Oil on Water
BY HELON HABILA
W. W. Norton, 2011. $14.95, 248 pages.
MARRyIng fIc TIon and politics is risky.
Nonfiction can explicitly reflect on ideas,
present information, and even advocate for
a “side” without violating the promise the
genre makes to its reader,
but fiction is another story.
A whi= of the didactic or
polemic, any glimpse of the
work’s creator stepping in to
direct a reader how to think
or feel, can shatter the fictional world the writer has
so painstakingly constructed
and unravel the reader’s suspension of disbelief.
However, when successful, fiction that addresses
political issues can be deeply a=ecting in
ways other genres cannot. Helon Habila’s
novel Oil on Water is a memorable example
of such success. Habila plunges his audience into a place and nightmare situation
most of us know only by way of occasional
reportage, if we know it at all: the Niger
Delta and its brutal conflicts over oil. The
novel is narrated by Rufus, a young Nige-rian journalist who accompanies an older
washed-up reporter on a mission to find,
interview, and confirm the well-being
of the kidnapped wife of a British petroleum engineer. Rufus’s dramatic journey
through the Delta carries him into encounter after encounter with the many factions
of this very complex conflict: government
soldiers protecting the oil companies; rebel
“freedom fighters” opposing them; unaffiliated thugs; villagers who have sold out
to oil companies, and villagers who have
not; and the British petroleum engineer
himself. As a journalist, Rufus can hear
and record the stories of all these perspectives, and also facts and historical context,
in a manner that is organic to the novel
and does not violate its “vivid continuous
dream,” John Gardner’s term for the spell
the best novels cast, a spell too often broken in overtly political fiction.
Habila’s primary characters breathe
and his plot mesmerizes, but what leaves
the most profound impression is his
stunning evocation of this violated landscape. Lush and horrific, sensuous and
desecrated, Habila’s Delta
is shrouded always in a
miasma of smoke and fog
and murk and slicks, and
through that miasma we
glimpse the flares of oil
wells, the rotting birds, the
putrid water, the strafed villages and poisoned people.
Yet Habila also goes beyond
simply documenting catastrophe to gesture toward an
ecologically balanced and
socially just future. On one island, Rufus
discovers a religious sect that worships the
natural world and is devoted to its healing. This village is the only optimistic one
portrayed in the novel, and also the most
resilient, the most adept at recovering after
being devastated by a firefight between soldiers and rebels.
The novel’s craft does at
times falter. Certain sections
feel rushed; the chronology
of events is unnecessarily
confusing; and, especially
at the end, a few contrived
plot twists lead to overly convenient resolutions. Nevertheless, after imaginatively
living in the world of this
book, I have a body-deep
sense of the cost of oil for Ni-gerians, as well as a significantly expanded compassion for them and
their land. Oil on Water is a powerful work,
one that rea;rms that art done well is always big enough to contain politics, too.
— Ann Pancake
The Magnetic
North
BY SARA WHEELER
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
$26, 315 pages.
Albedo IS A cuRIouS WoRD, long
unfamiliar to even the most informed.
But it is soon to become much better
known—and not least because it figures
importantly in Sara Wheeler’s latest book.
Unaltered from its Latin root, the word
means “whiteness.” It describes a property possessed by snow and powdered titanium dioxide, for example, but entirely
absent from coal. Some few cooks know
it as the white pith beneath the zest of a
lemon. But the meaning about to burst
onto the world’s linguistic stage is one
climatologists and astrophysicists have
employed for a long while: it is the whiteness of the reflection of sunlight from our
planet’s two giant and ever-glaring polar
ice caps.
Sara Wheeler, whose literary wanderings around the world’s highest latitudes
over the past two decades have won her
a faithful and respectful following, makes
it clear that the albedo is
presently very much in
trouble. Because for centuries past there has been
near limitless ice around
both poles, the planet’s albedo has long been in good
shape, the sun’s scorching
brilliance hurled back from
whence it came, as if by a
mirror. Now, however, the
polar ice is melting, it is becoming gray and thin and
piebald, in places nonexistent— with the
result that the sun’s rays are now flooding inward, unreflected, and are being
absorbed into the earth, heating it to ever-higher ambient temperatures. In other
