Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, a book by Maaza Mengiste

Review by Mike Fisher | JSonline.com

If you’re lucky enough to escape the indiscriminate rage unleashed during a bloody reign of terror, the rest of your days are likely to be haunted by the ghosts you left behind.

Whether those ghosts can ever again be made to walk, telling their stories so that they might be remembered, is less certain. There simply may not be words that can adequately describe all they endured.

This is the dilemma confronting first-time novelist Maaza Mengiste, who had the misfortune to be born in Ethiopia while her country was dying, wracked by the famine and political unrest that resulted in the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, followed by the rise of a Soviet satellite state that tortured and murdered the people it claimed to serve.

“I knew the smell of a discharged gun,” Mengiste has written in an autobiographical piece titled “Cheetahs Under Fire.” “I learned not to answer when soldiers came in the night and asked me about one of my uncles, assuming a 3-year-old girl held no secrets.”

Leaving Ethiopia as a child while it was sliding into darkness, the grown-up Mengiste has unveiled a fictionalized version of those secrets in her just-published “Beneath the Lion’s Gaze,” a novel that opens in Addis Ababa shortly before the 1974 coup and covers the first three-plus years of the madness that ensued.

The main story revolves around Hailu, a Western-educated doctor whose wife is dying and who is himself eventually arrested and tortured.

Meanwhile, Hailu’s headstrong younger son, Dawit, is jeopardizing his own and his family’s safety through his increasingly violent work for a resistance movement. Dawit is also half in love with Sara, wife to his older brother, Yonas, whom Dawit contemptuously dismisses as spineless.

Mengiste has also stuffed her book with numerous subplots, including the growing separation between Dawit and a childhood friend who is now a rising star in the post-coup military; Dawit’s eventual estrangement from his onetime lover; the sufferings of a servant family, including the torture of its youngest member; and the ruminations of the deposed emperor.

That’s way too much material for a novel of less than 400 pages. Mengiste’s characters never come alive, because none of them gets enough air time to truly be heard.

Unable or unwilling to make some hard choices among her many competing stories, Mengiste undercooks all of them.

The novel’s relentlessly purple prose makes matters worse. “Bullets fell like rain,” Mengiste writes. “Blood flowed in currents. Winds blew the rotten stench of the dead through deserted streets,” she continues.

There are numerous passages like this one – all clearly designed to convey the horror of what Mengiste describes, and each unintentionally trivializing it instead because the tropes she uses are so tired. One sympathizes with Mengiste’s fervent desire to speak the unspeakable, but cranking the volume just deafens the reader, making her voice even harder to hear.

There are promising glimpses of how much better this novel might have been if Mengiste had slowed down, pared her clunky plot while eliminating at least half her characters, and been blessed with a far more ruthless editor.

Hailu’s increasingly disordered thoughts while being tortured are excruciating to read, but often convincing. Even better are some poignant short chapters, appearing at regular intervals in the first part of the novel, presented from the point of the view of the bewildered emperor during his final days.

But “Lion’s Gaze” doesn’t have nearly enough such material to save it. The stories Mengiste wants to share deserve to be heard. But first she needs to find a better way to tell them.