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“THE Memory of Love” by Aminatta Forna is a book that depicts the aftermaths of one of the bloodiest civil wars in Sierra Leone in modern history.Told in the narrative of Elias Cole, an aged and dying man, the story centres on a woman that he once loved. The story is narrated to a British psychologist, Adrian Lockheart – who has left a wife and a daughter in England.
The story can be read as a tale of passion and betrayal, encompassing the political unrest that racked Sierra Leone in the late 1960s and the horrendous civil war of the 1990s, as well as the days of the tenuous quiet when those who managed to stay alive struggle to cope with physical and mental scars of those years.
Far from being fictitious, “The Memory of Love” is a tale told by someone who lived through the horrendous years of a civil war that claimed thousands of lives leaving others with permanent physical and mental scars. The author, whose paternal family is from Sierra Leone, lived a good deal of that horror close to home. In her first book, “The Devil that Danced on the Water”, she embarks on a truth searching journey that led to the death of her father who was a political dissident imprisoned and killed when she was just 11 years.
In “The Memory of Love”, Forna expands from that missing centre of her own life to narrate the story of a city and a nation whose every recollection is shadowed by grief and loss.
Thus, the story has three principal voices – Lockheart, the British psychologist who finds himself hopelessly inadequate to cope with a situation where almost everyone is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder although he immediately learns that the natives don’t call it that way but call it “living”.
The second principal voice is that of Cole, a former academic at the city’s university who is Lockheart’s only private patient. Their sessions, which form the bulk of the book’s narrative, consist of Cole telling the story of his life from intimate diaries kept from the 1960s to the present. Cole is a lecturer in modern political history, but his biography reveals how, in a place as fractured as Sierra Leone, the personal is never less than political.
The third principal voice is that of Lockheart’s confidant, Kai Mansaray, a local surgeon who specialises in orthopaedic reconstruction. Unlike Lockheart, he has no shortage of patients as the halt and lame are Freetown’s normality.
Mansaray, just like the other two are, is tormented as much by loss of love in the same way he is tormented by the everyday horror he has witnessed. He feels the loss of love of his life like his amputees feel their phantom limbs. The “memory of love” is therefore an absence every bit as desperate and intangible as any more corporeal haunting.
The metaphor of a healer in a place of insane violence is a familiar trope from “The Last King of Scotland” but by setting up the contrast between her physicians of mind and body Forna develops it in interesting ways. Mansaray can at least put limbs back together; Lockheart’s textbooks of neuroses and instinctive feel for human motivation are left wanting by the unfathomable cruelty of the cases he comes up against – in particular a woman named Agnes, who, having been away at a refugee camp, returns to find that her daughter has married her husband’s killer.
As Forna’s novel unfolds, the consequences of Cole’s biography of obsession and betrayal begin to manifest through the lives of the three men at the heart of her story who are linked by the love of a single woman. Although the plot may seem contrived it nevertheless serves Forna’s wider point that everything is connected if one looks close enough.
But this book has its own critics. British-based journalist and author Robin Friedman argues that Forna’s book is marred by “slowness, long, and wordy sections of extraneous material, and implausible and coincidental plotting”.
She says the reader can easily get lost in unnecessary detail, particularly in the first half of the book as the book becomes tedious and the writing tends to be overdone.
Rather than enhance one of her themes of the “fragmentation of conscience” and personal responsibility, she tries so hard to make the personal lives and loves of Cole, Lockheart and Kai interfere in a rather clumsy and contrived manner.
Online Reporter