Something I started thinking about while reading the early chapters of Adam Oyebanji’s novel Esperance was the extent to which this book’s story doesn’t seem like it should work, even when in practice it does. Initially, Esperance frames itself as a very straightforward murder mystery set in contemporary Chicago, with the plot following a detective, Ethan Krol, who is tasked with investigating a bizarre series of killings that seem to defy logical explanation. Over the course of this narrative, each step in Ethan’s investigation demonstrates a simple fact that he initially refuses to accept—that the crime he is investigating can only be explained via supernatural means.
It’s this merger of the tropes of an otherwise realistic crime-thriller with what is very clearly a paranormal science-fiction story that initially doesn’t seem like it should work. While Ethan, as the novel’s protagonist, spends most of this book assuming that the crimes he is investigating can be explained logically, we as readers in a sense know the resolution of this story even before that story has begun: Esperance is marketed as a work of science fiction, and because of that we know that, however hard Ethan may try to locate potential clues and people of interest, he’s eventually going to discover that the murders he is investigating will be the work of a supernatural power he could not possibly have ever hoped to explain. This investigation, in other words, is pointless.
Yet in practice, all of this does work—because Oyebanji builds tension not from the question of who committed his book’s crime, but instead from the many conflicting interpretations of its story. Esperance starts out as a mystery in which the murderer’s identity could in broad terms be argued to be revealed relatively early. Nevertheless, it sustains itself via the continually emerging questions of what the actions of the characters signify about the true nature of the narrative, as ultimately Oyebanji reveals that the crime which these characters think they are investigating may not actually be the one around which the story revolves.
This is all introduced through a framework that appears in the book’s opening chapter. As Esperance begins, Ethan is called onto the scene of an unusually brutal homicide. On the twentieth floor of an expensive apartment building, a medical student named Amadi Okoro has been found dead beside the body of his infant son, Benedict. As Ethan learns from the other officers on the scene, Amadi’s wife, Jennifer Freeman Okoro, was found unconscious in the next room, and has been taken to the nearest hospital where doctors have confirmed that, while she was sedated via an unknown drug, she is otherwise totally unharmed. Confusingly, while Amadi and Benedict’s deaths seem recent, no one has been in or out of the home in many days, with the doorman of the building, Al Mills, reporting that the last person to visit the Okoros was a washing machine delivery man who came by over one week prior, and who signed in under the name “A. Bello.”
On top of all of these mysteries, Ethan’s mind is dominated by a single confusing fact that makes every other detail of this crime appear trivial. Despite living on the twentieth floor of an apartment building in Chicago, Amadi and Benedict seem to have died by drowning in thousands of gallons of seawater that mysteriously flooded their living room, only for this liquid to vanish just as quickly as it appeared.
There’s a formula that crime thrillers tend to follow, and which Oyebanji emulates here. As Ethan dispassionately examines this scene, he is initially presented to the reader as an entirely objective observer—an authority of sorts who confronts the bizarre and surreal violence of Amadi’s and Benedict’s deaths, and who responds to this violence by working to contain it within a clearly defined explanation of cause and effect. Towards this end, Ethan studies the details of this crime scene, quietly testing his own interpretation of these events against the evidence at his disposal.
It’s through Ethan’s perceptions, then, that we learn that the Okoros’ apartment lacks a bathtub, with the bathroom featuring only a shower stall and an extremely fragile glass sink. Likewise, as Ethan walks around the Okoros’ living room, we learn that, while the entire apartment is spotlessly clean, there are also odd piles of plaster dust in the corners, and strange holes that have been drilled directly into the walls. When Ethan examines the bedroom in which Jennifer Okoro was found, he notes how the imprint that her weight has left on the blankets implies that this woman was awkwardly standing over her bed at the exact moment she collapsed—a fact which in turn implies she may have known she was about to lose consciousness before she did so.
Critically, all of these details elicit subtly conflicting versions of the same narrative. Amadi and Benedict drowned, but without a bathtub or suitably large sink, so where did this water come from? Similarly, do the piles of plaster dust indicate that the holes drilled into the walls were recently created? For that matter, if Jennifer Okoro knew she was about to lose consciousness, does this mean that she perhaps had a hand in the deaths of her husband and son, and has sedated herself so as to deflect suspicion?
