The Memory of Love [Paperback]

"The Memory of Love" is a story set in Freetown, Sierra Leone featuring two triangular relationships separated by a generation, with parallel accounts set during the political unrest in 1969 at the time of the Apollo 11 moon landing and during the period 1999 to 2001 following the brutal civil war.
The earlier era features Julius Kamara and Elias Cole who are both lecturers at the same University. Whereas Julius is charismatic,politically motivated and an idealist, Elias Cole is traditional, politically disengaged, and possessed with only mediocre talent.These two characters have only one thing in common; their love for Saffia.
Julius' life and fate is dictated by his political ambitions and that of Elias by his infatuation with Saffia.
Move forward 30 years and Adrian a disenchanted Psychologist from London takes advantage of an overseas government sponsored post in Sierra Leone to research Post Traumatic Stress disorder. However, underpinning his decision to take up this post, is his need to escape from a stagnating marriage and to discover what he really wants out of life.He befriends Kai Mansaray a dedicated and accomplished young trauma surgeon who works tirelessly at the city hospital.
Like so many other victims of the civil war, Kai too is suffering from PTSD played out as recurrent nightmares and insomnia. Young hopes,plans and romances are destroyed and by a sad twist of fate work to Adrian's advantage.
Adrian is the centre point of the story which oscillates between the city hospital where Elias Cole, now terminally ill, talks through his earlier life at the university in an attempt to seek absolution, and the local mental asylum.At the asylum Adrian gains much of his experience in PTSD where he works under the sceptical guidance of Dr Attila a senior Psychiatrist and Ileana a romanian Psychologist.
And so the story weaves between tales of aspiration and love, shattered dreams and tragedy as the various components of their lives are teased out.
The strength of this book lies in its beautifully evocative prose which instantly transports you to the tropical heat and monsoon rains of Freetown Sierra Leone, and to the well researched and intelligently constructed story all of which create a sympathetic and powerful piece of literature worthy of the highest accolade.

Aminatta Forna's memoir (The Devil That Danced on the Water) was, for me, an introduction to the recent history of Sierra Leone that went far beyond the headlines... it was a brave and true account. I enjoyed her first novel (Ancestor Stones)with its interwoven stories, but The Memory of Love book had me ignoring children, skipping meals and sneaking an extra half hour during my lunch break so I could spend more time with the characters. It's beautiful. She takes the reader deep into the heart of a story of two generations, betrayal, love and longing...and in these pages one travels to another place - to Free Town at the heady time of Independence, through the country's darkest times of war and, in the 'present day', with its traumatised people as they try to rebuild their city, their country and their lives. It's impossible not to fall in love with these characters - so intimately does the reader come to know them. It's Forna's skill that throughout, the politics (both personal and historic) remain as complicated as we know life to be - whereever we are. This is her best book yet...

Set primarily in the late 1990s in Sierra Leone, a time in which a brutal Civil War is being waged and over fifty thousand people killed, this novel comes as a surprise. Telling two tales of love in two different generations, the author is mightily challenged to be true to her setting and time periods while also allowing the love stories to develop naturally within this fraught environment. She accomplishes this, largely, by referring to the war only obliquely for most of the novel, with flashbacks by individual speakers providing details of the war and explaining how the memories of war have affected the behavior of characters whom the reader has come to know. A flash-forward which takes place in 2003, after the end of the war, occurs at the end to reconcile elements of the plot and themes.

As the novel opens, Elias Cole, a former professor and Dean of the university in Freetown, is now an elderly hospital patient, dying a slow disease which robs him of his breath. There, he is a patient of Adrian Lockheart, a British psychiatrist who has left his wife and daughter behind in England while he works for six months in the hospital near the university. Adrian quickly discovers that the dying Elias has memories that he is impelled to share about his life in the 1970s, many of these involving Saffia, the wife of Julius Kamara, a young professor. Old-fashioned story-telling conveys episodes from Elias's memories of his much younger life, and the author emphasizes from the beginning that it is with these three characters that the entire story really begins--Elias Cole, Julius Kamara, and Saffia.

A parallel narrative, with different main characters, takes place sometime around 2001, near the end of the war, with flashbacks to events of the late 1990s. Kai Mansaray, a brilliant surgeon befriends Adrian Lockheart. On one trip to visit Kai's family, Adrian's life is changed dramatically when he recognizes a former patient who has left the hospital without being fully treated. The war stories which have dramatically affected this patient's life--and that of Kai's family--are revealed, along with the lives of those who have had to spend two years or more in refugee camps. The brutality of the attacking soldiers is almost beyond belief: there are no "good guys" here--the two sides are equally brutal. Still, Adrian manages to fall in love.

The author's descriptions of the war are of events related to individual characters, but they are generalized in terms of the who, why, and when of warfare, and the author never really goes into the kind of detail which would distinguish this war from that of other African countries, including neighboring Liberia, under Charles Taylor. Nor does she mention the issue of Sierra Leone's "blood diamonds," which are said to have financed the rebel movement, both in Sierra Leone and in Liberia. No names of real historical characters surface here at all, and I often found myself wondering what the author's overall purpose was: A love story in the midst of war? A war story and its effects on lovers? Or a more fully developed examination of the overall power of love and its loss on a universal scale? The author seems to be aiming for all of these with the novel's length but not quite reaching her thematic goals, not quite integrating her many episodes and her large cast of characters with an over-arching structure. A strong novel in terms of emotion, this one would have benefited from editing much of the extraneous detail. Mary Whipple