly, because I love reading anything about Africa. I have had this fascination for this continent - so vast, so roiled in conflict, so different, and yet so same in its humaneness. Here's the book blurb from Amazon:

Adele is in a mess. On her own with her young son, struggling to cope with her job as a teacher, and stuck in a disastrous - and dangerous - affair, her life is unravelling. The sharp contrasts and certainties she experienced during the years she spent as a child in far-off Senegal have faded to a distant blur. Then, one night, when she looks in the bathroom mirror, she sees the face of Ellena, a girl she knew in those carefree days, staring back at her from the glass.

As the daughter of a nightwatchman in exile from the brutal conflict in Liberia, Ellena's childhood was far from the idyll of Adele's memories. Her mysterious appearance sets in motion a chain of events that takes Adele back to Africa, in the hope that she can make amends for a heartless act that broke the girls' friendship and damaged Ellena's family irrevocably.

Africa Junction artfully interweaves the stories of dramatically different lives and experiences - a Senegalese boy setting sail for Europe, a Welsh teenager running from Timbuktu, a young girl escaping from a life of slave labour in Mali - but at its heart is Adele and her quest.

From the rain-drenched streets of Britain to the sun-baked reds and yellows of Senegal and the violence of Liberia's civil war, Africa Junction follows one woman's attempt to draw the threads of her life together. Out of the quagmire of violence and hardship there emerges a tentative vision of common humanity and, ultimately, the possibility both of redemption and of love.

The plot sounds promising, except that isn't the plot at all. What emerged is a rather confusing mix of stories that shift from a vague past and an equally vague present. I was really confused because I didn't realize that Adele might be white. The whole 'redemption' story that you think is the crux doesn't really emerge at all. There are a series of 'interconnected' stories (it seems to be rather the fashion  - to write of the strange interconnectedness of our lives, and how seemingly random people affect the deepest part of our lives). They were interesting in their own right, but never seem to come together to form a complete whole. You can guess from this review, that I am struggling to put together a coherent review of an incoherent story. That surprises me as Africa Junction seems to have received such rave reviews. It's just me making this out to be worse than what it probably is - but that's what I seem to do the same for much of life. ;-)

Verdict : Painful and disoriented. 

Rating: 2/5