Like COVID-19, like Grey

• Published date: 03 February 2023
• Publication title: Nigeria - The Nation

Umar Turaki's novel, 'Such A Beautiful Thing To Behold', reminds me so much of those early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, those days when farmers couldn't farm, those days drivers couldn't drive, those days friends couldn't hug, those days Mecca was closed to pilgrimage, those days the world went on holiday. The novel will amaze and excite you in equal measures.

Unlike the COVID-19, what afflicted the people Turaki wrote about is called Grey, and it is an epidemic because it affects a town. Grey holds it by the jugular and is draining the blood of its inhabitants.

Nothing warned the people of Pilam that a strange sickness was about to unfurl across their lives with impunity. They were a happy people until Grey put things asunder, fell things apart and compelled the centre not to hold.

The sickness has no seeming cause, or remedy. It makes it difficult seeing colour again. It makes everything drab and leaden, like black-and-white films. It makes people kill themselves with knives, ropes, just anything capable of taking life. Wrists are slashed, rat poison is consumed and so on.

Corpses litter forests and birds and the weather makes faces indistinguishable.

Men are forced to form groups to sneak across the...