Hangman by Maya Binyam review – a debut to keep you guessing

There’s a lot we don’t know for much of American author Maya Binyam’s debut, Hangman. In this tragicomic story about an unnamed narrator’s journey home to an unnamed nation, which begins with a phone call telling him to board a plane, uncertainty and surreality are the norm.

We know that his ticket has been bought and placed in the breast pocket of his jacket, that a car arrives to pick him up and take him to the airport. The radio is on, “announcing traffic due to an accident involving a taxicab driver, a police officer, and a woman”. He finds that in fact the roads are fine, but this item of breaking news will follow him on his travels.

The narrator is “neither happy nor unhappy” to be going home. As he continues his protracted odyssey, from “the country where I had become a citizen” (likely America) to “the country I am currently in” (likely in sub-Saharan Africa), we learn the true purpose of the trip: to find his brother, who is on his deathbed.

With the narrator adrift, the journey and story are anchored by his eccentric encounters with taxi drivers, aid workers, bureaucrats, priests, cousins, a “chocolate-covered woman”, “a yoghurt-selling man”: the good, the bad and the ugly. The family reunion is postponed. Meanwhile, everyone wants to tell him their life story – and he lends an ear in interactions that last longer than he intends or desires. Binyam uses these conversations as a vehicle for acute political commentary and philosophical musings on everything from foreign aid and hospitality to refuge and care, injustice and social responsibility, life and death.

Among this cast of characters, a white woman who has adopted a Black farmer’s son claims she’s committed to “the work of mutual understanding”, and a former clergyman clarifies of a pile of donations: “Although these people were ashamed of their old possessions, they were nevertheless attached to the idea of their possessions being used to their full extent.” Through a postcolonial lens, Binyam confronts the asymmetrical power dynamics inherent to international relations and questions the true purpose of philanthropy.

The narrator doesn’t offer up much of himself in return, and Binyam similarly withholds, doing some stunning foreshadowing work and leaving breadcrumbs that are only retrospectively spotted by the reader. “I considered trying to demonstrate that similarity by telling him the story about my sick brother and my experience with torture, including hot coals, in the prison where I was a political prisoner,” the narrator says in a failed attempt to be relatable to a local. But memory fails him, “given that time, geography, and my changing legal status as a citizen, refugee, tourist, etc., had conspired to dislocate me from it”.

Reality fails him too, as does his body. Without warning, the story slips into surrealism and he has out-of-body experiences where “none of my thoughts made sense, because they entered my mind only as isolated images, and without some kind of narrative thread, they just floated around, accruing no meaning whatsoever”. In this, Binyam’s work is reminiscent of Paul Beatty’s fictional worlds. She has built a brilliant illusion, a facade that holds up until the final few pages, when, with a swift and clean twist, she shatters it all and the reader is shocked out of the dreamlike atmosphere. Things fall into place. Many truths emerge.

With its unreliable narrator and its social commentary on the supposed binaries between two countries, the novel is at its best when exploring the ethics and mechanics of empathy. “I told him I understood, and he looked away, probably because he knew I didn’t understand at all, even if I myself had, as I previously stated, left my son with my son’s mother, falsified documents, fled to another country, and been granted official status as a so-called refugee. That was all in the past. It didn’t matter that we had been political prisoners, neglectful fathers, exiles, and so on, because now we were just two people, two tourists, returned to a country that might as well have been any country in the world.”

Are we all just people? What does it mean to be in someone’s shoes? Can we ever truly empathise with, relate to, understand each other? Are we capable of being hospitable to another human being, offering them sanctuary, with nothing to gain in return? With paper and pen, hangman is a guessing game for two or more players. In the novel of the same name, someone’s life is on the line. And Binyam keeps us guessing, and second-guessing, until the very end.

• Hangman by Maya Binyam is published by One (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply