Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon - Wole Talabi
- Publisher – Daw Books
- Published – Out Now
- Price – £22.00 hardback | £2.99 Kindle
This one was always going to be a hard sell for me, frankly. Urban fantasy and stories about gods walking the earth aren't among my favourites and I often find it hard to connect with them. There's plenty to like here, and I gave it a real effort, but I ended up DNFing at around 37%. Here's the blurb:
A mythic tale of disgruntled gods, revenge, and a heist across two worlds, perfect for fans of Nnedi Okorafor, Neil Gaiman, Marlon James, and Karen Lord
Shigidi is a disgruntled and demotivated nightmare god in the Orisha spirit company, reluctantly answering prayers of his few remaining believers to maintain his existence long enough to find his next drink. When he meets Nneoma, a sort-of succubus with a long and secretive past, everything changes for him.
Together, they attempt to break free of his obligations and the restrictions that have bound him to his godhood and navigate the parameters of their new relationship in the shadow of her past. But the elder gods that run the Orisha spirit company have other plans for Shigidi, and they are not all aligned—or good.
From the boisterous streets of Lagos to the swanky rooftop bars of Singapore and the secret spaces of London, Shigidi and Nneoma will encounter old acquaintances, rival gods, strange creatures, and manipulative magicians as they are drawn into a web of revenge, spirit business, and a spectacular heist across two worlds that will change Shigidi’s understanding of himself forever and determine the fate of the Orisha spirit company.
This has been compared quite widely to American Gods1, and though I can see the comparison it's fairly surface-level. Both books are about gods walking the earth and interacting with mortals, but that's about where the similarities end. What makes stories like American Gods and G. Willow Wilson's Alif the Unseen work, though, is that they have a mortal character at the centre of them to ground us in the world. Shigidi is lacking that grounding, and I struggled to find any way to connect with the characters - especially Nneoma, a succubus who spends much of the narrative sexually assaulting people.
When the writing is good it's great, but there are moments - particularly in flashback sequences - where it becomes quite plodding and dense, and I felt like those sections were doing little more than providing exposition that didn't yet have any context to be meaningful. I'm sure it all pays off in the end, but I never got to that point.
The main thing I struggled with was trying to take the world that we're presented with seriously. This isn't something unique to Shigidi, it's something I struggle with in lots of urban fantasy when their are shadowy organisations whose role revolves around keeping the magical world secret from mortals. What little we see of the Orisha spirit company reminded me far too much of Monsters, Inc., and I couldn't separate that from Shigidi's early missions to kill humans by sneaking into their bedrooms and inflicting them with lethal nightmares.
I was managing okay with it and willing to give it a chance and see where it was going right up until the point at which Alesteir Crowley became an important character. After a scene in which Nneoma sexually assaults a magically-bound man in an alleyway and then grants Crowley immortality so that he can return to the narrative a hundred years later as a key part of their heist team, I realised that I was enjoying the book less often than I wasn't, and I decided to put it down.
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