At the beginning of Chimamanda Adichie’s big book, Half of a Yellow Sun, one of the more original creatures in African literature makes his first appearance disguised as a hackneyed staple of the genre — upcountry lad come to the big city under the suspicious watch of a reluctant relative.

He is attached to a cranky upper-class gentleman — himself a recognisable type — as a domestic help. The gentleman is an intellectual; the lad is bewitched by his books.

But the essential narrative bump appears not too deep into the book. Before he has spent a single night as house servant, the boy pockets a chicken wing.

Ah! Stories of this kind — the poor villager coming to better himself in the metropolis — have populated the novel for ages. But not even Thomas Hardy, Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka ever had a character pocket a greasy piece of chicken.

The early signs are that we are in for something sumptuous. So the eyes move faster over the printed lines.

Because of the chicken alone, you think you know Ugwu, the upcountry boy.

You start to like Chimamanda Adichie, his creator, warm up to the book and when in later pages, the narrative is not all about purloined chicken parts, you start to take in the scale on which this novel is set.

It is an ambitious one: The engaging university intellectuals’ chatter comes to pass; the central character is described as “illogically pretty” — and suddenly we find that we are immersed in a theatre of horror, that baffling conflict central to modern Nigerian history — the Biafran war.

Henceforth, one settles down to the kind of book we have not had much of on the continent since Wole Soyinka’s novel, The Interpreters back in 1965.

Her second published novel behind her, this young Nigerian is arguably the first of the new generation of African writers to break with the 1960s structure and sketch a new diagram of how the continent’s complex story can be constructed:

Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus was something of a curiosity: A precocious, perceptive girl-narrator centred that family novel about religion, class, corruption and oppression. But the story of Purple Hibiscus was passive, potentially inchoate.

Its more urgent themes were set at a distance and only through the family telescope could we sense the gravitational pull of corruption and oppression as they orbited beyond the outer reaches of the pages. We knew them only by how their gravitational force dimmed the family lights in and out.

But the real star of Purple Hibiscus was the writer herself.

This foundling book, more beautifully written in its opening pages than the rest of it manages to live up to, introduced the real gifts of Chimamanda — her authorial distinction, her ability to notice the scarcely anticipated, gifts that keep even the worst books afloat.

In Half of a Yellow Sun, she is once more the star, except it is not always a good thing.

The business of introducing the main characters in the second novel is drawn out like an overwrought Nigerian reception as leading characters are brought on one at a time. So when the real action starts — the Biafran war — we know too much of everybody for suspense to work its magic.

Like all war novels, Half of a Yellow Sun has a lot of material to work with. War with its gamut of large themes, seems tailor-made for the genre — death, loss, love and the inexplicable violence man descends into.

War novels are also brave undertakings; memories are fresh and hurting.

Imagine what an Igbo experiences reading this— Ojukwu is alive as is Gowon, and Chimamanda, by taking on this dread bit of Nigerian history places herself athwart the nation’s consciousness, author and book going beyond literature (something that may have blinded her and her editors from treating Half of a Yellow Sun primarily as a novel).

But like cooking chicken, you have to be a very bad cook to spoil a war novel.

In Half of a Yellow Sun, we have an erudite set of intellectuals, a newly independent country and a very rich Nigerian industrialist’s family. Fading away is a small circle of white expatriates — not the colonial masters, but a coterie equipped with enough racial snootiness to stand in for empire.

Religion and tribalism disrupt the set. Half of a Yellow Sun is about love and war and peace, little of which is fair.

Chimamanda’s orchestra of beautiful women, internationalists, and a researcher into ancient African art, revolutionaries, tribalists and militarists is a risky set-up. Although she has the conductor’s authority to make them produce a tune, it is authority she does not give maximum application.

Difficulties of falling in love, cross-racial sex, the pull of “tradition” and ethnic sub-nationalism give us immense mileage while we wait for the war.

The glitter of wealth, a white man in Africa fascinated by ancient African bronze casts — but as if to emphasise that the empire is gone, Chimamanda sends him in search of an African remedy for his erectile dysfunction.

We are still waiting for the war.

The war comes. Cue the second movement: A disturbing journey to the north jolts us with a foretaste of the recurrent Nigerian drama of ethno-religious massacre.

The central character is caught up in the rising tempo of anti-Igbo hatred that descends into splenetic brutality. These sections are narrated at a cruising speed that sees Chimamanda at her best.

Third movement: Evacuation comes and the train ride.

The book has acquired momentum, whirring in high gear to become music as well-proportioned notes and rhythms plunge forward.

