Wife of the Gods by Kwei Quartey
Last month Kinna hosted the 2nd Annual Ghanaian Literature Week, a “celebration of Ghanaian Literature and a discussion of book/reading related issues in Ghana.” Yours truly had every intention of participating and I selected Kwei Quartey’s Wife of the Gods to read and review. But impish fate would not allow and November ended up being the busiest month I’ve ever had at work. Needless to say, I didn’t get the chance to review the book until the month was very much over.
Below you’ll find said review. Enjoy.
Wife of the Gods is the first in a series of mystery novels set in Ghana. A young aids worker is murdered in a small town and our protagonist, Detective Darko Dawson, is called in from the big city (Accra) to investigate. A textbook execution of the mystery genre ensues.
Det. Dawson makes for an interesting protagonist. One has to be clever to make it to Detective in the CID, but Det. Dawson is also incredibly stubborn and that dogged refusal to abandon the impossible proves useful. Anger issues, a fondness for marijuana and an ill son cloud his motives and actions enough to keep him from dissolving into the stock sleuth. It also doesn’t hurt that Det. Dawson has a personal and tragic history in Ketanu, the location of the murder.
The writing is good too. The story moves at a rapid clip and yet the prose can be deliciously languid at times. Here the author describes a forest.
“The trees, covered from apex to root with dry, sloughing scales, beckoned him with their crackling, stunted branches.
…or describing cocoa pods
“Each was perfectly almond shaped with sculptured ridges that ended in a point like an erect nipple.”
Mystery fans will be well pleased by the author’s adherence to the guidelines of the genre. A discerning eye can easily (perhaps too easily) see the mechanics of mystery at play, suspects (obvious now and not so obvious later), alibis (solid and shaky in turns) and so on. The unraveling of events, the procedures, the characters, they’re all familiar and if that makes them less likely to surprise, it also makes them less likely to offend.
What separates Wife of the Gods from ten thousand or mysteries is the setting. There aren’t many mysteries set in Ghana (or any African nations for that matter, No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency being the most popular of these). The author makes full use of the inhabitants, environs and neurosis of this setting.
Witchcraft, ancient customs such as giving local priests young women to fulfill all their needs (the wives of the gods/trokosi), the fetishization of the dead/funeral customs; the author explores all these capably and weaves them into the story without obvious judgment. Combined with the more literal characteristics of the setting, these issues provide a fresh backdrop to a familiar story.
It’s particularly interesting when African authors living in the west write about Africa. A special set of fears and biases plagues this group. At every step in the writing, we are beset by blind spots and propelled by advantages. We are always weighing the scales to see how much of Africa we can bear for the West, how heavy our obligation is to show the truth, if we can really see it clearly from over here. Strangely enough, one of the great charms of this novel is the absence of such a debate. There are echoes, a missing detail here, an extra detail there, but for the most part, its presentation of Ghana is self-assured.
I didn’t love Wife of the Gods, but I liked it well enough and I think you will too.
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I reviewed a book called Diamond Dove today and I think I had a similar response. It was a fairly standard murder mystery book, but it was the setting (outback Australian Aboriginal community) that added an element of uniqueness. I didn’t love it, but I would still recommend it for that
Oh that does sound similar. Definitely shows how setting can make an old story new. Did Diamond Dove put the local neurosis or issues to good use?
“story moves at a rapid clip and yet the prose can be deliciously languid”
That alone makes it an intriguing read. And I’m still missing seeing my No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency.
Might be a good time to confess that I haven’t read any of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels. Something i should remedy in the near future heh. How goes revisions?
I read this book sometime ago and really enjoyed it. His writing was very easy to read, and the Ghana setting, as you say, quite self assured.
Glad you felt the same, Myne. It really is well executed. How goes things with you?
So happy to see this review and to see that you enjoyed it more than the last book I nagged you to read for a project *cough sorry bout that*. This does sound really interesting and I shall certainly read it!
Heh…thank you for “encouraging” me to do the projects. It’s great fun. And yes, I do think you’ll like this one a lot.
Thank you for participating in Ghana Lit Week. I’ve heard quite a bit of good about this series by Kwei Quartey. I want to read them. A Ghanaian detective sounds intriguing enough. I think the CID folks in Ghana are a strange lot!