Ari Levine's Reviews > Glory

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE

2.5, rounded down. What an endless slog through 400+ unnecessary pages, and a major conceptual misfire from a truly talented novelist, who was executing a flawed premise with extreme verbosity and repetitiveness.

The novel begins with possibly its weakest 100 pages, consisting of crude, almost entirely wit- and irony-free (and justifiably outraged) political satire about the corrupt, incompetent, brutal authoritarian regime of Robert Mugabe and his successors in Zimbabwe, the horrific facts of which are almost beyond, or maybe completely beyond parody: rigged elections ensuring one-party rule, legalized looting on a grandiose scale, an economy wrecked by asset-stripping and foreign sanctions, banned and opposition party members tortured in prison, death squads murdering villages of innocent civilians. These outrages might have been more outrageous if they had been described in non-fictional, journalistic prose than as forced satirical allegory.

Beyond the nod to Orwell, casting humans as animals (compared to what Art Spiegelman accomplished in Maus) added nothing to the narrative: horses are politicians, dogs are soldiers, and goats are common people. And since these animals are so heavily anthropomorphized-- or maybe these humans are so lightly animalized, to the point that I forgot they were animals for long stretches, until I was snapped out of it by the jarring ridiculousness of pigs using smartphones or dogs wielding machine guns.

But the Destiny and red butterfly chapters were undeniably wrenching and moving, and would have worked their spell as a much shorter, tighter, genuinely moving short novel. And the final chapters, where Buluwayo describes/prescribes a future revolutionary path for Jidada, and the healing that would follow when the regime's defenders recognized the fellow humanity of their fellow citizens,
allowed for a greater degree of moral ambiguity and complexity, transcending the crude binaries of the rest of the novel.