Namwali Serpell's THE OLD DRIFT (Narr by Adjoa Andoh, Richard E. Grant and Kobna Holbrook-Smith) with a brief excursis on Zamrock

Phew! I feel like I just binge-watched like 15 seasons of a top quality family saga/soap opera on a par with, say, the original TV adaptation of The Forsyte Saga, but with more life and color in just one scene than that masterful production had in its whole run, not because The Forsyte Saga was dull or colorless (though the original adaptation was in black and white, tee hee) but because The Old Drift, especially as brought to life by Adjoa Andoh and Kobna Holbrook-Smith*, is so intense, colorful, grand and real that I feel like I've known these characters for years now.

And while the fact that The Old Drift -- the title refers to a part of the Zambizi river that is slightly more navigable for crossing than it is for most of its length, where an early settlement is established around the turn of the last century -- is set in and around Zambia instead of a few neighborhoods in London might give it an unfair advantage in terms of vividness, it's really author Namwali Serpell's intense involvement and intimacy with her characters, given incredible life by the devastatingly talented Adjoa Andoh, showing off a broad range of accents, tones and stylings that make the audio edition a true standout -- and her commitment to sharing that involvement and intimacy with her readers, that sends The Old Drift to a whole 'nother level of storytelling.

Also, it has a Greek chorus of mosquitos. And I'm not going to say that's the best part of the book, though it certainly would be, for me, for most books, because The Old Drift has so many other contenders for "best part" that the mosquito chorus becomes just another astonishing wonder among many.**

The story the mosquitos and the more conventional narrator tell are tremendous in scope -- over a hundred years of Zambian history, from its initial contact with white settler-colonialists through its years as part of that travesty called Rhodesia to its emergence as an independent nation state that once even had a space program and beyond -- but also, as I said before, incredibly intimate. By this I don't just mean you are going to experience a lot of menstrual and pregnancy issues right along with the novel's characters, though of course there is that -- but also that as the generations of three different families keep meeting and interacting in strange ways, the reader comes to feel that she knows them better than they do themselves, because the reader recalls bits of their histories that the characters themselves don't seem to know, to wit...

All of this starts when a British would-be-explorer makes a stupid blunder in a frontier bar, and the blunder's victim's daughter overreacts and does permanent, debilitating injury to a bystander/bar employee. This incident lives in the lore of the three families -- the British guy's, the victim's daughter's, and the bystander's -- for only a generation or so before being forgotten, or at least never mentioned by any of the later generations of characters in the novel's text, but the reader gets to appreciate how the courses of all of these lives bear the mark of this ridiculous incident, and of subsequent ones in later years such as the decision of a honeymooning couple who hit a bicyclist with their car to just leave him where he lays with a pile of money instead of staying to help him, or of a wife still very much in love with her husband to take the necessary steps to go and confront the woman he's sleeping with instead of her.

See where it's so like a soap opera? It's utterly engrossing and unfailingly dramatic but it's also way more grounded in reality than any soap opera I've seen, and beautifully, beautifully told. Namwali Serpell's skill as a poet shines in the mosquito interludes, but her mastery of prose is there for us to admire throughout:

Now, as her baby wept for hunger and as she herself wept distractedly - weeping was just what she did now, who she was - Matha felt that dawning shock that comes when you look at yourself and see a person you once might have pitied.

Which is a pivotal moment in the named character's development,and then there's heart-shattering stuff like this that speaks to and for us all: 

Old like her father was old, a shaggy shambling old, an old where you'd lost the order of things and felt so sad that you simply had to embrace the loss, reassuring yourself with the lie that you hadn't really wanted all that order to begin with.

Time is a bitch. 

There is also a gentle strain of what I can only call magical realism in the novel. One character, Sybella, is born with so much hair that grows so thick and fast that she lives most of her life as a sort of female Cousin It (but still finds a husband and raises a daughter and then grandchildren); another, the Matha of the first pulled quote above, never, ever stops weeping copiously after the moment there depicted, to the baby's endless detriment until that baby grows up into a strong and self-reliant woman who winds up doing incredible business making and selling wigs made from Sybella's hair. Sybella and Matha's lives and fates are united by the Stupid Inciting Incident; Sybella is the daughter of the girl who pushed the bystander and Matha is the granddaughter of the bystander, but neither of them knows this, or that they're destined to meet the bumbling Brit's granddaughter-in-law in a scene that is so dramatic and disastrous and riveting that it doesn't need all of that historical baggage to be a jaw-dropper, but since the reader has it, that Simpsons-racing-to-the-couch moment is utterly unforgettable and deserves to be as famous as the Simpsons scene I referenced.

