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language: English
country: USA
year: 2024
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Forever Desert, #2
dates read: 14.9.25-15.9.25
Moses Ose Utomi’s The Truth of the Aleke is the second book in his Forever Desert trilogy. while I had some reservations about the first book, The Lies of the Ajungo, I was nonetheless willing to give it a try.
sixteen-year-old Osi, an ambitious but also sometimes careless boy in the City of Truth, finds himself caught in the middle of a crisis — explicitly modeled on 9/11 (the USAmerican one, obviously), which I’ll return to later — and unexpectedly promoted to Truthseeker, one of the elite, magically empowered warriors of the City who protect it from the relentless attacks of the Cult of Tutu and its fearsome leader, the Aleke.
of course, all of this turns out to be a lie, and Osi’s sense of self, of his city’s history, of the power of Sight, and of the nature of power in general completely unravel over the course of the book.
unfortunately, it’s not good.
this isn’t to say that it is unmitigatedly bad. Utomi’s prose stands out, in particular, as attempting to Do Things aesthetically — not experimental and not capital-P Poetic, but I appreciate that he seems to be actively trying to produce something more sophisticated than “transparent” prose. it doesn’t always pay off, in part because of the quite heavy-handed foreshadowing, but I want to acknowledge the attempt — it’s one of the things that has me (still) considering maybe reading the third book.
foreshadowing notwithstanding, I think the (initial) overturning of the City’s truths is also well-done, particularly with the context of the first book. The Truth of the Aleke begins with a brief prologue that, if you squint, is a kind of summary of The Lies of the Ajungo, but with everything twisted out of shape. it’s cool!
there are, however, three big problems.
one is structural: basically, the “novella” length is not working here. in some ways there is too much going on: everything feels rushed, particularly the relationships between Osi and the other Truthseekers, which are (meant to be) part of the emotional core of the book. if it were longer — not a doorstopper, but maybe 200 pages instead of 100 — it would have a little more room to breathe and to sit with characters and relationships. as it is, it’s racing to get through the plot, telling us how Osi feels about other characters but not giving itself the time to show these feelings develop.
conversely, though, parts of the book felt like there were extraneous details — I think this also could have worked better in an extremely compressed form as a short story. possibly even better than it would as a 200-page book — I think this could really pack a punch in like 5k words.
the second and third problems are political. problem two is in-world: the book’s understanding of power is based on a facile, Foucauldian-idealist conception of “power” as a) something with an abstract existence that seeks to grow/propagate itself, and b) something that is inherently bad/dangerous, regardless of how and/or to what ends it is being exercised. insofar as the book is attempting to make a political point (which it very much is), this conception of power limits its ability to do so effectively, because no actionable politics follows from this position.
exacerbating this is the third problem, which is that, unfortunately, Utomi makes explicit in his acknowledgments that this is a book about 9/11 and its aftermath. in the context of the contents of the book, this has horrendous implications — essentially, both-sidesing US imperialism. in the first half of the book, we are told that the Aleke leads an evil cult that is attempting to destroy the City of Truth basically for no reason, most recently by launching a giant meteor of sand and rock at the seat of government to try to destroy it, killing hundreds of civilians. in the second half of the book, Osi meets the Aleke and learns the truth of his city’s history (as portrayed in The Lies of the Ajungo, although there’s also kind of an inexplicable jump between the state of the city there and the state of the city here), not as last bastion of resistance to a bloodthirsty conqueror but rather as a privileged oppressor, hoarding resources.
now, one problem already here is that the 9/11 analogy implicitly positions Osi as the proverbial eighteen-year-old child who doesn’t understand that joining the US military involves killing people and upholding US imperialism. the bigger problem, though, is that in the actual climax of the book we learn that, while it’s true that the city is a privileged oppressor that’s hoarding resources, it’s also true that the Aleke is a bloodthirsty conqueror who plans to slaughter most of the city and use it as his base of power to conquer the rest of the desert. hello?????????????????? we’re both-sidesing US imperialism now?
Utomi claims in the acknowledgments that “[t]here were fuses lit in this book that are going to explode in book three”, and I admit that in spite of this book’s flaws I am still curious to see how things turn out, so it’s possible I will read it and find out. but, god, the politics here were bad.
moods: adventurous, dark