Coming Down from Wa

Claire Wilkshire is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of
British Columbia.

The hero of Coming Down from Wa (Wa is a town in northwestern Ghana) is
William Kwame MacKenzie, conceived in Ghana and raised in Victoria in a
gloomy family haunted by some mysterious past event. William’s parents
were never the same after something happened in Wa, where they spent
time as aid workers in the early days of their marriage. About to embark
on an MA, William decides to travel to Ghana, ostensibly to do research
but in fact to seek out the source of his parents’ unhappiness.

The novel’s two main weaknesses are the mystery event and William’s
character. It’s not so much that the event turns out to be
predictable, but rather that so much is invested in its secrecy that any
revelation short of the truly spectacular would be a disappointment. As
for William himself, he spends an implausible amount of time pondering
the ways in which women suffer. Ultimately, he sounds too nice to be
true—the woman writer’s ideal male protagonist.

If William appears too empathetic to be entirely credible, his
aesthetic sensibility makes him a useful protagonist for Thomas. William
notes the colors, signs, children’s rhymes, brand names, and assorted
snippets of official and popular culture (both Canadian and Ghanaian)
that combine to create the novel’s evocative fictional world.

Coming Down from Wa isn’t a brilliant novel, but the characteristic
strengths of Thomas’s writing—its ability to conjure the pathos of
domestic relations, its engagement with the odd contortions of language,
its ironic snap—make it worth reading.