Book Review: Doing Dangerously Well

This was another one of the three novels sent to me by Random House as part of this year’s batch of “New Face of Fiction” titles.

The back of my advanced reading copy says:  “When a humanitarian catastrophe strikes Nigeria, an unforgettable cast of Machiavellian opportunists and quixotic do-gooders swoop in to make the most of the tragedy.“

The short story from where I stand: this is one of the best books I’ve read this year so far.  I was completely blown away.

Who doesn’t love a really good, juicy black comedy? Doing Dangerously Well, Carole Enahoro’s debut novel, is just that.  Brilliantly melding a vicious sibling rivalry with disaster capitalism, Machiavellian political and office politics, this book is chock-a-block satire that cleverly fictionalizes the points Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

The inciting incident is the bursting of Nigeria’s Kainji Dam, a fictional incident, but a real dam.  This disaster kills about a million people and puts the country in political turmoil.  On the other side of the ocean, a fictional water megacorporation called TransAqua gets set to purchase the Niger River and help Nigeria with “reconstruction.”  Leading TransAqua’s rather spider-like manoueverings is Mary, a cut-throat but otherwise personality-less high level executive who will stop at nothing to thwart her randy office rival’s attempt at securing the river for the company himself.  Mary has a sister, Barbara, who is very steeped – or so she thinks – in the New Age movement but is really a washed up hippy who can’t find a decent job.  As soon as Barbara finds out what Mary is trying to do, she jumps on the water activism bandwagon and does her best to thwart Mary and TransAqua.

Mixed into this we have the Machiavellian machinations of the Nigerian government, led by the paranoid opportunist and former Natural Resources Minister, now President, Ogbe Kolo.  Not caring about the suffering of his fellow countrymen after the Kainji Bursts, Kolo wastes no time massaging deals out of TransAqua, pitting Mary against her rival, Sinclair.

And then we have Femi , a Nigerian environmental activist and folk hero whose family is killed by the massive flood causes by the dam’s rupture.  Fighting his own demons, Barbara spurs him into action – action that basically turns out to be terrorism.

If this sounds bleak, well, yes, the subject matter is indeed bleak.  But this is one seriously hilarious book!  Enahoro’s writing is tight, her characterizations punchy, and her dialogue is snappy.  Barbara, Mary, Kolo, and Barbara’s love interest, Astro, are some of the most well-drawn characters I’ve encountered in fiction recently.  While dealing with a serious topic like disaster capitalism, the author has mined a bad situation for all the satiric possibilities it can dare to offer.  I particularly loved how the more paranoid Kolo got, the more outrageous his behaviour got, eventually leading him to hide out in the special bulletproof trunk of a car, complete with oxygen tank and luxurious linens.  The escalation of everyone’s behaviour in the story gets more and more outrageous as the stakes become higher and higher, and I found myself laughing at loud and unable to wait for the next page to see what happened next.

Definitely a worthwhile, timely, and entertaining book, and I totally recommend it!