These alternate interpretations of the story emerge constantly as Ethan wanders around the home, and yet it is also in this context that Oyebanji introduces an additional layer of ambiguity: As Ethan is perhaps just a little too quick to notice upon arriving on this crime scene, Amadi Okoro is Black, while his son’s lighter skin tone leads Ethan to assume that Jennifer Okoro must be white. This brief observation initially appears innocuous, and yet it nevertheless takes on an uncomfortable weight as Ethan, a white police officer, begins displaying a subdued prejudice as he investigates the murder of an African American father and his son.
When Ethan questions the doorman of the building, for example, he responds to what could potentially be a racist comment about Amadi with an ambiguous smile “designed to show he understood perfectly” (p.10). It is unclear whether this smile represents a skilled attempt on Ethan’s part to put a potential suspect at ease so as to prompt him to reveal more information, or a literal signaling to Al Mills that he agrees with the implied sentiment that Amadi may have been difficult to work with because he was Black. Similarly, as Ethan wanders around the Okoro home, he reflects upon the family’s wealth with a casual envy which could easily be read as resentment. When, later that day after work, Ethan takes his daughter, Cara, out to dinner to celebrate her birthday, he expresses misgivings about the man to whom Cara has become engaged—misgivings he attributes to unexplained “differences” which he insists exist between Cara and her fiancé.
The implications of these odd moments set up a question that lingers in the background of Esperance’s plot. As Ethan fixates on a primary suspect in this case—the delivery man who was the last to see the Okoros alive—increasingly numerous comments and fixations on Ethan’s part cause this story to begin following two alternate versions of the same narrative. In one, Ethan is characterized as a noble police officer dutifully working to solve a murder, and who eventually sets out on a quest to track down the most likely suspect so as to prevent future killings. In another, Ethan is a racist police officer who resents the wealth of the African American family whose deaths he is investigating and has refused to attend his daughter’s wedding because he doesn’t approve of the fact that her fiancé isn’t white, and whose only suspect in this murder investigation is a washing machine delivery man who was unhelpfully described by Al Mills as being Black, and having “black-guy hair” (p.10).
It’s with these questions established that the second of this book’s two protagonists, Abidemi Eniola, is introduced. Much like Ethan, Abidemi (or, as she soon comes to be called, Abi) appears in the story very abruptly without any supportive context. Possibly having teleported directly into the middle of a park in Britain, Abi’s story opens as she finds herself standing behind a family whom she unintentionally startles, and who then remark with confusion that they didn’t see her approach. Via scattered comments that Abi endures from those around her, we learn fragmented details about her identity and background. As she is frequently and unnecessarily told by others, she is apparently almost unnaturally tall, and speaks with an odd American accent that makes her sound like she’s constantly imitating a TV western from the 1930s. When asked about her origins, Abi says only that she is from Nigeria, though even this she offers only after a young boy randomly suggests to her that this is the case.
Most important of all, however, is the fact that, as Abi’s narration soon reveals, she possesses the mysterious ability to wirelessly interface her brain with nearby electronic devices— commandeering digital networks and hacking into classified databases with the very literal speed of thought itself. After Abi befriends an impoverished woman named Hollie Rogers (with Abi helpfully offering to pay off a lifelong debt Hollie had owed a corrupt pawnshop), we begin to learn a little of her motives. Abi has traveled to Britain from the mysterious home she insists on calling Nigeria because there is someone in this country whom she has been tasked with finding. She carries with her a small, intricately carved wooden box which she describes to Hollie as an “inheritance,” and which she explains she must give to a very specific individual. Yet who exactly this individual is, or where exactly they can be found, is unclear. All Abi knows for sure is that this person can be located only by researching all available information about a sailing ship which repeatedly voyaged between Africa and the Americas during the eighteenth century, and which was known by the name Esperance.
Just as how Ethan’s half of the narrative is defined by the reader’s uncertainty regarding Ethan’s motivations—whether his actions reveal him to be an objective observer of the Okoros’ murders, or alternately indicate a deep-rooted prejudice that he refuses to interrogate—Abi’s parallel story likewise is presented to the reader in a context that alternates between contrasting interpretations of itself. While Hollie assumes that the wooden box Abi carries is a priceless family heirloom (and then enthusiastically entrusts herself with the task of helping Abi find the person whom she assumes must be this item’s rightful owner), Abi’s narration by contrast indicates that this story is fraught with unacknowledged complications. For starters, it’s not so much that Abi is seeking out one single individual to receive this so-called inheritance, but instead that she is searching for one of several potential candidates to receive this item. Moreover, Abi seems to be working against a timetable of sorts, with there being another person her thoughts occasionally stray towards—a man who, like her, seems to have traveled from the same Nigeria from which Abi claims to have come, and with whom she is engaged in some sort of conflict, necessitating that she locate the targets of her search before he does.
