The Shadow of a King (2024)

The Shadow of a King

Maaza Mengiste’s second book has an eponymous king who appears only halfway through, appropriately enough in a shadowy manner. He is Minim, a “soft-spoken man with the strange name that means Nothing”, one of those who have answered the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie’s call to arms provoked by the Italian invasion of the country in 1935.

But Minim has a lucky resemblance; to Selassie himself, now exiled in Bath, which can be exploited to restore faith in the people’s ability to beat the European colonialists. Dressed in makeshift uniform and sitting on horseback with a red umbrella across his saddle, all he needs do is show himself in the hills so recently full of Italian troops and they will become stronger for him.

Another novel might centre such an odd interlude; fiction as written by a popular historian such as Ben Macintyre say. But in Mengiste’s story she draws on her own family history here: her grandfather fought against the Italians shadows and echoes proliferate so that although faced with clear and present danger its participants remain intimately tied to generations and individuals that came before them.

When we first meet it seems likely that this book’s stage will be small, enclosed. We are within a compound where tensions simmer between Hirut, an orphaned young woman who has recently joined as what amounts to maid of all work for the household, and her mistress Aster. Hirut was brought here by Aster’s husband Kidane, an old friend of her parents’; but Aster is both suspicious of their former connection and mourning deeply for the child she and Kidane have lost.

At first it feels like there can be no doubt which way our sympathies lie: towards vulnerable Hirut and protective Kidane and away from capricious (occasionally malevolent) Aster. Their battles are fought out over claustrophobic rooms including the tiny bedroom Hirut shares with a cook and the more luxurious quarters assigned to elegant Aster, and they are painful as well as insoluble.

But things change. And quickly. In Eritrea and Somalia Italian commanders are massing their troops for another attempt at controlling Ethiopia something they were prevented from doing in the 1890s; now under Mussolini’s mythologising sway they think they can succeed. For Kidane and other Ethiopian men who gather their own forces to fight off the invaders that first conflict is still alive in their minds; its revenge offers them an opportunity to avenge their fathers’ humiliations.

But what about the women? At the start of The Shadow King, Aster tells her husband she will not wait for him at home. Instead, she dons his tunic, jodhpurs and cape and goes off to fight in a manner described with such vividness that it is almost as if the pages of the book catch fire around her. She takes Hirut with her.

The story which then unfolds predominantly a cat-and-mouse between Italian and Ethiopian forces is broken up by fragments: descriptions of the documentary photographs taken by a young Venetian soldier, Ettore; glimpses of Selassie in Bath, as he faces up to the fact that his rule may be destroyed and consoles himself with listening to Aida; the interjections of what feels like a Greek chorus. Alongside Hirut’s tale and Aster’s comes Kidane’s; alongside theirs comes Ettore’s, who is Jewish (exiled from his family) and only now discovering that his father was too (exiled from Russia), just as letters stop coming from home informing him that Jewish soldiers must register their ethnicity because rising anti-Semitism means Jews are no longer safe.

It is a pretty conventional narrative lots happens, there are details galore and multiple perspectives with some quite subtle tweaks thrown in for good measure. History sits up against modernity in wonky facts about how war works (Ethiopians are fighting with outdated weapons which often don’t work; Ethiopians have no long-distance communication); it also sits up against modernity in terms of consciousness.

While every character has an instinct for battle which seems primal whether it be attack or defence, they keep having to change their minds because Italians need to film themselves building an empire while Ethiopians know they can only resist by blurring gender lines more than they already do.

In her afterword Maaza Mengiste notes that memories of the war tend to coalesce around the heroism of the outnumbered Ethiopian soldiers, “stoic and regal like my grandfather”. Much later she found out that her great grandmother had taken her father’s gun and gone to fight herself one of those women whose stories “even today have remained no more than errant lines in faded documents”.

What Mengiste does in The Shadow King is breathe life back into them, show them as being as much alive as any man who ever lived, with all his strengths, weaknesses and shifts.

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