BOOK REVIEW: A Nigerian author’s quantum leap into Igbo cosmology and the nature of reality

I read I.O. Echeruo’s The Comfort of Distant Stars while travelling, and there were points when I had to put it down and stare into the middle distance for a while. Partly because Echeruo expects rather a lot from his reader – quantum physics makes an appearance – but mostly because I kept trying to work out what, exactly, I was being asked to believe.

At the centre of the novel is Ezeani. Growing up in Nigeria, he experiences visions of Anyanwu, the Sun God, who appears to him, speaks to him and advises him. Ezeani carries these experiences into adulthood and, eventually, to the US, where he studies at Cornell University and becomes a gifted mathematician and scientist.

And that is about as much as I am prepared to tell you.

Because one of the great pleasures of the book is the uncertainty Echeruo creates around Ezeani’s experience of the world. What is happening to him? What is he seeing? And what happens when the person through whose eyes we encounter a story may be experiencing reality differently from the people around him?

During a conversation at the Open Book Festival, Echeruo told me that it was important that the story be told entirely from Ezeani’s point of view. Everything we know, we know through him. The clues that something more complicated may be happening are there, but lightly placed.

“For me,” he tells me, writing is about “making the world comprehensible”. It is a form of meaning-making: taking memories and ideas and trying to make something from them that helps him understand the world.

Echeruo was born in Nigeria and has lived both there and in the US. But when I ask how his own life found its way into the novel, he takes me further back, to his grandparents and the social and religious context contained within a single generation of his family.

His four grandparents were Christian. Their parents were not. He remembers particularly the stories of his grandmothers, and the questions this generational shift left him with: What had existed before Christianity became dominant? What might an Igbo world shaped by a different cosmology look like if brought into contemporary life? That question became one of the kernels of the novel.

And then Echeruo threw quantum physics into the mix. Technically, this should not work. He is writing simultaneously about Igbo cosmology, religion, science, mental health, family, migration, marriage, betrayal and the nature of reality itself. It is an enormously ambitious first novel, and I told him that it would have been very easy to mess it up. He laughed heartily at that. I think we both know that he did not mess things up.

What I found difficult to believe is that Echeruo does not have formal training in quantum physics. He read his way into it, and accuracy mattered to him. His UK publisher assigned a copy editor with a background in astrophysics to ensure that Echeruo wasn’t making stuff up as he went along. And here’s the shocker: the quality of what he had delivered was so high that the reviewer assumed that he had some scientific training.

Luckily for some of us, Echeruo’s aim was not to turn the reader into a physicist. Quantum theory, he says, is “really, really weird”. He wanted to make it accessible through fiction in much the same way that ideas from psychology and psychiatry have entered novels and become ways of thinking about ourselves.

You can read the science as science, but you can also encounter it as metaphor, analogy or philosophy. Because underneath all of it sits a much older question: What does anything in life mean?

That question also shapes Ezeani himself, who is one of the most maddening, funny, arrogant and vulnerable characters I have encountered in a while. There were moments when I wanted to shake him and others when I wanted to step into the book, hold his head and help him through whatever was happening.

Echeruo describes Ezeani’s arrogance as a kind of shield. The bluster and certainty coexist with profound vulnerability. Sometimes both appear almost in the same breath. It makes him difficult to dismiss, even when his behaviour becomes difficult to defend.

And Echeruo is careful about what he shows us. Some of the novel’s most disturbing events – violence, misogyny, betrayal and harm within families and relationships – happen almost at the edge of Ezeani’s vision. Echeruo writes around violence rather than directly into it. That, he told me, was deliberate.

He wanted the reader to do some of the feeling. Ezeani can report something terrible almost flatly and move on. The reader cannot necessarily do the same. Perhaps that is why the novel stayed with me. It does not hand you a neat explanation and allow you to close the book satisfied that you have understood it.

Science, spirituality, memory and the mind keep rubbing against one another. Echeruo allows several possibilities to remain alive at once. And I am going to stop there, because this is one of those books where telling you much more would steal something from you.

What I can say is that I finished it and kept thinking about it. Then I spoke to Echeruo and thought about it some more. DM