"An Orchestra of Minorities" by Chigozie Obiomoa

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2019.

This story is narrated by the chi - a sort of cross between a guardian angel and a soul - of the protagonist. This is a useful conceit for two reasons. Firstly, because the chi has been reincarnated through a number of lives and so knows more about the behaviours of humanity than its host, enabling the narration to comment sagely from a position of detachment on what is happening. Secondly, because the chi can, from time to time, leave the host’s body and therefore know more about the situation than the protagonist. For both these reasons, the principally first person narration achieves a degree of omniscience. (This is tempered somewhat when the chi explains that what the host cannot say, he cannot say, a rule he has already repeatedly broken, which seems to be the narrator's attempt to have the best of both worlds.)

A third reason emerged just over half way through the book when a killing occurs. The chi then spends a whole chapter popping up to heaven to discuss things with God. Someone (I think it might have been E M Forster) once said that when you reach a climax in your story, when you have got your reader hanging on every word, desperate to know what happens next, have your character look out of the window just to prolong the suspense. Having a chi as narrator enables this to happen. 

As if to compensate for this supernatural element, the story is narrated in a very pedestrian style in which things happen one after another with little embellishment. This includes calling a spade a spade: for example, the protagonist urinates, he copulates. This is a style I associate with other African books such as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and its sequels No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God. I also thought of Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This everyday style is interrupted whenever the chi communes with his spirit colleagues, when the prose becomes much more flowery, and when the chi quotes proverbs and sayings, which can be quite picturesque (see selected quotes).

But it also reminded me of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison, which grounds a fantastic tale with meticulous observations of everyday life, and Glister by John Burnside which combines mystery with gritty reality. 

Is this sort of style the best technique to achieve verisimilitude when you are asking readers to accept fantastical storylines, such as in novels using magic realism, or ones far from their experience of everyday, such as novels set in a war zone or a prison camp? 

Surprisingly, given this prosaic style, I found myself on an emotional roller-coaster, at least in the first part of the story. The protagonist falls in love with a woman of much higher status than himself; when he meets her family he is humiliated by them. I empathised deeply. He decides that the family will never let him marry her unless he improves himself and so, because he loves her deeply, he sells his home and his business so he can travel abroad for an education. 

But then, about 40% of the way through the book, the story seemed to morph into a recreation of the 'hero's journey'. The long first section had established the status quo ante; despite a prophecy of doom, the hero determines on a quest (to improve his lowly status so that he can get the girl, a girl for whom, very early on, he has made an animal sacrifice). Then, in a chapter actually entitled "Crossing the threshold", he travels to a liminal realm (Northern Cyprus, a quasi state recognised by almost no other nation) where he meets challenges, guides and helpers (eg Tobe) not all of whom are friendly. He undergoes (another chapter heading) a "metamorphosis" while enduring a time of trial at the end of which, despite having nothing left, he makes a gift of the little that he does have (glossed with a Biblical reference about going two miles with someone who asks you to go one mile with them). At his lowest point he has a near death experience. Rather unexpectedly reborn he returns (in a chapter headed "Return") to his own world a sadder but wiser man and (again unexpectedly) receives at least a partial restitution for his suffering. However, unlike the happy ever after endings of a fairy tale, this story has a tragic twist in its tail (this is not a spoiler, given that the narrative is cast as the hero's chi, pleading for forgiveness for his host, who has killed, or might have killed, a pregnant woman).

I rather lost my motivation during the Cyprus interlude. It seemed to drag. I found it more difficult to empathise with a character who no longer possessed agency but seemed little more than an object to which things happened. I was no longer 'involved' in the story. And I became increasingly irritated by the supernatural bits, especially the affectation of introducing chapters and even some paragraphs with one of the names of the deity. 

I was also confused about whether one is supposed to sympathise with the protagonist or not. We know, throughout, that the chi is pleading mitigating circumstances for a bad deed done by the protagonist. That suggests that the author wants the reader to be on the protagonist's side. But is he a goodie or a baddie? He is described as "a shepherd of birds" (Ch 5) and shepherds are conventionally seen as good people (like Jesus) but shepherds exploit their flock, taking their produce and killing the creatures for whom they have cared; shepherds are predators. The title of the book refers to the collective distress of his flock of birds mourning when one of the chicks is snatched by a hawk. Given that the hero is portrayed as a poor man, helpless against the bullying of the rich, especially when he travels to Cyprus, I supposed that the title of the book is a metaphor for all the poor people of the world, so many from the African continent, who are preyed upon by the rich people in the world. 

Perhaps he is making the point that those who have power, no matter how much or how little, prey upon those who have less power. That is the theme of my novel The Kids of God.

A recurrent motif is the story of the gosling whom the protagonist loved as a child, after his father had killed the gosling's mother for sport. But the gosling was tethered and, eventually, in a foreshadowing of the plot, killed by the protagonist. "For each man kills the thing he loves," as Oscar Wilde wrote. In may ways the fatal flaw of this hero was that, like a dog in the manger, he couldn't bear to see someone else getting enjoyment from one whom he loved.

I suppose that might be the point. The author is inviting us to appreciate the protagonist with all his faults. As the French say: “Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner”; to understand all is to forgive all. We are sitting in judgement upon this man who has done something awful, upon this man who is a representative of the poor people of the world, the dispossessed, upon this Everyman, upon this shepherd, upon this man who in some ways represents Jesus himself, and we are asked to understand his strengths and weaknesses and to weigh him in the balance and to decide whether to forgive him. 

