- Transcendent Kingdom, by Yaa Gyasi. Viking $32.99.
Yaa Gyasi (pronounced Jassi) was born in Ghana and grew up in America, gathering wide accolades for her first novel, Homegoing, which won a National Book Critics Award and was later identified by the BBC as being "one of the 100 Novels That Shaped Our World".
Having set the bar dauntingly high for her second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, Gyasi proceeds to clear it with impressive ease.
The title is an apparent reference to the way we - as a human species - appear to have transcended the animal kingdom by assuming natural superiority.
Of course, there are - even as I write - increasing examples of the fallacy of this presumption.
But this novel is more concerned with the over-arching dichotomy between science and faith.
The first-person narrative is cleverly spun by Gifty, a young Ghanaian/American woman of similar background to that of the author.
Gifty is a PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stamford School of Medicine, spending long and lonely hours in a laboratory carrying out carefully recorded experiments on mice, aimed at mapping the biochemistry of addiction.
A research path driven by the disintegration of Gifty's family, as her father returns to Ghana, her brother, Hana, a talented basketball player, dies from a drug overdose, and her grief-stricken mother takes to her bed in a deep depression.
Gifty's religious childhood was enlivened by chatty diary notes to God, usually seeking answers.
Her high school biology teacher was inclined to say: "I think we're made of stardust, and God made the stars", but also believed in asking "a ton of questions".
The invitation to curiosity snuffed out Gifty's faith: "It happened that quickly, a tremble-length reckoning.
"One minute there was a God with the whole world in his hands; the next minute the world was plummeting ..."
Gifty's world of higher learning is occasionally comforted by a few like-minded friends, but withdrawing to her flat in the evenings she finds her mother's face still turned to the wall.
This fiercely intelligent novel engages cultural and spiritual loss, racism, and hard-won redemption.
Gifty was raised by people who saw science as a trick to rob them of their faith but received an education from those who saw religion as a comfort blanket for the weak.
On this razor's edge, she breathes life into an extraordinary story.
- Ian McFarlane is a Canberra writer and reviewer.
