Habila’s writing is deeply evocative. Waiting for an Angel starts with the protagonist in a jail cell for political ‘crimes’, and although we trace back to more naïve times, the sense of injustice brought about by terse, constrained writing never leaves us.
It’s not all oppressive gloom. In one of the darkest sections, we follow Loomba trapped in a jail cell in disgusting conditions, his own love having left him, forced to write love poems for his jailer’s romantic fancy. Despite these poems being written for a facsimile of love, or perhaps because of the paradox of conditions in which they’re written, they’re beautiful and heart-wrenching. I immediately purchased a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets after finishing the chapter.
Not everything adds up - towards the end the book blurs the fourth walls in confusing ways. However the main message hits home: no one will ‘publish a novel which nobody would buy, because the people are too poor, too illiterate, and too busy trying to stay out of the way of the police and army to read’.