What do we owe one another? More than seven billion people inhabit our planet, seven billion souls who dream as we do, work as we do, fail as we do. They possess different personalities, different goals, different cultural ethics, but they are fundamentally beings built from the same blueprint, individuals who descend from a common place and a common time. And yet, with this being true, we still fight one another, steal from one another, denigrate one another, all in the hopes of reserving for ourselves the largest portion of available resources and privileges possible. Some might argue this is right and proper. After all, of those seven billion, we will only ever meet a vanishingly small fraction. And we don't owe anything to people we'll never meet. Or do we? What are the costs of acting against those we'll never know? Will Ferguson ruminates in his intriguing novel of modern reality.
Known colloquially as a 419 scheme, drawing its name from the section of the Nigerian criminal code that prohibits it, this infamous practice attempts to defraud an individual of their savings by making the victim an offer temptation won't allow them to refuse. Having risen to prominence with the popularization of email, the Nigerian Scam is the most famous strain of this disease. Though it has various derivations, the scam generally offers the victim a lucrative payout if they will wire the scammer a substantial sum of money, ostensibly used by the scammer to unlock an even greater sum of money such as an inheritance. In reality, however, the scammer has no intention of paying back the victim. For the entire enterprise is a fiction used merely to capture the victim's initial investment. Though the odds of success are low for the scammer, the rewards are high enough for them to persist until they find someone credulous enough to fall for their lies.
Laura Curtis, a copy-editor living in Canada, is made painfully aware of the price of this scam when, after her father's death in a car accident, his bank accounts and email history reveal a devastating truth, that he is only of 419's victims. Preying on his chivalry, the scammer has defrauded the elder Curtis out of not only his savings but the money from a loan Curtis took out to aid a fictional girl. Though Laura's brother is enraged, haplessly threatening to sue everyone involved, Laura is the only one determined to act. Driven by grief, she attempts to track down the specific scammer, traveling to Nigeria where she is immersed in a world utterly foreign to her, a world of vicious criminal gangs, ruthless government troops, cold-hearted oil companies and beleaguered natives of the Nigeria delta trying to survive in a hellish, ever-changing environment.
A slow and steady build towards a darkly moving crescendo, 419 is at times laborious and mesmerizing. Mr. Ferguson deploys three primary protagonists, a Nigerian scammer, a native of the Nigerian delta and a beleaguered, pregnant girl from inner Africa, to draw the reader into a noisy world as utterly foreign to the West as it is harsh on its inhabitants. As the narrative switches between Lagos, the delta and the dubious roads and polluting oil derricks that connect them, we can feel modern Africa in all of its post-colonial splendor and corruption. Through the eyes of these partially empowered actors, we come to understand not only the heavy burden of colonialism's legacy left on the souls and the societies of this continent, but the razor-sharp keenness of the Resource Curse that afflicts Nigeria, miring it in so much corruption that it's nearly impossible for the country to lift itself out of economic chaos.
For all of the emotive power of 419's African characters, Laura Curtis is the novel's driving force. Sharing with the reader both culture and ethics, Curtis channels the reader's empathy and outrage which she shapes into a cold sword of justice. She is a bright spot of familiarity and vengeance amidst a sea of foreign ways and means. And yet, for all that she is the reader's port in the storm, she is also the novel's downfall. For Mr. Ferguson is never able to bring Laura to life in the same way he does the Nigerian cast. He tries to inject her with grief and rage, but these powerful emotions seem to slide off of her impenetrable exterior, leaving behind an austere shell. We sympathize with her plight and cheer on her desire for action, but this never coalesces into anything like a human being we'd recognize.
With an engaging cast of characters, cinematic prose and an expanse of quality research into both Nigeria and 419, Mr. Ferguson has produced an interesting read that pays off those who persist with it. However, periods of inactivity and the occasional slide into spiritualism prevent it from truly standing out. (3/5 Stars
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