My dad once received a snail mail letter from an address in Spain telling him that he was entitled to a million euros—all he had to do was send his bank account information to them for deposit. He showed it to me when I went to visit a few years ago and he said, “Maybe I can open a new bank account and see what happens.” I knew he wasn’t serious, but I immediately said, “No dad, it’s a scam.” He wondered how they got his mailing address. I suppose if my dad were not a cautious man, he could very well have fallen prey to this scam. Luckily for us, he’s averse to anything ‘new’—he still goes to the bank teller to pay bills and withdraw money and refuses to use his bank card for debit purchases or do any online transactions. Although, he did discover the internet about three years ago, so there might be some hope for embracing technology! Sadly, however, retired school teacher Henry Curtis, in Will Ferguson’s novel 419, lost his life savings and his life from one of these scams.

In 419, which is a reference to the section of the criminal code in Nigeria that outlaws receiving money and goods under deceitful manners, Henry gets a random email one day asking for help from a Nigerian lawyer to get money out of the country on behalf of a distressed young woman. Henry mistakenly replies saying they have the wrong person. The emailer responds with accurate information about Henry, confusing him into thinking they are supposed to be talking. They carry on an email exchange resulting in thousands of dollars being sent over to Nigeria, a confirmation that he would have a minimum of $100,000 in his bank account for which he remortgaged his and his wife’s family house for, and a suicide attempting to recover that money from insurance. This sets his daughter, Laura, a copyeditor in Banff, on a journey to find the person she holds responsible for her father’s death and tracks him down in Lagos.

This is the premise of the book, however, surprisingly, it’s not the main story. As Ferguson says in a printed Q&A with Penguin books at the end of the novel, “In researching the 419 con, I learned more about Nigeria and the more I learned the more I realized that the real story was over there. Nigeria is a vast , tragic, heroic, daunting story of its own –and I set out to bring in characters from each of the main regions: the northeren Sahel, Lagos in the Yoruba west, and the Niger Delta region in the east (part of what was once known as Biafra). After that, the novel really came alive. It was electric.”

Alive indeed. Ferguson uses a flashforward/flashback structure to tell his story which was confusing at first as to how all the characters intersected or how the story would come together. In the second and third parts of the book (of four) a great amount of detail is devoted to the characters of Amina and Nnamdi and I found myself enthusiastically reading and waiting for the connection to the 419 con and Henry and Laura Curtis which did not come until nearly the end. As Ferguson says, Laura’s story was the catalyst for the book, but Amina and Nnamdi were the heart. In fact, Nnamdi’s story is the only one that is told from the beginning to the end and you get a complete picture of who he is. I read the book in about three days wanting to know more about Amina fleeing from the northern Sahel region and Nnamdi, a sweet and innocent boy who as a man meets Amina and wants to help her no matter the social consequences. He always wanted to do the right thing.

Ferguson never explicitly says why Amina is fleeing her town, but I read in the Q&A with Ferguson that she is based on a real person. The woman depicted on the cover is also of Amina, so it made me all the more curious about who she was and what her story was and how her character would survive. I liked that Ferguson made her a strong woman who was able to make the trek on foot, pregnant, starving and alone not knowing the local languages, who stand up for herself—even though when she meets Nnamdi, he helps her tremendously—and who survives it all. I would’ve liked to have read more about her at the end though, as I found the ending of the book a little rushed.

In Nnamdi’s story, I learned so much about the Niger Delta, and the communities there. Ferguson also weaves in some political history with the North American and European oil companies moving in to extract the resource which is described as “light and sweet.” It was interesting to read about how these oil companies came in promising wealth and jobs, but ruined the rivers that the local community relied on to fish, or how they built schools and health care clinics but there were no teachers or doctors or nurses to staff them. Ferguson also writes about the social and political unrest in many areas around the Delta resulting in protests for the oil companies to get out, and how communities break down because of the schism between those who want the oil money, and those who want to preserve their way of life.

Overall, Ferguson told a remarkable story that makes you think about the values you hold and what you would do in certain situations. The opening line of the book is “Would you die for your child?” The parent-child theme runs frequently throughout, especially when Laura’s father says “You, I love,” so that “love” is the last thing she hears from him after their conversations. Ferguson also makes you think about what is right, how far are you willing to go to get revenge, does circumstance dictate the outcome of your future and does the end justify the means? It’s something that all the characters think about and I’m happy with some of the answers they found.

419 is really an amazing read and comes highly recommended!

–Bea