What makes a story not work? "The Bar Beach Show" by Olabajo Dada

When I started a concerted effort last fall to blog more reviews of contemporary literature, I was worried I wouldn't be able to be honest when I thought something fell short. I'm a writer myself, and in a literary market that seems based on a lot of Twitter-based mutual admiration between writers, I worried I'd be blacklisting myself if I didn't radiate enthusiasm about every story. I was spared having to find out for the most part when I blogged through Best American Short Stories, because I honestly liked 18 of the 20 stories in the collection.

Now, I've come to a story in the Pushcart Anthology I don't think was up to snuff, and if I'm going to have any integrity about this, I need to call it like I see it. I don't get any kind of snarky thrill out of picking apart a story, but I really think there were some fatal flaws in "The Bar Beach Show" by Olabajo Dada.

It's a promising plot: a man makes coffins for the Nigerian military, who puts on a show every other Sunday (the titular Bar Beach Show) where the military publicly executes prisoners by tying them to barrels on the beach and mowing them down with machine guns. Akanji, the coffin maker, isn't really into this job, but he's got a sick wife and he needs to pay for her medical care. There's a lot of potential here for heavy-hitting social commentary. So why doesn't the story work?

An actual photo of a Nigerian prison. Found on grandmarketsquare.com, which did not credit the photographer

1. The prose is sloppy. This story badly needed editing. The first paragraph has this sentence: "On the day of the show, while children played soccer and flew kites around lovers moseying along the shoreline, who patronized hawkers peddling snacks, and swimmers rose and fell with the waves, soldiers set up barrels right next to a bamboo stage where invited musical guests entertained the crowd just before the show's most popular attraction." I don't even think that sentence is grammatically correct. The clause "who patronized hawkers..." is unclearly linked to what came before; I first thought the children were patronizing hawkers, but then I realized it was the lovers moseying along the shoreline. But that's all within the "around lovers..." clause, which means we've got one hell of an interrupting clause. The clause is so long, in fact, that it interrupts the parallelism of "children played soccer and swimmers rose and fell" such that by the time I got to the swimmers, I was all turned around in the sentence and had to go back and read it again and again. There are a lot of these kinds of constructions in the story, where sentences are so impatient to get information to the reader they can't finish one sentence before starting in with something new. A lot of the story needed to take a breath and slow down.

In fact, there's another guilty sentence in the first paragraph: "Then, with much ceremony and to deafening cheers and jeers, the soldiers paraded newly condemned criminals and tied them up to the barrels. And while they wailed and pleaded and ceaselessly pleaded their innocence, the soldiers yanked out their assault rifles and mowed down the convicts like inanimate paper targets. Their bodies..." There are two subject pronouns here that don't refer to the subject nouns that came immediately before them. Soldiers are the subject of the first sentence, but then the "they" that follows in the next sentence refers to the object of the soldier's action, the prisoners, not the soldiers. Once we've made this shift to prisoners as the subject, we then move back to soldiers doing the action of "yanking," but then we immediately get back to a "their" that refers to the bodies of prisoners, not soldiers. This would have been easy to edit down. I'd have rejected the story after that first paragraph. Yes, I can understand what it means, but why make the opening lines disrespect me enough to make me work that hard?

2. There are a lot of weak adjectives doing all the work. I never really saw the scenes here, because there isn't much in the way of imagery. We get a lot of adjectives. Page one: flashy, deafening, succulent (in a way I'm not sure made sense), inanimate, sombre, ear-splitting (also in a way I don't think makes sense--is a hammer ear-splitting?). The attempts at imagery don't really work, like soldiers shooting people like paper targets. That's just comparing one thing soldiers shoot to another thing they shoot. Not much imagination at work there. Later on, we get, "Two hefty soldiers off loaded the truck while a stocky officer stood by supervising, arms akimbo." That's a sentence that could have been written by any beginning fiction student.

3. The organization seems off. There are eight sections to the story. All but two are from Akanji's point-of-view. Only two and seven differ, and the characters from two aren't the same as seven. Those sections are really just there to get information to the reader we couldn't get another way, not to establish new characters or a new reality to the world of the story. These characters really don't get to be anything more than automatons necessary to move the plot. These two sections don't have enough power on their own to justify their break from the rest of the story.

4. The plot is a cheat, entirely meant to give us a surprise. Akanji sold his soul to help his wife, but guess what? His wife is dying anyway, and he's going to get double-crossed by the major he works for! For some reason, Major Okoro is worried enough about whether his coffin maker's heart is in the work that he tells another character (in section seven, when Akanji is absent), that he's going to find a new carpenter and kill Akanji. Why the hell would he do that? Couldn't he just fire Akanji? Is he worried that Akanji will somehow blow the lid off the big scandal that Okoro made money off selling the coffins to wives of victims? Of all the scamming things he's got going on, he's really worried about this one? More than he's worried about a trail of murders he'll create to cover up what seems a small crime in the world of the story?

The promise of the plot is in its social commentary, its satirical take on a Nigeria wanting to put on a show to discourage lawlessness while corruptly preying off the weak. It's fine to end a story about the evil state with "I fought the law and the law won," but Akanji doesn't even fight. He has no arc at all, not even a negative one. No character does. In fact, every character in the story other than Akanji is a cutout, just there to serve the interests of the plot. There is no change in anything from beginning to end. There is no hint at what is special about Nigerian corruption compared to corruption anywhere else in the world. I don't feel I learned anything, even knowing as little as I do about Nigeria, from beginning to end. There is nothing in this story that offers hope or an explanation for why there is no hope. It's just an anecdote, told in mediocre language, with a bit of a twist.


That wasn't any fun at all.