Book Review: A Long Way Gone

From the outset of reading "A Long Way Gone" I knew the writer, Ismael Beah, was going to become a "boy soldier." After all, the subtitle is "Memoirs of a Boy Soldier." So, while it really wasn't a question of "if" he would be drafted, the real suspense built around when, how and by whom.

This book is the true story of a young man who was swept up in the civil war that afflicted the West African nation of Sierra Leone. He left one day with one brother and some friends to go to a talent show in a nearby town and never returned home again.

Throughout perhaps more than half of the book Ishmael recounts how he went from place to place, lost track of his brother and saw unimaginable carnage and atrocities. Although I expected him to be conscripted into military service, I had no idea whether it would be by rebel or government forces. Somehow I expected it to happen suddenly, illogically and entirely against his will. When it came there was an element of haste to it, but the process seemed bizarrely reasonable and natural, given the situation.

Despite the horrors he had witnessed up to the time of being drafted Ishmael had managed to keep himself together, in a sense. This was lost after he took up arms. Between the violence, the drugs and the brainwashing, Ishmael became a killing machine. This book shows how an image-bearing child of God can lose the divine likeness through extreme hardship and first witnessing and then participating in atrocities.

The process of recovery also was not immediate. When Ishmael and others were finally removed from the fighting and taken to a place to recuperate and reintegrate with society, they struggled not only against the vicious demons of their past but the very real and present pain of withdrawal from narcotics.

Somewhere I read online a comment from a person who read this book who said he lost his belief in God after seeing the evils people were permitted to do. To that I can only suggest that commentator was sheltered, has a rather childish Sunday School vision of God and needs to come to terms with the fact that this book isn't about the nature or existence of a deity, but about the depths of human depravity. That a child can be made into a murderous terror demonstrates what pervasive systemic wickedness in our world is capable of doing. At the same time, we learn that restoration is possible, given love, patience and plenty of time.