The story started off in an exciting enough spot but didn't grip me. The prose is easy to read but lacks an interesting voice. The main character simply didn't reel me in or urge me to follow their journey. I ended up putting it down around a quarter of the way through.

Harmattan Season is a noir-style fantasy set in French-colonial Africa. It follows a jaded investigator who is shaken by the appearance of a bleeding young woman on his doorstep, who is later found dead and suspended in mid-air. It has themes of colonialism and the harm that comes with it and is stylized in a noir sort of way, but with some speculative elements added in. It's doing something interesting, though the characters feel rather arms-length which might be a challenge for character-driven readers. The audiobook is very well done and immersive to the place and culture. I received an audio review copy via NetGalley, all opinions are my own.

Tochi Onyebuchi is an auto-read author for me. His stories are all so unique and they each have their own style and voice. Harmattan Season is no exception. (And the audiobook narrator is FANTASTIC.)

Set in French colonial Africa, Harmattan Season is a hardboiled noir mystery with a strong social commentary edge. It also features some light magical elements that really played well into the tone of the book.

A short book with a fast moving plot and a main character who seeks redemption equals a perfect storm for a fantastic read. I read this in one sitting and could easily have read 100 more pages and not been satisfied. I highly recommend this book and Tochi Onyebuchi in general.

This is a story of juxtapositions. Tone and content and setting and expectations and language, many unexpected bedfellows rub up against one another. It's interest and success comes from how well managed those contrasts are, and how the unexpected intertwine to emphasise the meaning coming from both sides.

Harmattan Season is set in West Africa under recent French colonial rule. The main character, Boubacar, has mixed ancestry, with one foot in each of the cultures in his home city. In the past, he has fought for the French, but in the present is a down on his luck, struggling for work chercher - someone who finds people for money. When a grievously injured woman stumbles into his room one night, the police hot on her tale, he's set on a journey to discover who she is, where she came from, what happened to her, and what it could mean not just for him, but for the whole city.

That sounds familiar, right? Maybe not the specifics, but the tone, the setup. A detective, a woman with a problem, a mystery that might be more than it first seems... if your genre senses are telling you "noir", you would absolutely be right. Within even the first few sentences, the vibe is settling itself in for the long haul:

Fortune always left whatever room I walked into, which is why I don't leave my place much these days. It works pretty well; I keep my office close (downstairs, actually) for others' sake. Means that the bad-luck radius stays small. But, of course, the work suffers.

This could be any hard-boiled detective in any black-and-white office in any number of stories. Onyebuchi sets out his stall on this right from the off, and that tone never dips, not even for a second. There are familiar phrases, quirks of grammar - a lot of sentences clipped at their beginning - that put you right into exactly that framework and keep you there. Obvious, but not so over the top as to be egregious. And part of why that is is because so much of the rest of the story runs counter to that clear tone.

To start with, the setting. It's about a generation into French colonisation (given that mixed heritage adult characters exist), which puts us a bit early for the typical time period of the hardboiled detective, never mind that none of the characters are speaking English. Obviously the book is in English, but there's a frisson that comes from these very familiar US-specific linguistic flourishes in a story that takes pains to specify when different languages are spoken. Onyebuchi wants you to remember what this is - and isn't. But even if not for the time, the noir detective is typically at home in his US city, so taking him out into the world beyond is already a little unexpected. Add into that the mentions of fashion - the gendarme uniform and the djellaba - and the picture we hold in our heads is never the pinstripe suit and the brimmed hat. Again, these details of dress are constantly noted, this is another contrast being made clear.

And then of course just... the story. The typical noir detective isn't dealing with bodies who float up into the air, their blood hanging in mesmerising droplets over the city square. Nor are they reckoning with the ongoing legacy of colonialism or the difficulties of being tied to two different and opposing sides in a conflict that keeps on going.

There's a lot going on here.

And somehow... it all works. It's not just that the disparate elements are kept tightly under control, but that they are used to intersect productively. The contrast and the frisson turns into something new and better, something that reinforces the points being made on all sides, rather than just adding an unexpected twist.

Take, for example, the standard fantasy trope of the woman in danger who needs the comfort of the hard-boiled detective. The dame. Or, in a French-speaking context, the dame. It's not just a pun. Several moments like this, where the language or tropes of one side of the equations cuts through into one of the other pieces in play and you realise there's a connection going on, that there's a through-current you hadn't thought about at all. The pun, the visual cue, the little moment of knowing is just the nudge you need to get you across into the deeper well of connection that Onyebuchi is drawing from.

And there are likewise moments of disconnection, of language choices that feel deliberately set to break you out of immersion, and make you step back from the story - anachronisms like the protagonist talking about "batting average" as a metaphor for success rating (and his conversation partner not knowing what he meant), meme references like "I don't think that word means what you think it means", sitting in an alley with a little kid planning a heist - an "impossible mission" - in a scene achingly reminiscent of the movie staple. It's full of knowing winks telling you that what's being done here is, always, deliberate.