As with the university lecturer’s chatter, Chimamanda is a master of the expansive and as the book levels out at the heights, this talent achieves a compact grace.

But it’s a book of small things as well. There is war; there is “fried rice” to cook. There is Olanna’s “illogical” beauty; but there are witchcraft flies too; bottles of expensive wines, over-developed female bottoms and half-opened doors at night with a voyeur to peer through them.

A book that tells the high tale as well as the low has its stomach-churning moments. And therein lies the hitch:

The social relationships are well-described. The war is well-introduced. But it is meshing the two together — having the Nigerian fighter-bombers fly overhead while building the romantic tensions between Olanna and Odenigbo, Kainene and Richard — that proves overwhelming.

The story fails to cohere at this point — right in the middle of the book.

It becomes clear that the build-up of relationships was given too much room at the beginning and because war is big, the social momentum is stalled so the war can gain its own velocity.

This truncation of the beginning for the sake of the middle reflects badly on the first half of the book. Beautiful sentences and observations that so enchanted start to look merely clever, for they are denied a restitutive affirmation.

The biggest casualty is Ugwu and as his character fails to develop, he ends up as a blotter for the grotesque and the vulgar, which for inexplicable reasons, there is too much of. It is obvious that Chimamanda’s middle-class guilt sabotages Ugwu.

What purpose is there in having him “study” books if not to assuage Chimamanda’s soggy sentimentality?

Does she assume people of lower classes have no sense of self?

Why does she force thoughts into his mind, moreover in the subjunctive?

Is Ugwu, who reflects the failure to realise male characters well in this book, a reflection of what Chimamanda thinks men are like — forever looking at women’s bottoms or peering through bedroom doors?

Ugwu degenerates into one of the worst realised characters in all of African writing, worse for being in a prominent book; the chicken wings fail to fly into their initial promise. Along with Richard — a truly bizarre presence in the novel — they seem to have strayed in from a pornographic novel.

As Chimamanda the conductor becomes Chimamanda the juggler, so the plates begin to break. The remarkable thing is she goes on tossing the pieces into the air regardless.

Like in Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda’s central characters are like family to her, but family in a fond, girlish way: Richard, Olanna and Ugwu belong to Chimamanda, in a way Odenigbo and Kainene don’t. She constructs a doll’s house for these three and while there is so much going on, they are protected from any real, final tragedy.

In temperament, Richard, Olanna and Ugwu are the same person, divided into two races, two classes, and two sexes, then given three different names.

Their emotional temperance, their hesitancies, intellectual outlook (despite differences in education) are one; the hollowness at the centre of their lives, their incapacity for decisiveness, is indivisible and creates a sucking vacuum that draws the reader into pitying, even loving them. This is totally unfair.

This triumvirate disrupts Chimamanda’s treatment of other characters: Those who harm the trinity, she punishes. Hence the death of Odenigbo’s mother is retribution for the bad things she did to Ugwu and Olanna.

The war, one cannot avoid suspecting, is not what broke Odenigbo; Chimamanda did, because he was not faithful enough to the holy Olanna.

Ugwu, who should never have been allowed into the book in the first place, becomes a narrative liability before too long and it is a relief to the reader when he meets his death on the Biafran front. Potentially, his departure gives the book a chance to sharpen up and for Chimamanda to deliver the killer punch.

No way. Chimamanda’s fondness is too strong and in one of the more bizarre novelistic moments, she resurrects him.

Yet even in reincarnation, the ex-village lad has learnt nothing. With his death, a narrative chastity was won but carelessly lost. After that, the book lapses into a strange afterlife.

If you can turn your attention away from technical shortfalls, Chimamanda is still an enjoyable enough writer. Like a tennis champion, she never lets potential stray balls go if she can reach them:

The problem is that frequently, the balls she manages to reach cost her in unforced errors as when in Half of a Yellow Sun, she says of Ugwu that he “…felt breakable… as though his bones were broomsticks, the kind that snapped easily d–––––uring the harmattan…”

“Snapped easily during the harmattan” is imagery gone too far; she is going after a certain aesthetic, a “Nigerianised” sensibility, something Soyinka was a master of but that appears garish inside Chimamanda’s pied-a-terre empiricism.

Then there is the casual repetitiveness in Half of a Yellow Sun, where the characters and their views are re-introduced ad nauseam.

Many of the elements that ruin what is for the most part an excellent book are editorial issues, which the publishers should have had the wit to axe. Left in, they leak the tension out of the story at crucial moments.

Chimamanda is a decorator of life. Her books are cozy sleep-ins. The great majority of readers want this kind of fuzzy warmth. But for the literary novelist, the choice between depth and popularity is a moral one.