As with her lauded debut Stay With Me, in Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s second novel domestic strife and the political tensions of modern Nigeria bristle against each other. Early in A Spell of Good Things, we encounter the protagonist Eniolá’s father staring at an almost empty tin of garri. Racked with shame at the poverty his family now find themselves in, Baba Eniolá scratches at the grains in the pot. How might such a meagre portion stretch to feed four mouths? A neighbour’s noisy radio intrudes on his spiralling despair with news of voter registration schemes. Baba Eniolá cannot help but glance at the vicious scar, running from his wrist to his elbow, acquired in the run-up to previous elections when his links to one of the candidates proved almost fatal.
Violence in multiple guises – political, domestic, psychic – simmers beneath the surface of the often restrained prose. In Eniolá, it manifests as a repressed rage. We first meet him as an obedient, able 16-year-old whose academic aspirations are dashed when an ill-advised government initiative promoting “progress” sees the sacking of all state history teachers, leaving his father out of work and his mother searching dunghills for used bottles to resell. Adébáyò empathically tracks Eniolá’s bleak downward trajectory as he falls in with “local hoodlums”, showing how the sustained indignities of disfranchisement and tarnished masculine pride lead him to make destructive decisions.
