PraktikTess

I’m not sure when this novel is taking place, but I would guess that it is somewhere around 1990 since Ishmael is born in 1980 and was around 10 when it all started. The war takes place in Sierra Leone, a country situated in the western part of Africa.

The unique thing about the setting of the story is that it’s taking place in Sierra Leone, a country far, far away from ours. It’s not only far away from Sweden in a geographic aspect; the country also has another kind of politic and social standard, so the grade of poverty is also far away from ours. Sierra Leone has a whole different culture and it´s interesting to hear about the country from the inside and not from the view of the newspapers, the way we usually here about the countries in crisis nowadays.

So the special thing about the book is that we get to hear about the war in Sierra Leone from Ishmael’s point of view and not from the twisted truth you get from magazines or bowdlerization. This gives the novel another kind of power (you get more affected when the story is true) as well as people recieve general knowledge by reading the book. Besides this was the whole reason behind the book; Ishmael wanted people to be aware of the horrible war and how young boys are recruited into child soldiers. When Ishmael came to the USA he realized that nobody knew anything about the war in Sierra Leone and as a result of this he wrote “A Long Way Gone” from his perspective so that people could get the whole truth about the situation.

I’m not sure how to imagine this story taking place in Sweden since the whole novel circles around the war in Sierra Leone. If the war would happen in Sweden I guess that they would have a stronger military which could help.

The author concentrates on both environment and characters, but he describe the people very generally (the villagers, the refugees, the rebels and so on) the specific persons he eventually do describe separately only have their actions and personalities formed while their shallow looks are more up to the reader to decide.

In order to give the story power and an impact on the reader the novel has to focus on the villagers as well as the environment. The book is very much based on this concept since it’s supposed to portray all the horrible things happening in the war. When Ishmael tells us how everything (the environment) is ruined and then describes how the villagers (characters) are hurt, he gives us a versatile picture creating sympathy among the readers.

But it’s when Ishmael describes how the villagers are reacting that his environmental descriptions are put into reality. The extreme reactions among the villagers is what wakes me up and forces me to believe that what is happening is true, and that this was Ishmael´s life during the war.