So here is where a background understanding of the ethnic/religious conflict in the former Yugoslavia would have been beneficial to me. The jokesters in the audience will say “What? But Jenny! You love genocide!” and that’s not true, I am just interested in it because it is interesting, and also, I mainly know about things that happened in Africa. Because of my African reading project. Of genocidal conflicts in the Soviet bloc and Latin America I know very little.

I did know enough to feel highly apprehensive about Duro’s backstory, which he reveals slowly and carefully. From the first there’s a sense of unease about the town of Gost, tension in the air that Duro understands but does not explain to Laura and her teenagers. And Duro drops hints: the bakery that’s no longer open, the Orthodox Church that stopped offering services years ago. What it’s leading up to, what Duro’s telling the reader all along, is shocking and, at the same time, ultimately quotidian. A stupid, petty story about stupid, petty men, like so many stories from war.

The end of this book is an absolute knockout. The daughter of a Sierra Leonean father, Forna writes with devastating assurance about the perpetual state of moral compromise that war brings along with it. And she writes about what comes after, the responsibility to hold onto those memories of wrongdoing, even when it would be more comfortable to forget.

Any book whose theme you could describe with the world “culpability” is very likely to be in some degree my jam. That said, The Hired Man was very, very slow to start. Forna’s trying a Kazuo-Ishiguro-like thing of setting up an idyll and then tossing in a discordant note here and there until you realize you’re listening to a totally different piece of music than you thought. I respect the hell out of this technique, but damn did it take a while to get moving here.

That complaint aside, it’s a beautifully constructed book, with lots of attractive symbols to analyze. I’m not telling you how to do your job but if you’re trying to construct some sort of modern fiction syllabus like maybe this would be a pretty analyzable book to analyze if your students haven’t had a whole ton of experience with analyzing things. Again, the town’s name is Gost. The guy’s name is Duro. College students, grab a blue book and go to town.

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