A Nigerian man’s trek to Europe becomes a test of faith and ambition

Countless Christian songs exalt the ableness of God, but the tune that makes up my childhood soundtrack is the one my mother, a gospel guitarist, would sing when her faith hit the rockiest of shores: “If you’ve tried everything and everything failed …You know God is able … try Jesus.”

Her melodies floated back to me as I read Samuel Kọ́láwọlé’s debut novel “The Road to the Salt Sea,” which follows the story of Able God, an ambitious Nigerian man disillusioned with his stagnant life. He gets drawn into a crime that sends him into the clutches of a charismatic religious leader promising impoverished Lagos residents better-paying jobs in Italy. As Able God and his fellow migrants embark on this journey, there is a foreboding sense that what lies ahead might be even more treacherous than the realities they’re leaving behind. This harrowing migration story wrestles with themes of family pressure, personal ambition, modern-day slavery, religion and that ever-prevailing Western insistence on positive manifestation — a self-help philosophy that can feel disconnected from the horrors of war and other calamities.

With a close third-person narrator, the book opens like a thriller — with Able God hiding and nursing a wound — before the narrative quickly flashes back to the events leading up to this fateful moment. At 32, the college-educated Able God is not living the life his mother had imagined for him when she bestowed him with such an aspirational name. He’s stuck in a dead-end job at a luxury hotel in Lagos, where the glass walls, gleaming chandeliers and vast lobby stand in stark contrast to his one-room apartment devoid of electricity.

A deeply religious woman who weaves her Yoruba traditions and Christian faith, Able God’s mother rebukes him: “Do you want to serve others for the rest of your life?”

While he has long strayed from his religious upbringing, Able God is just as idealistic as his mother; he’s simply bound to another form of faith: self-help books whose affirmational phrases he repeats like proverbs.

Determined to “think” his way into manifesting the life he fantasizes about (world-renowned chess player or wealthy business magnate), every day he flashes his “hundred-watt toothpaste-commercial” smile at hotel guests, affluent people he believes could help catapult him into a better future. But Able God also resents the way some of the travelers treat hotel workers and other working-class Lagos residents. “How had he acquired his wealth?” Able God wonders about a guest named Dr. Badero. “He was sure he’d built his wealth on the blood, sweat and toil of the powerless.”

Able God and his co-workers witness all manner of outlandish behavior from privileged guests, but when Dr. Badero turns violent against a sex worker who lives in Able God’s neighborhood, Able God cannot turn a blind eye. “He had known men like Dr. Badero all his life, men who dominated women — and who hurt them. Men who thought sexual conquest was a God-given right.” Such an assessment could be lifted from these fictional pages and plopped into recent news recounting the actions of powerful men.

Obsessed with saving the woman he believes is in danger, Able God becomes embroiled in a crime from which no affirmations or prayer can rescue him. A religious leader hawking the migration to Italy promises the trip is “free” and can be paid later with their jobs. This snake-oil salesman’s name is Ben Ten (after the namesake TV series’ cartoon character with the capacity to morph into different aliens).

As he endures an increasingly difficult trip, Able God leans on self-help mantras the more he senses his control over his destiny slipping away. “Enjoy the journey on the way to your destination,” he recalls. Yet not only is this journey not enjoyable — it threatens the lives of the migrants as they cross border checkpoints stocked with corrupt soldiers, trudge through the unforgiving Sahara, face starvation and thirst and enter a part of Libya still reeling from civil war. “We are close to the Promised Land,” Ben Ten tells them after weeks of traveling, but following his announcement comes a dramatic turning point that plummets the migrants into human trafficking, slavery and even graver violence.

In his essay collection, “How to Write About Africa,” the late Kenyan author and journalist Binyavanga Wainaina wrote satirically about journalists and authors who treat one of the world’s most diverse continents as though it were a monolith. “Treat Africa as if it were one country,” he advised, tongue-in-cheek. “It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. … Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions.”

In “The Road to the Salt Sea,” you’ll find starvation, power dynamics inherent in class systems, the aftereffects of war, but the novel is proof that when a writer dares to broach such themes, stereotypes can be dismantled through specificity, through painting characters as full beings. With his attention to detail and rich crafting of an interior life for Able God, Kọ́láwọlé offers us a masterclass in sensory writing (engaging the five senses in ways that repulse and delight). He subtly weaves history into his narrative and balances his main character’s inner life with the chaos of the external world. “These children lacked guardians and lived in poverty, but they also had freedom.”

In an interview with the Hopkins Review, Kọ́láwọlé, who was born and raised in Ibadan, about 80 miles north of Lagos, says his greatest wish is for his writing “to touch the heart of my reader.” In “The Road to the Salt Sea,” he grabs us by the throat, gut and heart. At times, the suspense is all-engrossing; at other times, one wrenching scene after another overwhelms. Yet the novel reminds us that even in calamitous times, the search for meaning and purpose continues, despite the ways in which mantras might fall short, biblical messages might confound and false prophets and preachers peddle desperate and vulnerable people.

During a stop in Niger, Able God wanders upon a place of worship “reduced to ashes” in what he believes was the result of religious riots. “Could God inhabit something so charred and dilapidated?” he wonders. Able God is no saint, but his fight for physical survival, and even his ability to hold on to a shard of optimism in the face of atrocities, is testament to the tenacity of the human spirit.

Cassandra Lane is author of a memoir, “We Are Bridges,” editor-in-chief of L.A. Parent and a contributor to the anthology “Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California.”