Review: Clatter Deities by Azeez Aregbesola
Aregbesola dares the unthinkable and gives us a shocking Afrofuturistic thriller that will define the genre for this era. In Clatter Deities, Obienu, an obscure hunter fighting to keep his marriage becomes the unlikely leader of a fight to save the world from an apocalyptic event which the gods are happy to sit and do nothing about unless he succeeds in task of harmonising the world under a series of tasks.
Book: Clatter Deities by Azeez Aregbesola
Reviewer: Philo O’fuose
Rating: 4.5 Stars
I was a late comer in reading The Way of Iron by Azeez Aregbesola which was released in late 2019. It wasn't until the tail end of the pandemic lock down in 2022 that I got to read it and immediately saw what the hype was about. So last month when I was scrolling through Eihnu's latest line up of originals and found Clatter Deities by the same author, I wanted to read it right away and be the first to tell my friends about it this time.
Obienu goes on his routine hunting trip at night in his village when he stumbles upon a sink hole or what appears like one. On further investigation, hoping he will find a deer or two nesting near it. What he finds instead is what looks like an abandoned underground or cave shrine that quickly shuts him into a metaphysical realm. In that turbulent experience where he could hardly tell between his natural environment and a transcendent spiritual subconscious, he witnesses a heated debate between factions of the Alusis in the Pantheon whose duty is to hold mankind together in one piece until they have to give account to Chukwu Okike. Obienu's presence, once sensed by the gods is summoned to settle the argument.
Dazed, confounded and unsettled, Obienu finds himself saying yes to whatever they request and he will shortly learn that the last few statements he had heard and agreed to was an oat to be a devoted message bearer for the gods to mankind and to carry out all tasks given him by the gods with fearlessness and unflinching loyalty. At this point, it is revealed to Obienu by a series of apparitions, all the three catastrophic events lined up to occur on earth. All three separately had the potential to wipe out all humans within days.
The events that follow see Obienu struggling to get his message out first in his village but the gods want him to take the message to a wider, audience. Because he now possess some powers which he is still struggling to accept and apply like telling the future, reading minds, speak all languages and others, little acts for his village got him going viral on TikTok. A world that instead of help him in his quest complicated life for him even further.
Aregbesola did a brilliant job on this one as always. His narration stayed clean, sharp and direct. The technic is linear just as in The Way of Iron, but this time, perhaps as the subject gravely needed, he found beautiful ways to infuse humour in his dialogues and presentation of Obienu's impossible travails.
In all honesty, nothing prepared me for the wild journey the book took me on with the blend of characters. If there was any negative in the story, it would be that for such a vast-reaching plot, there seem to be little cast of characters used. Perhaps, the author was trying not to get the reader lost in a sea of characters but an extra voice in the Security Council setting would have helped.
Clatter Deities is highly recommended for fans of Afrofuturistic fantasies looking to read about African cultures and their intersection with global trends. I love it and glad I got to discover it on Eihnu.