Review: "The Old Drift" by Namwali Serpell

The author who I thought of most while reading Namwali Serpell’s brilliant epic of a debut a debut novel The Old Drift was David Mitchell. The way she weaves a wondrous world both ancient and futuristic, informed by our distant past and our near future but still wonderfully original reminded me of his best work and even some of his lesser quality work which, like this book in very few places, is still fascinating to look at, interpret and think about. It manages to exist wholly within its two worlds, running smoothly through the bulk of the 20^thcentury and into the great unknown of the 21^st, presenting a world informed by past mistakes, present failures and hopes for a brighter future, all within the microcosm of the Republic of Zambia, a country that only gained its freedom a little over 50 years ago. It offers a wide range of characters through the years, with both victims and victimizers thoroughly fleshed out with murky motivations and hidden desires, along with very cool running themes that recur throughout the book. It begins at the start of the 20^thcentury, where a seemingly innocuous event at a luxury hotel at Victoria Falls, a scuffle between a white businessman that leaves another man knocked imbecilic, draws in the lives of three families, black, white and brown, and follows their ancestors as to the near future where the world presented at the beginning feels unrecognizable but with its same prejudices and feelings of want and desire. Like Mitchell’s work, Serpell crafts a world that is fantastical but realistic and it is easy for the reader to by into the more ridiculous aspects of the novel, such as the character of Siballa, whose hair grows at a rapid enough rate that she resembles Thing from the Addams family (hair is one of the book’s recurring themes, such as its powers in both growing it and shaving it off) or the character of Grace, a background character in most of the lives of the three families as they converge who does not see to age over the course of several decades. One of the main themes I found that appears at the turning points of each section is the somewhat pessimistic look at progress in both history as well as politics, like what happens to the sisters Matha and Nkuka, both of whom fall under the spell of the cult like Nkoloso, whose failed Zambian space program would be funny if it did not indirectly cause the death of the girl’s mother at the hands of the government. The book takes a delightful if hard left turn when it focuses on the grandkids, Jacob, Joseph and Naila, and introduces hi-tech smart devices that are implanted in people’s fingertips and near microscopic drones that might be the swarm of mosquitos that narrate small pieces in between sections, but it swings for the fences in its daring final few pages, and it is easy for me to respect that for a debut novel so thick, complex and intricate. 

Rating: 5/5