Nigerian spirits do a heist at the British Museum, but struggle to deliver on the promises of that brilliant conceit
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| Cover illustration by Jim Tierny |
This book is a welcome breath of fresh air into the pantheon of stories about gods and humans. No longer are we revisiting the familiar names from Norse mythology and Greek mythology, perpetually retold and reused and recycled, with genuinely fresh takes few and far between. Instead, Wole Talabi is presenting us with a pantheon that many Western readers, or readers from the Global North, will find unfamiliar: that of the orishas, or the divine spirits from Yoruba mythology. The titular Shigidi is a very minor orisha, whose responsibilities involve sitting on a sleeper’s chest to engender nightmares, and eventually suffocate the life out of the victim.
It’s not a very nice job, and Shigidi’s physical form matches that valence: he is small, squat, and ugly. But he doesn’t really have any control over it. He works for the Orisha Spirit Company—has, in fact, been created solely for the position he now holds—and he must navigate the familiar corporate challenges of unfriendly supervisors, reductions in human prayers which cut into the company’s bottom line, and competitors in the field who have their own plans for the victim he’s been sent to nightmare-suffocate. One such competitor is a succubus, Nneoma, but after a heated exchange of views they decide to team up and go freelance. This puts the team in the perfect position to take a job from Shigidi’s erstwhile boss: namely, to make their way into the British Museum and retrieve the titular MacGuffin, the Brass Head of Obalufon.
So: we have an erotic (because succubus) heist, featuring Yoruba gods stealing back their cultural artifacts from the British Museum, with a bonus commentary on modern corporate drudgery. This is so awesome on so many levels. The opportunities to do brilliant things with this narrative conceit are boundless.
And so many of them were missed.
I really, really don’t want to write the rest of this review. I wanted this book to be so much better than it was. It could have been so much better than it was. And I think, on the whole, that each missed opportunity is reasonably small, so if you think the conceit sounds awesome, then maybe you should stop reading right now, buy this book, and enjoy it. Maybe you won’t be bothered by the things that bothered me, and that would be ideal.
But if you are curious, or perhaps you’ve already read this book and were dissatisfied, read on, and perhaps what comes next will resonate with you, as I try to articulate why this book disappointed me.
First, the narrative does the thing where the timeline jumps around. So we start in medias res, with Shigidi bleeding out in the back of a cab, his arm ripped off, blood everywhere, monsters chasing them—clearly something has gone badly wrong. Nneoma tells him she loves him. Fade to black. OK, cool—I’m engaged, I want to know how they got into such a fix.
But the remainder of the timeline jumping around just didn’t work—to the point that after the second or third hop, I started looking at the copyright page and the acknowledgements to see if I’d somehow missed a Book 1 in this series. Things that hadn’t happened yet were being referred to and briefly summarized, as if I was expected to remember them from a previous book. Then, when those events finally take place, twenty or fifty pages later, they feel redundant and pointless, because I had already gotten that ‘remember when this happened?’ summary earlier in the book.
One case in point is the events surrounding Shigidi and Nneoma’s decision to team up and go freelance. We hear about that as a done deal from the past, before the narrative jumps backward and shows us how it happened. In principle, this could be useful for elaborating on another component of the narrative—not the specific plot-based events, perhaps, but certainly the character arc surrounding Shigidi and Nneoma’s relationship. A continuing thread involves Shigidi trying to get Nneoma to admit to loving him, which she is unwilling to do for backstory reasons. This plays out in various conversations, one of which, infuriatingly, takes place during an extremely time-constrained heist. Priorities, people! But the point is: the whole question around Nneoma's admission of love doesn’t matter. We already know that Nneoma’s going to eventually say that she loves him. It happened on page 3! It was resolved before we knew it was important! So there’s no tension or uncertainty surrounding that plot arc, which means all the jumping forward and backward serves no purpose, except to make me wonder whether I picked up Book 2 by mistake.
Next, let’s talk about Shigidi himself. He’s created to be a small, ugly, minor god, and physically he is small and ugly. He doesn’t like his job, he doesn’t like his appearance; he’s miserable in all aspects of his life. There is such richness here to explore, from divine work-life balance; self-perception (what is ‘ugly’ when you are divine?); body-image and views of beauty. For example, one component of Shigidi’s ‘ugliness’ is scarification marks. Scarification, Wikipedia tells us, is the act of scratching or cutting patterns into one’s skin, after which follow-up treatment, such as repeated irritation, or packing clay or ash into the wound, ensures that the healing process leaves visible scars in the pattern of the original wounds. It is a deliberate, culturally significant procedure in many parts of the world, and if you click through to the Wikipedia entry, you can see that the results of this undoubtedly painful procedure can, in fact, be quite beautiful. To be sure, Westerners don’t particularly care for the practice, and so Christian missionaries in Africa spoke against the procedure, and colonial governments straight-out criminalized it. So, in sum, scarification and its relationship to beauty—especially in the context of orishas—raises some very deep questions! Why does Shigidi consider his own scarification ugly? What is his relationship with the culture whose patterns are etched into his body, that he thinks so poorly of them? What is beauty to an orisha, and why do specifically Western human beauty standards apply to him?
