Fiction: Mamo and LaMamo are twin brothers living in the small Nigerian village of Keti. The two boys are perfect complements. LaMamo is bold, reckless, extroverted, physically robust. He is the talker. Mamo, born with sickle-cell anaemia, is physically weak and introverted, intelligent, rational and a good listener.
Despite their differences, the brothers share the same dream - to escape from Keti and their vain and domineering father. (Their mother died giving birth to them.) They also dream of achieving immortality through fame as soldiers. For Mamo, the issue of immortality is all the more pressing, as he believes he will die of his disease before he is out of his teens. But when LaMamo leaves Keti for the battlefields of Africa, Mamo is too ill to follow.
Measuring Time is the second novel by Nigerian writer Helon Habila. Habila's first, Waiting for the Angel, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book, Africa Region. Measuring Time is about a lot of things: colonialism and post-colonialism, tradition, change, the saving power of intellectual endeavour, the folly and the nobility of the armed struggle, family. Underlying all these themes is the story of how ordinary people survive, or don't survive, the life they are born into and whatever it demands of them.
When LaMamo leaves Keti at the age of 16 to become a volunteer - fighting in Chad and Mali and Liberia - he largely vanishes from the narrative, reappearing only in the form of periodic letters from whatever front. The novel becomes Mamo's, following him as he stumbles along, always seeking, always waiting. First he waits for death, then for fame and adventure, then for his life to begin - some definitive and recognisable moment of crystallisation.
Through Mamo's years as a student and later a teacher at the village school, then as the palace secretary to the local Mai, the village's traditional ruler, the dream that sustains him is that of writing the history of his people, not the grand narrative but a multiplicity of narratives - the housewives and peasants, missionaries and government officials - that make up a people and a nation. Like the history Mamo writes, Measuring Time recounts a slice of Nigeria's history by focusing on the way individual lives intersect with circumstance.
AT TIMES THE project feels a bit too much like a device for entering into disparate lives, and the perfect balance set up at the novel's outset between the two brothers is upset by LaMamo's virtual disappearance. (The letters he writes are so interesting, one wonders why Habila denied LaMamo a narrative of his own.)
But Habila regards these individuals, with their dashed hopes and their misguided schemes for survival, with such humanity (even the missionaries, the suicidal colonial, the dreadful father are treated with compassion) that one hardly minds. People are just people, Mamo says, when his brother begins to deride the sycophantic widows who hang around their father. They too are just trying to survive with some pleasure and some dignity an often difficult and undignified existence.
Many of the characters don't survive, psychologically or physically or both. Mamo's cousin, in a wheelchair and drunk every day before noon; his father, destroyed by his own vanity; his uncle, worn down by his good intentions and the cynical corruption of those who would thwart them; his brother, a victim of his own grand vision of freeing Africa; his lover Zara, mute and unreachable. And yet, as a doctor says to Mamo, the mind may be a fragile, sensitive thing, " . . . but it also has incredible regenerative abilities. Look at all the hurt we go through every day and still manage to maintain our sanity. All we need is a little peg and we will hang our hopes and dreams on it".
In spite of all the kinds of losses it depicts, Measuring Time is a novel of regeneration. At one point, late in the book, as Mamo feels his strength returning to him in the wake of all his family's tragedies, he realises that " . . . the worst was over, they had survived, life had hurled its arrows at them and now it was out of missiles". The reader knows, of course, that life is never quite through, but if one can accept it on its own terms and stop waiting for the ideal moment when everything will begin as one has dreamed it will, then there is hope. As Mamo's wise old uncle tells him: "This is life. There's nothing more. The trick is never to give up".
Molly McCloskey's latest book is the novel, Protection. She is currently working for the UN's Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs for Somalia, based in Nairobi
Measuring Time By Helon Habila Hamish Hamilton, 383pp. £16.99