And it works. It shouldn't, but it does, because it feeds back into this being a story about contrasting culture, and a character unsure of himself and his place in his city, his role in the events unfolding.

Aside from all this linguistic playfulness, there's a depth to the thematic core of the book that is surprisingly hefty for the relatively short page count. Because so much of the heart of the story turns back to the recently ended war and the very present current legacy of the violence enacted as part of it. Whether that's the injured ex-soldier we meet in a care-home, his one glass eye unnerving the protagonist, or the upcoming election whose result may bring about a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, uncovering ghosts and literal bones many wish left undisturbed, the spectre of the past hangs close overhead. Bouba himself fought, and he too must face up, by the end of the story, to his role in what came before, and what that might mean for his future.

And the story is unflinching about facing up to that reality. By the time it becomes a pressing concern, we've spent a lot of time along the road with Boubacar, seen him being kind to street kids, bantering with beautiful women, trying to do his best for a dead woman and to remember her as a person, not just a clue. There are things to be sympathetic with in his character and his actions. But there must also be a reckoning. Can doing good in the present outweigh the sins of the past? Can there ever be closure, or forgiveness? Those are all questions asked of the story, and the character. Onyebuchi doesn't necessarily have answers tied up in a bow, but he doesn't shy away from having his protagonist face up to them. There isn't an easy answer to many of these questions. But asking them on the page makes for deeply engaging, thoughtful reading, and a story that lingers after you close the final page.

There is one aspect of the whole that doesn't quite sing as loudly as the rest of the choir, and that's the logistical nuts and bolts of the mystery plot itself. If this were just a detective story, where the only focus was on solving the crime, that might be a problem. As it stands, there were a few moments where it was a little unclear how A led to B, but I found myself willing to gloss over them because it was far from the most important or most interesting thing going on. The mystery is there to serve some of the thematic interweaving, and so I found it less critical that it be executed absolutely perfectly. It never detracted from the atmosphere, the sense of a city poised on the edge of something big, and of a character trying to find how he fits into his own life. So it was more a niggle than anything else.

All in all, it's a beautifully written story, and I love how knowingly it messes around with how its different pieces all fit together. Tonal incongruity well managed is one of my absolute favourite things in books, and Onyebuchi does it with panache, leaving a novel worth lingering over, to make sure you enjoy how every word fits into the pattern of the whole.

Bouba is a veteran turned private eye caught adrift in French occupied West Africa, with the worst luck. "Fortune always left whatever room I walked into, which is why I don’t leave my place much these days," he says. A bleeding, strange woman stumbles into his house one night, then vanishes, only to be found hung up floating in the air. As an investigator, he needs to unravel the mystery, but as a mixed race vet, he finds himself in a precarious position.

I really enjoy Tochi Onyebuchi's worldbuilding: he gives us a strong sense of place without overwhelming the reader with unimportant details. Harmattan Season tackles colonialism and identity alongside the mystery, integrating them into the plot.

Onyebuchi is a storyteller, and this is a prime example of his craft.

This was an ok read for me. I liked how the colonial aspects of the country was communicated and how the dugulen were relegated to a lower standard of living g and existence bt yet how they manged to thrive colourfully.

However, I felt that the mystery/noir aspect was overshadowed by the socio-political narrative.

Even in a fantastical reimagining of West Africa teetering between colonial control and Indigenous resistance, there’s something comfortingly familiar about a hard boiled private eye who is reluctant to heed the call of adventure. When a bleeding young woman stumbles into Boubacar’s doorway and then vanishes, he becomes drawn into a tangled web of political corruption, supernatural powers and personal reckoning. The Harmattan winds churn dust through streets riddled with mysterious bombings and unexplained dead bodies hovering in the air. As Boubacar descends into the city’s seedy underbelly in search of answers, he’s forced to examine his own role in the clash between the Indigenous people and the French oppressors. Whose future is he fighting for? Author Tochi Onyebuchi, winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction and a Yale University alumnus, is a virtuoso of creating unique speculative worlds drawn from West African history and mythology that wholly immerse readers in his exhilarating stories.

The publisher’s tagline for Tochi Onyebuchi’s Harmattan Season calls his novel “hard-boiled fantasy noir: Raymond Chandler meets P. Djèlí Clark in a postcolonial West Africa.” That’s fair, but it’s also very much its own thing. Some noir tropes in the novel are familiar: The protagonist is a struggling, world-weary private detective; he’s in an uneasy relationship with the police; the city has layers of money, power, class, and corruption; and an initial mystery turns out to be much more complex and wide-reaching than it initially appeared. Some elements have a lot of resonance for anyone who’s experienced or read about postcolonial African history. Even the most surreal fantastic elements of the book end up being employed in ways that eventually make some sense. But despite some familiar elements, their combination and development is unique and engaging. I wouldn’t quite call Harmattan Season an easy read, but it absolutely kept me interested throughout, and I was entirely satisfied with the ending.

