Burma Boy, by Biyi Bandele

As the author's note at the end of Burma Boy makes clear, many things went into the making of this short but powerful coming-of-age novel about a Nigerian boy who escapes an apprenticeship to a brutal blacksmith by joining the Royal West African Frontier Force and ends up operating as a Chindit inside Japanese-held Burma.

The Nigerian-born playwright and novelist Biyi Bandele has combined childhood memories of his father's tales of "carnage, shell-shock and hard-won compassion" with biographical research into the lives of Orde Wingate and other Chindit leaders, and further studies of the Second World War's "least documented and most brutal theatre". Yet there is no whiff of the lamp about this taut, tense and utterly riveting tale of comrades-in-arms undergoing conditions of such adversity as to defy belief.

The novel has two heroes: Wingate himself, for whom the saying about genius being akin to madness might have been invented, and the scarred Sergeant Damisa, a veteran of Wingate's Gideon Force in Abyssinia (where he lost an ear in hand-to-hand fighting against the Italians), who takes the novel's protagonist, 14-year-old Ali Banana, under his wing.

Bandele's portrayal of the manic, bearded, Old-Testament-prophet-like Wingate is as vivid and compelling as everything else in this novel. He prefaces the Chindit story with a graphic account of a suicide attempt by the (then) major during a bout of malaria in Cairo. Many officers who later served under Wingate in Burma may have wished it had been successful, since they were deeply offended both by his attitude to the wounded and his often unflattering remarks about their beloved troops. For every one who thought him a genius there were others who dismissed him as a charlatan whose strategy was not as original as he liked to make out.

But such historical controversies are outside the scope of this book, and Bandele's account of the way Wingate's sudden death in an aircraft crash orphaned the Chindits is absolutely authentic. As for the Gurkhas, they are known in the novel as "Thik Hais", from their constant use of the Urdu phrase for "all right", and feature only as sure-footed walkers who provoke the Africans' curses as the latter try to keep up with them on gruelling forced marches.

Ali Banana is one of the reinforcements flown in to shore up the besieged "White City" fortress against frantic assaults by the Japanese. After enduring weeks of bombing raids by Mitsubishi Zeroes and suicidal mass attacks on foot and by tank, "the stronghold had turned into a purgatory... being inside the block, or anywhere near it, was like being trapped inside an airtight canister filled with methane". When they set out on a mission, Banana's comrades are delighted to leave this hell-hole that is a paradise only for vultures and flies. But sadly for them, it is a case of out of the frying-pan into the fire...

Burma Boy explores to the full the inhumanity of modern warfare while celebrating the humanity of warriors caught up in it. It is a fine achievement, not least in giving the previously unheard West African Chindits a voice of their own.

Tony Gould is the author of 'Imperial Warriors: Britain and the Gurkhas' (Granta)

Jonathan Cape £12.99 (218pp) £11.50(free p&p) from 0870 079 8897

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