By KARI MUTU

More by this Author

Foxes, immigrants and the city of London are key elements in the book Happiness, the latest by British-Sierra Leonean author Aminatta Forna.

Two unlikely people bump into each other on London’s Waterloo Bridge on account of a red fox, which makes an unexpected appearance. It marks the beginning of a tentative love story and in-depth look at relationships.

Attila, a psychiatrist from Ghana, spent many years in war zones around the world. His name and towering physique is much like the fearsome Hungarian warrior-leader, Attila the Hun. But by nature, he is courteous, intellectual, enjoys dancing and good food.

Jean is a white American woman who researches wild carnivores living in towns. She lives in London and her marriage has broken down. She likes to jog at night and plants gardens to earn extra money.

But her main work is researching urban foxes, for which she has mobilised a diverse collection of hotel doormen, security guards and rubbish collectors to act as animal scouts.

Attila is on a visit to London to deliver a keynote address at a psychiatric conference.

But for much of the time he is engaged in coming to terms with the dwindling state of his former English colleague and lover who has Alzheimer’s disease, and finding the daughter of his Ghanaian friends who has gone missing in London along with her son.

He is also pondering his shifting views on trauma as experienced by war survivors and victims of tragic circumstances.

The sense of place in the book is engaging, as Forna takes us from Jean’s rooftop garden to the Savoy Hotel, London’s theatres, restaurants, the River Thames, old cemeteries and then into the battlefields of Iraq, Bosnia and Sierra Leone.

Flashbacks

She moves back and forth from 2014, to incidents in Jean and Attila’s former lives, through flashbacks whose transitions sometimes feel uneven although they bring out the backstory and underscore the circular nature of life as people from the past return in surprising ways.

The subject matter is well researched, especially the history of feral parakeets, foxes, coyotes and other wild animals that over the centuries have crossed into human settlements.

Immigration is another topical theme that she covers, and the narrative features a cast of minor characters from West Africa, Eastern Europe and South America.

The concept of wildlife assimilation mirrors that of migrant workers who call London home. Jean’s proposition for better understanding of wildlife relocation into cities echoes the current heated debates in Western European countries about immigration.

Forna has scoured the globe and centuries for material to build this narrative, which has multiple layers and branches.

At times it felt as though she were trying too hard to connect the coincidences of the story. Some of the occurrences could have been left out without any major setback to the main storyline.

I would have liked to know more about Attila’s deceased wife — to whom he wrote letters that were never posted — and seen more depth to the inevitable romance between him and Jean.

The book’s title suggests a healthy dose of joy, but one phrase that defined the story for me was, “Hope is a different order from happiness.” This is a tale of hope and survival.

It is a review of war, grief, love, co-existence, the interconnectedness of people and the resilience of the natural world.

This book is a very different from Forna’s sweeping post-war novel The Memory of Love, which won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 2011. Happiness is a subdued and sympathetic tale without any heavy drama, rich in its exploration of humanity.