Again, much as with the readers’ questions surrounding how to interpret Ethan’s actions, this mystery surrounding Abi’s objectives persistently serves to highlight the ambiguity of what little information we have about this character. Abi and Hollie seem to form a friendship. Yet is this friendship genuine, or is Abi taking advantage of a woman who is more trusting of a total stranger than she should be? Is it perhaps the case that Abi is the killer for whom Ethan is searching? If so, then what is signified by the moments of altruism Abi periodically displays towards others?
Likewise, as Ethan’s story advances, and he begins closing in on the whereabouts of his suspect, learning that the washing machine delivery man is actually an individual named Yemi (with “A. Bello” being an alias), questions begin to arise regarding not only the nature of the murders which Ethan believes his suspect has committed, but also the ominous parallels that silently emerge between this figure and Abi. Not only is Yemi (like Abi) described as being almost unnaturally tall, but—as Ethan begins to learn as he encounters others who have met this individual—Yemi also speaks in a strangely artificial American accent, and at one point several years earlier began obsessively researching a little-known sailing ship called Esperance, which traveled between Africa and the Americas in the eighteenth century. Of course, it eventually becomes clear that the Esperance was engaged in the transatlantic slave trade, with the many descendants of the ship’s crew, whom Yemi has begun seeking out, in turn being people who have unknowingly benefitted from these historical atrocities.
Yet, throughout all of this, Oyebanji very pointedly constructs the narrative in such a way that he leaves the true nature of this story continually ambiguous. Is Yemi the antagonistic figure with whom Abi is in conflict? If so, does this mean that Ethan is correct, and Yemi is the Okoros’ murderer? Alternately, could it be that Abi is actually the killer for whom Ethan is searching, with Yemi instead being an individual who is seeking to locate Abi’s future victims so as to protect them from harm?
Maybe it’s because of the skill with which these disparate questions are introduced that I struggled with the final portion of Esperance, in which all of these mysteries are definitively answered. Like many crime thrillers, Esperance concludes with a climactic scene in which the characters confront the book’s murderer. This in turn leads to a sequence in which the long-concealed villain—greeted with the opportunity to finally explain themselves to an audience—embarks on a monologue. It details not only where they are really from, and the step-by-step process by which they accomplished their murders, but also the brutal nature of the historical crime that drove them to take revenge against the distant descendants of the Esperance’s crew.
To be clear, many of these mysteries indeed demanded an answer, and I think it’s important to acknowledge that, in an author’s note at the end of this book, Oyebanji indicates that the historical crime ultimately shown to motivate this story’s murderer is based on a specific, real-life incident that he learned of many years ago and chose to echo here. Yet it’s also the case that the artificial ways in which these elements are revealed at the final moment feels less like a resolution of this story, and more like an undermining of many of Esperance’s most interesting themes and questions. In particular, the method by which Oyebanji ultimately explains the origins of both Abi and Yemi—that is, by slotting these previously enigmatic characters into familiar sci-fi tropes involving alien abductions, advanced nanotechnology, and interstellar travelers displaced in time—feels out of place amid the broader tone of the conclusion. Given the ambiguity of so much of Esperance’s story, it seems like it might have been fitting for the book to have ended with at least a few of its mysteries left unanswered. As is demonstrated by everything from Ethan’s cryptic racism, to the grim but enduring history of the ship that shares this novel’s title, and even the misguided actions of this book’s antagonist, the crime at the center of Esperance’s plot is not so much the murders which the characters are investigating, but instead an atrocity so vast that its guilt has spread beyond anything that can be contained within the culpability of a single person.
In other words, even Esperance’s awkward conclusion highlights what I think Oyebanji has accomplished with this novel. Just as it first seemed it would, the book eventually concludes with Ethan indeed realizing that the crime he is investigating cannot be solved. It’s just that this realization, when it finally happens, is shown to take place in a far more layered and troubling context than was first perceived.