Sebastian Shakespeare
Arduous Asylum
What is the What
By Dave Eggers (Hamish Hamilton 480pp £17.99)

At first glance this book looks like a heartbreaking work of staggering worthiness. A prefacing note explains that all the author's proceeds are going to Sudanese refugees, and the novel comes garlanded with a quote from a human rights organisation. When did you last read a novel endorsed by the International Crisis Group? Whatever you think of What is the What, you cannot fault Eggers for his noble intentions.

The book is inspired by the true story of Valentino Achak Deng, who fled his Dinka homeland in Sudan and became one of the displaced refugees seeking asylum in Ethiopia and Kenya. In Eggers's novel there are in fact two stories, that of Valentino the Lost Boy growing up in Africa and that of Valentino the Lost Man eking out a living in America. The story opens five years after he emigrates to Atlanta, when Valentino opens his door to a pair of gun-toting African-Americans. They beat him, truss him and gag him. The promised land of America turns out to be anything but. Robbed of his voice, Valentino addresses his life story to his assailants in silence. Like the Ancient Mariner, he has a ghastly tale to tell - one as harrowing as it is brutal.

The author's unadorned prose style allows the reader to focus on the bare bones of the story. Valentino's first memory is as a six-year-old in Marial Bai, when he sees his mother's yellow dress. Shortly afterwards, his village is razed to the ground by the Arab militias. Believing his parents to be dead, he and his fellow survivors walk through the desert to seek sanctuary in Ethiopia. En route they are mauled by lions, shot at by soldiers, bombed by planes, and under the constant threat of being attacked by the murahaleen, the Arab militias who terrorise the country on horseback.

The biblical overtones are not exactly subtle. There is a boy called Moses and there are endless quasi-prophets whom Valentino encounters in the wilderness (the title refers to a Dinka creation myth). But it is a powerful read. At times it resembles a phantasmagoria. Valentino talks of 'disconnected and miscolored images, as in fitful dream'. A blue dog flits in and out of the narrative; he meets a man with no face; and boys who he long thought had been killed keep reappearing as if they have come back from the dead. Eggers captures well the maelstrom of war. Everyone is a potential enemy, even those supposedly on your side. The boys discover they are utterly dispensable.

Valentino has to avoid enemy soldiers of the Khartoum regime, deadly Muslim militias who act by proxy for Khartoum, and liberation rebels who might draft him into the Sudan People's Liberation Army. Anyone who tries to leave the SPLA is killed as a deserter. He witnesses death on an unimaginable scale and also on a petty scale - he sees a twelve-year-old boy kick another to death whilst fighting over rations. There are many such haunting set-pieces. When Valentino flees Ethiopia chased by hundreds of Ethiopian soldiers, a woman beckons him and a group of boys forward with the words 'Come to me, children! I am your mother!' and then shoots two of them dead; another time 10,000 boys have to witness the public execution of seven men.

In the end Eggers's desire to bear witness rather dissipates the tension of the novel. It is far too long. The ten years Valentino spends in a Kenyan refugee camp are telescoped into the last quarter of the book, and the pacing here inevitably flags, the tone becoming slightly more preachy. Valentino, for example, takes issue with placing refugee camps in inhospitable areas ('I do not judge the UNHCR or any nation that takes in the nationless, but I do pose the question').

When Valentino departs for America from Kenya, his flight is delayed because it coincides with 9/11. This might have happened in real life but here it seems contrived. This book is emblematic enough without having to add 9/11 into the mix. We are told Princess Diana's death also occasioned mass weeping in the streets of Nairobi, which I find hard to believe. In the book's preface we learn that some of the book's events are fictional, others are invented. Throughout the novel, as a result, you keep wondering not what is the what, but what is the truth.

Nevertheless Dave Eggers should be commended for tackling the troubles of Sudan. At a time when most Anglophone fiction is so insular and navel-gazing this is a bold and spirited attempt to focus on a corner of a foreign field that is resolutely unAmerican.