One reason why the proverb may not have the force it once did is that when it was first voiced ‘a certain entity called Nigeria was not yet thought of’. The battles of Soyinka’s long life (he was born in 1934) have, by implication, not been an indulgence but a necessity. In 1960, he witnessed the emergence of the modern state as it formed within the confected borders of a colony, and he has spent his life trying, in word and deed, to draw it out towards a truer version of itself. At eighty-seven, there is little hint that this task is over, merely the acknowledgment that he might have reached ‘a moment when age dictates the avoidance of certain forms of engagement’.

With this acknowledgment, Soyinka returns to an ideal he expressed as a student in England in the 1950s: of writing as its own form of engagement, in which he and his comrades would ‘make a trenchant use of the pen, the stage, propagate progressive ideas, mobilise the people and expose their betrayers. The contested arena would be strewn with words, with polemics, not soaked in gore.’ For most of Soyinka’s career, this transfiguration of rebellion into word has been partial at best, never fully accounting for the searing reach of his plays, poems, and novels, nor for how deeply enmeshed his moral standpoint as a writer is with his work as an activist – and vice versa.

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth does not offer a resolution. Instead, it raises the partial to high art. With the same sense of late style Theodor Adorno detected in Beethoven’s final works, the novel’s fragmentariness refuses a higher synthesis. Its attention to its parts is constitutive, not ornamental. Edward Said’s insight that works of this kind are about ‘“lost totality”, and it is in this sense that they are catastrophic’ certainly applies.

In Soyinka’s hands, the lost totality is the nation that might have been. In its place is a novel exposed at the joints. The places where its multiple stories, tales, and diversions meet are social as well as textual. The novel centres on a group of friends not unlike the fraternity of the pen Soyinka formed as a student, who all studied in Europe and have now returned home. The leitmotif will be familiar to readers of Soyinka’s first novel, The Interpreters (1965), which also traced the lives of expatriates reasserting themselves on re-entry as a way to explore a changing homeland.

In Chronicles, the group is made up of Duyole Pitan-Payne, scion of an influential family and engineer preparing to leave for a UN appointment; Kighare Menka, a rural boy come good, now nationally renowned for his surgical work on the victims of Boko Haram; Prince Badetona, a mathematician whose skill with numbers is not always used for good; and Farodian, the mysterious financier, who it seems has lost contact with the ‘Gong of Four’. The group’s name comes from a Benin gong. As students, they put the image on T-shirts, replacing the carved figures with their four conjoined heads.

The gong is a symbol of their early ‘embattled idealism’. This idealism is tested and deformed to varying degrees as the novel follows the group’s interactions with a cynical political set, desperate to show its humility and affinity with the country’s people. The current prime minister, Sir Goddie, is leader of the People on the Move Party or POMP. The acronym, characteristic of Soyinka’s delight in wordplay, reveals a shallow idea of progress, where meaningless ceremonies paper over the brutal extraction of wealth.

The shallow corporate speak in politics is only matched in religion. Sir Goddie, who is known as ‘the Presence’, finds a counterpart in Papa Davina, ‘the Prescience’, whose connection to the four is only revealed at the novel’s end. As in politics, the goal is extraction. To get the most from his countrymen, the charlatan preacher attempts to contain the syncretic heteroglossia of indigenous religions, Christianity, and Islam under the banner of ‘Ekumenika’, his answer to the American megachurch.

And all this in the land of the ‘happiest people’! The novel’s title comes from a 2011 Gallup poll that rated Nigeria the highest in happiness index. Chronicles lays waste to this ludicrous measure of humanity – its supposed representative wholeness – as Menkha is set in pursuit of ‘Human Resources’: a shadowy cabal that procures and sells body parts for use in ritual. What he finds is a sleek corporate conglomerate that literally dismembers its people and sells their parts back to the moneyed classes. As he progresses, the novel of friendship becomes a murder mystery, and its ever-present satire dances its way to the point of excess: where the target and the exaggerations the mode usually requires to sharpen its attack meet in reality.

Chronicles is difficult to read. The prose is dense, allusive; the plot filled with divagations. This is the point. To be anything less would implicate the novel in its own critique of the falsely holistic. That it can be at once difficult and enthralling is perhaps evidence that Soyinka has taken what Said thought a prerogative of late style: ‘the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them’. In Soyinka’s case, the forces do not so much pull against each other as touch at various points on the road, always under the eye of Ogun, god of drivers. As they do, the novelist finds a form to reflect his apparent fate: ‘To watch the nation turn both carrion and scavenger as it killed and consumed its kind, the road remaining an obliging stream in which a nation’s fall from grace was duly reflected.’