EASY MOTION TOURIST by Leye Adenle (Cassava Republic)
Leye Adenle’s Easy Motion Tourist, a crime thriller set in Lagos, gets its name from a Fatai Rolling Dollar high-life song about a night out gone wrong. It is a night out gone wrong that immerses Guy Collins, a British journalist, in the epicentre of a body-parts syndicate.
It is election season and bodies are appearing everywhere in Lagos, incidents that are thought to be linked to the seasonal jostling for power by any means.
Out alone at a Victoria Island nightspot, a commotion ensues and the curious Collins sees the mutilated body of a sex worker left near the entrance of the nightclub. Snooping around the environs of the dumping spot, he is soon arrested, setting in motion a wild adventure with pulp inflections and cinematic drive.
In reading Easy Motion Tourist, it is probably worthwhile keeping in mind that its author is a flash fiction and thriller writer with experience in theatre. There is a lot of movement in the book that mimics the meter of a cinematic tale. Adenle relishes spending time on the setting-up of an action scene, giving the book the ebb and flow of an action flick. His chapters are brisk, his interiors, although sparsely described, come alive with an atmosphere that is vivid and palpable.
Amaka, who stitches together a plan to save Guy from his detention, is a civil society activist whose world revolves around reforming the lives of Lagos sex workers. But her approach is not a reproachful one. Her modus operandi is to ensure their safety. With the assistance of other sex workers, she keeps tabs on their clientele, gathering a database of as much information as possible about their profiles. Where she can, she moves the women to safe houses and helps them out of their dangerous work.
Adenle crafts the working world of these sex workers with precision, where sex and body language is a performance of power. Many of the male characters are drunk on it, and many of the sex workers know how to subvert it, albeit momentarily.
Although Adenle’s fictional account is far out and could be set in any post-colonial metropolis, he succeeds, at times, in making its Lagosian setting unique and believable. Ultimately, the tension between forms, literary and cinematic, tear into this tale to sometimes thrilling effect.
Adenle alludes to the sociopolitical plight of Nigeria but, at the same time, he crafts an escapist tale in which the reader can get lost in its twisting plot and novel environs.
Adenle’s priorities are given over to plot, which sacrifices the musculature of some of his characters’ back stories. Many are caricatures and the only first-person perspective in the book comes from our “easy motion tourist” Guy.
His is the typical story of the marauding international journalist whose privilege can get him in and out of pretty much any situation. He is the white guy appended to our shining superhero Amaka, getting more of a story than he could ever have imagined.
Amaka, too, is more a superhero dressed in a cape than a calculating civil-society type.
Then there is Ibrahim, a pliant, somewhat compromised policeman, who escapes complete scrutiny in the storyline.
Adenle’s novel has been described as a noir thriller, so these traits can mostly be put down to genre affectations. Its blurb announces that “Tarantino has landed in Lagos” and that the book “reeks of its [Lagos’s] open drains and sparkles like the champagne quaffed in its upmarket districts”.
Still, the book appears to pander to its imagined audience rather than being a tale, unhinged as it may be, that speaks back to its society.
In the end I had to marvel at Adenle’s gifts — the ability to weave an entertaining escapist tale and the relentless cinematic pull of its pacing. Soon, it seems, his name with be in the director’s credits.