We never find out. Shigidi is ugly, doesn’t like being ugly, and pretty much the first thing he does after meeting Nneoma is allow her to remake his body into something super hot and muscled and glistening and abs-full. Through the power of sex-magic, to be sure, because Nneoma is a succubus, so there’s a certain amount of orgasmic potency to his transformation. That’s fine, I guess. Talabi wanted to write an erotic thriller, and this is one way to do that. But by doing that, he disregards all of the really interesting issues implied in Shigidi’s self-image as a corporate drudge. Shigidi was ugly. That lasted less than 40 pages. Then he becomes hot. Next.
OK, next: let’s talk a bit about Shigidi’s status as a corporate drone. This was so promising. I love the idea of a pantheon of gods operating according to bureaucratic norms. The idea of audits of prayer-income, overbearing supervisors, board meetings devolving into chaos as gods try to smite each other—it’s delightful.
But in this book it doesn’t quite work with the cosmology of the spirit world. Because it seems that the Orisha Spirit Company has been in existence for a long time. Shigidi was created to fill a role in that company; he was literally created to be a worker drone. Since records of Shigidi predate human corporate bureaucracy, and the Orisha Spirit Company predates Shigidi, then that means that the gods decided to organize themselves according to a human cultural construct before human culture constructed it. Or, conceivably, humans got the ideas of corporate infrastructure from the gods—which is again, a delightful world-building conceit—but if so, then shouldn’t the idea of board meetings and progress reports have originated in Nigeria? (I mean, maybe they did! People with business degrees, please weigh in! But my impression is that the daily grind was imported to, not exported from, West Africa.) There are ways of making the whole corporate-gods shtick really sing, but this book doesn’t do it. It just invokes the idea as kind of a gag, and ignores all the world-building implications.
Moving on from Shigidi and his employers, let’s discuss Nneoma. As I've mentioned, she’s a succubus. I’m not a huge fan of the phenomenon of succubi (especially in the absence of incubi), because I think they’re based in a deeply misogynistic perspective that sexuality in women is inherently dangerous and bad; and also that men cannot be expected to control their sexual appetites. But I went to a panel at Worldcon in which Wole Talabi made a really interesting case for Nneoma: in the same way that Shigidi must kill people for the Orisha Spirit Company, because that was the role he was created to fill, Nneoma must kill people (through sex) because that is how she is designed to live. It’s not her fault; her deadliness to mortals is also not something she enjoys. Rather, it’s a necessity. So for different reasons, these two represent a complicated relation with mortals, in which malice and deadliness are entirely disconnected. That was neat. I was on board with that.
But this book doesn’t follow through on any of those promises. Because Nneoma, as written, absolutely loves fucking people to death, and also enjoys engendering pointless jealousy in men too, just for kicks. And, remember, Shigidi is an ugly miserable corporate drone for less than 40 pages before he gets orgasmically turned into a thirst machine and sets up as a freelancer. And even though I can’t complain about a book being super sex-oriented when one of its characters is a literal succubus, I can complain when the erotic bits are so clunkily written that they’re not even hot.
Clunkily written? Oh, yes. Let’s talk about the writing style. It’s, as I implied, clunky. For example, after descriptions of women’s nipples in a nightclub we get, ‘Shadowy people-shapes gyrated sensually against each other.’ Sensually? Oh, good, thanks for specifying. Do the sexually attractive sexy people do sex sexily together? Or this: ‘Her flowing red dress was loose and flowed over her body’s [sic] where it encountered her curves.’ The typo I can forgive, but the repetition of ‘flowing’ and ‘flowed’ is a real clanger. (Don’t worry—it’s not all male gaze. We get lots of descriptions of Shigidi’s muscles too.)
And then there’s this approach to prepositions: ‘… the words of a man with whom he was completely in love with and for whom, in the moments when they lay together, he’d sworn he would do anything for.’
‘With whom he was in love with’? ‘For whom...he would do anything for?’ Yikes. I myself think there’s absolutely nothing wrong with preposition stranding (‘who(m) he was in love with’), but if you’re going for the more self-consciously formal pied-piping construction (‘with whom he was in love’), you’ve got to remember to leave out the final preposition. Getting smacked with that kind of sloppiness in the face, twice in quick succession, really ate up a lot of my goodwill about the writing style.
I recognize that a lot of these problems are specific to me. Writing style is an incredibly personal judgment, and if Talabi’s style works for you, then you’ll probably enjoy the eroticism as well. And although I really wanted the book to dig into the corporate commentary and the world-building, perhaps you’re on board more for the British Museum heist—which, as far as heists go, is lively and fast-paced (except for the bit where Shigidi and Nneoma pause to talk about their feelings, despite the inconveniently brief window of opportunity rapidly closing around them). And there are some stunning images evoked in this book as scenes dissolve into other scenes.
I think this book achieves a lot of what it set out to do. But the things that it could have done and didn’t do unfortunately happened to be exactly the things that I was most interested in; and so I put it down feeling annoyed and disappointed. But that was me. Maybe you’ll be different.
Highlights
Nerd coefficient: 6/10, still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore
- Brilliant conceit
- Heisting the British museum
- Clunky writing
- Full of missed opportunities to explore things that Clara, specifically, wanted to see explored
- Disappointingly traditional use of succubus as main character
Reference: Talabi, Wole. Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon [Gollancz 2023/Daw 2023].
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.