In a recent Skiffy and Fanty interview with Shaun Duke and me, Onyebuchi said he was introduced to detective fiction during a college class. After gaining attention and awards with speculative YA fiction including Beasts Made of Night, Riot Baby, comics and video games, the nonfiction (S)kinfolk, and his first adult SF novel, Goliath, he said he wanted to try something different, less impenetrable and more “sneakily complicated” where the reader could follow along, so he returned to his old love of crime/noir. I haven’t read his prior work, but Onyebuchi certainly succeeded in making Harmattan Season approachable for me. It starts out pretty mysterious, of course, with the limited third-person present tense perspective as the narrator tries to figure out what crime is even happening, let alone what’s behind it all, but that’s just detective fiction for you.

Although things start expanding and shifting pretty rapidly, the opening of the novel is fairly typical for a noir detective novel: A woman steps into the protagonist’s place and asks for help. Less typical is that she’s already wounded; after he hides her, and the policier search his place, she’s gone from his closet.

Right, that’s policier, not police. I picked up some vocabulary while reading this book, some from context and some from Internet searches. Policier is easy to figure out, along with some other French words from this unspecified country’s colonial influences (although the past is still present here in many ways, such as the introduction of loans, which formerly had been illegal under local leadership and now dominate many people’s lives, including the protagonist’s, and the fact that French people are still moving here and taking the best jobs). Some of the words from the indigenous dugulen people’s language are harder to find, but that didn’t slow down my reading once I accepted that those would just have to come through via context, just like unfamiliar made-up words in any fantasy or science fiction.

The Harmattan of the title is a word with West African origins, “from or akin to Twi haramata” (according to Merriam-Webster), meaning a dry, dusty, seasonal wind. It can be hard to endure, and it can bury and erase places and people, but at least in this novel, it can also be seen as an opportunity for renewal and even rebirth. If you don’t have markers of the past anymore, you’re not as bound by its restrictions, and you have more choices for your future. And at least it’s not the wet season.

The book’s protagonist/narrator, Boubacar, can certainly use a reset, as can his troubled homeland. He has a very uncomfortable past, as a veteran traumatized by his past (what’s happened to him, and what he has done), a present where he’s barely scraping by (and merely tolerated or even mistrusted as a deux-fois man of both French and local heritage), and a future with dim prospects. He’s more or less frenemies with an old army buddy who’s now a policeman, and there’s a woman who lets him run an unpaid tab at her shisha house, but he doesn’t have any real friends.

Later on, he does acquire an ally of sorts, an urchin who offers to help him acquire information. The kid claims to be assisted by a gang of cronies, and it’s never clear whether this is true; meanwhile, Bouba doesn’t inform him that he has no money to pay for this help, so they’re both sort of scamming each other. Somehow, as they work together and keep getting thrown together, they come to rely on each other. Watching their interactions was the most fun part of the book for me.

The female characters aren’t deeply characterized and sometimes seem inexplicably drawn toward the protagonist, whom many might view externally and simplistically as a loser; however, that’s a trope commonly seen in noir detective fiction. There’s so much else going on in this novel that I was giving this aspect a pass, and then Bouba started asking more about people, not just events, and then the final chapter elevated everything. What Onyebuchi did with that was really lovely.

The fantastic elements start in the fourth chapter, when the missing girl re-enters the plot in an inexplicably surreal way. Bouba soon finds out that she’s not the first to have undergone this mysterious phenomenon, and later, it happens to a lot of people (and objects) at once, not just one at a time. The provincial government attributes this to terrorism, and now everyone in the city (who’s not rich) is in trouble, under a crackdown. Could the events be related to an upcoming election? Is it possible that things will change for the better or get much worse?

Since Bouba can talk to people that the police can’t (and the army investigative unit won’t), and he even gets answers sometimes (although sometimes he gets beatings instead), he keeps asking questions, in hopes of resolving the situation, or at least understanding it. He finds himself under uncomfortably greater scrutiny than ever before, and eventually moves from asking questions to taking direct steps.

Getting to know Boubacar and his city is really interesting; his past and its past slowly unfold as the mystery progresses, and the social commentary not only enhances the mystery, but eventually helps it to progress to a resolution. The fantastic elements are not explained, but in the end, they don’t seem much more surreal than life itself in modern times, with all its complications and unexpected turns. What’s most important is that Bouba persists and eventually moves from endurance to action. I ended up being really happy with Harmattan Season, and I highly recommend it.