And that's not all, for The Old Drift is not just a historical family saga with magical realism elements, it is a grand example of speculative fiction in its fullest and most inclusive sense, for as its arcs and family lines approach the present day, its characters are looking toward the future with ambition and purpose, and the three families are each as important to those ambitions and purposes as they are to one another, as children from each family come together to continue the work of one's father -- a physician and medical researcher who has made the conquest of HIV his obsession to the cost of pretty much everything and everyone else in his life -- and to mitigate the harm that father's singleminded pursuit of a cure for AIDS has inflicted on another's mother, who turned out to have a T-cell receptor mutation that showed tremendous promise toward the creation of an eventual HIV vaccine. Meanwhile, that mother's son is obsessed with inventing a mosquito-sized drone, and the daughter of the third family is in the picture, too, as she attends school and learns about activism, Marxism and the art of political protest. Later in adulthood, this trio pools its many talents and resources and hatches a plan that will change Zambia forever. This is African futurism at its very finest and most pointed because...

Zambia, both in the novel and in the real world, is at or near ground zero for investment/meddling by the People's Republic of China, continuing the long tradition of exploiting Africa for extractable resources in a somewhat kinder disguise as Chinese money, immigrants and visiting executives build roads and factories, re-open mines, establish schools and hospitals, projecting Soft Power in a very rigid fashion. Grappling with this reality is the biggest challenge the Millennial generation of Zambians, black, white and brown, face as they continue to work toward nationhood, equity, dignity and strength, hopefully without sacrificing a cultural heritage that predates Cecil Rhodes and David Livingston, for all that they and men like them arrived on the African continent and assumed it had been created for their use and damned whatever inconvenient people got there before them (or, this being Africa, never left in the first place).

I learned a hell of a lot about Zambia in the course of listening to this stunning work, enriched by what little knowledge I did already had, which was entirely and only about the Freedom Rock or "Zamrock" of the 1970s, in which a small but immensely creative and talented group of muscians who had grown up on American and European pop music took up that industry's tools, especially the electric guitar, and made their own thing with it and I am a fan! At least one character in The Old Drift discusses this amazing flowering of musicianship in passing, and several other scenes mention slightly older examples of Zambia's earlier pop music history (OMG, The Dark City Sisters, you guys!), and so of course I'm going to spend a little time sharing some of my favorite examples of this music, including first and foremost, only because this novel begins at the famous location after which a band I really dig named themselves, but they ain't named Victoria Falls, friends, oh no. They are Musi-a-Tunya (the original name of the falls) and just listen to this song by the same name!

In fact, really, you should just go listen to that whole album, Welcome to Zamrock on your streaming service of choice*** as many times as it takes for you to fall in love and then buy the damned album on physical media because you never know when streaming services will fail or have a dispute with the artists or other nonsense. And then listen to the sequel album, Welcome to Zamrock Volume 2. And hunt up other individual tracks by whoever catches your fancy. There's so much goodness out there, you know how it works!

And while you're at it, check out Dark City Sisters because oh my goodness the tight girl group harmonies alone are worth a click or two, here's my favorite of theirs. Thanks for the recommendation, Namwali!

Have another favorite of mine:

But now I'm really digressing and robbing you of the fun of exploring this stuff for yourself. Go, explore! And listen to the 100% pure high grade awesome that is The Old Drift in audio book form. Probably you should plan on listening twice, because this is another one in which the ending reveals a whole 'nother way to interpret what you've been hearing as it also makes you realize that you've been too distracted by the incredible character drama to notice the slow burn infrastructure going on behind it.

This. Is. A. Masterpice!

*Richard E. Grant only appears at the very beginning, which concerns itself with the founding blunder and has a white English colonizer for a protagonist.

**Though the mosquito interludes are where Kobna Holbrook-Smith takes over and makes an absolute meal of the chorus' dramatic lines and strange perspectives and sound effects and the poetic rhythms of their text. I would listen happily to a whole book of just that, but I don't suppose there'd be much of a market for such a thing. I'd sure like to visit the universe next door where everybody clamors for narratives from the point of view of mosquitos delivered like speeches from Sophocles, though!

***Psst. If you actually care about some of your streaming dollars maybe actually making it to artists, or at least to their heirs/copyright holders/sick old grannies/whomever, some services are better than others. I'm only using YouTube here because it's easiest to embed clips on Blogger from it, and it's also a service that you don't have to have an account to enjoy instantly. But otherwise...