3.25 stars on Storygraph.

This isn't a higher rating for me mostly because I should have known that this wouldn't really be a book "for me" -- the gritty, noir, detective tone of it all wasn't my jam.

Really solid thematic work though, in my opinion. Heavily talking about colonialism and cultural (and racial) identity, particularly for someone who is biracial.

My thanks to NetGalley and Tor Publishing Group for an advance copy of this novel that takes place in a Western African country, colonized by the French, with winds of both natural and unnatural forces threatening to blow everything away, and a private detective who can walk in both worlds doing his best to figure out what is happening.

I have always felt that crime novels can really tell us a lot of who we are as a people. Nonfiction sometimes has an agenda, prove the forces of good use technology, or go to lengths to find murders. In fiction one knows within pages that every part of the system is corrupt, and no body cares. Except for that lone knight, male, female, it doesn't matter. That character not afraid to hit those mean streets, be it LA in the 30's, London in the Victorian Age, a fantasy world, even a West African nation, colonized by the French, who still use a heavy hand. A character who no matter how much they have given up, how knocked down they get, how many lies they have to carry, still tries to do what is right. Crime novels tell us much about who we are as a people, how low we can descend, and how hard it is to do right. Even when one is caught between worlds in more ways than one. Harmattan Season is by award-winning author Tochi Onyebuchi and tells of a private detective who starts with a simple quest to find a missing body, and finds himself caught in a battle that might lift the lid, literally of his homeland.

Boubacar has a small room, over a smaller office in a building loaded with families, in a West African nation, currently under French control. Bouba, as people call him, is both a veteran, a private detective and what is called a deux fois, a person of both worlds. Bouba has gained a reputation for finding things, both for the people who live here, and the French who control the area. Recently Bouba has had a problem finding work, and his bills are even beginning to scare him. A knocking awakes him, a woman, bleeding from the stomach who speaks only a word or two, before the sounds of the police are heard. Bouba hides the woman, but she disappears, only to be found floating the middle of the city square, dead. Bouba is tasked to find out what is going on, for this woman is not the only body found floating, something that Bouba has not heard, which worries him. What could be so powerful, so strong, that no one is talking about 6 bodies. The more Bouba investigates, the more that he finds that something is going on, something much bigger that murder. As the winds of the Harmattan start to hit the city, Bouba is afraid that everything he knows will be blown away.

A mix of film noir, colonialism, and magical realism, all mixed well into a very tasty story. Onyebuchi is a very good writer, able to craft a world that seems slightly familiar, and yet different, mix in French influences, and hints of magic. Until the magic gets big. Bouba is a great character, and Onyebuchi does a good job of showing both his strong sense of responsibility, and the difficulties of being of two worlds. There is a scene where Bouba is being berated by a street thief and a school loan officer about his debts that really drives this point home. The story is good, the plot moves along, and is revealed slowly. Sometimes there is a little bit of an info dump, but even that makes sense in the way the story works.

I enjoyed the world, the mystery, the reasons why, and why Bouba does what he does. I love the influence of film noir, fantasy and a world that could exist. Onyebuchi is very good mixing all this, and crafting an intriguing and compelling story. This is the first I have read by Tochi Onyebuchi, but I look forward to reading many more.

My rating: 4.5

Although “fantasy noir” and “mystery” are good descriptions of the genre of this book, it can also be classified as magic realism - in my opinion.
From Brittanica:

“…chiefly Latin-American narrative strategy that is characterized by the matter-of-fact inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction. … Some scholars have posited that magic realism is a natural outcome of postcolonial writing, which must make sense of at least two separate realities—the reality of the conquerors as well as that of the conquered.“

While this story takes place in Africa, the setting is definitely post-colonial, and the magic embedded in the story takes a hard boiled detective story to new heights.

The story is written in first person from the perspective of our intrepid detective, Boubacar. As we follow Bouba’s quest to find out what happened to the bleeding woman who stumbled through his door, we gain a picture of the uneasy peace between colonizer and the colonized. We learn about the history of the place, Boubacar’s personal history, and what drives him.

Pros:

the world-building is top notch - the setting, the history, the culture

the characters are well-fleshed out. It’s easy to gain a sense of who they are.

a wonderful plot - as with any good mystery, it’s a lot of fun following the detective around searching for clues.

excellent writing

Cons:

I have just one little quibbling criticism. In several of the long conversations between two characters, I got lost on which character was talking, and would have to go back to the beginning of the conversation to clarify. This would be easy to fix.

Will I read more of this author? Yes!

Positives: The setting is strong in the specifics - language, politics, history. The fantastical element is unexpected and striking.
Negatives: Scenes change very quickly between chapters, in a way that often feels rushed/confusing. Some scenes feel unfinished; the book, at times, feels more like a particularly well-written outline than a full draft.