Alternatively, one of the members of my U3A Meads reading group suggested that the chi might be an unreliable narrator. She supported this contention with the following evidence (page numbers from the paperback edition):

On page 374, the chi explicitly states that he is only allowed to remember what the host 'affirms to' which is a little at odds with the fact that the chi can relate occasions when he has left the host's body and gone to places of which the host has, presumably, no idea, unless the host dreams these experiences.

On page 339, the chi says: “ I know it is possible that our recollections are not always accurate.....”

And in the preface, the chi has assrted: “If the prey do not produce their version of the tale, the predators will always be the heroes in the stories of the hunt”.

Delightfully, the book is written in a mixture of English, Igbo and Pidgin. Frustratingly, the Igbo and Pidgin are rarely translated. Annoyingly, sometimes Igbo is used at a key moment in the text. Is this book supposed to be inaccessible to non-Igbo speakers? Is the reader supposed to use Google Translate to find out what is going on? If ever there was a case for footnotes, this is it.

Selected quotes:

• "Loneliness is the violent dog that barks interminably through the long night of grief." (Ch 2)
• "After he had combed through the thick hide of night, as one would search for lice on the skin of a densely furred animal, he returned home in anguish." (Ch 2)
• "He broke from the group like a wheel unhooked from a fast-moving car and rolled into the void." (Ch 3)
• "When a man encounters something that reminds him of an unpleasant event in his past, he pauses at the door of the new experience, carefully considering whether or not to go in. If he has already stepped in, he may retrace his steps and reconsider whether to re-enter." (Ch 4)
• "Discretion was at the centre of his self-esteem. It was must be kept alive to maintain him." (Ch 4)
• "I have dwelt among mankind long enough to realise that they do not store information about those who have hurt them as they do others. This kind is kept in tightly sealed jars whose lids must be opened to remember them." (Ch 4)
• "He decided to attend the party with only a part of him attuned to it, dragging along the other intransigent half." (Ch 7)
• "The character of human shame is chameleonic." (Ch 8)
• "Soon, someone who has a bachelor's degree would be useless, because everyone would have it." (Ch 8)
• "A person must reconsider their position if everyone else is saying something that contradicts their own position." (Ch 8) A refutation of Kipling's "If you can keep your head while all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you." 
• "Seeds sown in secret always yield the most vibrant fruit." (Ch 9)
• "For this was the way of the universe: when a man has reached the edge of his peace, the universe lends a hand, usually in the form of another person." (Ch 11)
• "The worst thing adversity can do to someone is to make them become who they are not." (Ch 12)
• "Speak only what you know. If a fact is thin, do not feed it to make it fat. If a fact is rich, do not take from it to make it lowly. If a fact is short, do not stretch it to make it long. Truth resists the hand that creates it, so that it is not bound by that hand. It must exist in the state in which it was first created." (Ch 13)
• "It is God that swats the fly from the bottom of a tailless cow and from the food of the blind man." (Ch 15) Another refutation , this time of the proverb "God helps those who help themselves"; inverting it to become 'God helps those who cannot help themselves."
• "A man sits here all day, merely alive, the enamels of life peeling away from him and withering into flecks at his feet." (Ch 18)
• "Anticipation is one of the most curious habits of the human mind. It is a drop of vicious blood in the vein of time." (Ch 20)
• "Revenge is a debris field." (Ch 20)
• "He wept for the time which would not replenish itself." (Ch 20)
• "The mind of man is a field in a wild forest on which something, no matter how small, must graze." (Ch 26)

A carefully crafted novel with an ingenious narrative technique and some delightful insights into the human condition. May 2024; 512 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Grass is Singing" by Doris Lessing

 The debut novel of a Nobel Laureate.

Between the ages of 6 and 30, Doris lived in Zimbabwe, which was then called Southern Rhodesia and was a country ruled by white colonists, mostly ex-English, who farmed; she was brought up on exactly the only-just-paying-its-way farm that is described in the book. A hallmark of the book is its immersion in the life: it is ultra-realist and she paints word pictures that make the reader feel very much inside the scene described.

The story opens with a newspaper cutting detailing the murder of Mary, and the arrest of the 'houseboy' Moses. Peter, Mary's husband has gone mad. The bulk of the novel is therefore not so much a whodunnit as a whydunnit. 

The plot is that lower middle class Mary (only surviving child of a mother and an alcoholic father) spends her young adult life as a very efficient office girl, enjoying an active social life and being taken out by men. But she begins to feel that something is missing and so, after a very short courtship, and despite the fact that she has, it seems, zero interest in sex, marries Peter, a struggling farmer on an isolated farm. The loneliness and boredom she experiences are tangible. She is also very bad at managing the native staff, tending to be a disciplinarian, while her husband cuts them some slack. Things go from bad to worse. Peter, despite having lots of good ideas, is unable to make the farm pay. (The neighbour, who is rich, has made his money by utterly degrading the soil system; his farm is now almost entirely infertile.) 

It is beautifully written with so much detail and verisimilitude. But at the end I was unsatisfied. I couldn't understand what made Peter mad. Throughout the book he has met his trials with stoicism and fortitude. The murder of his wife didn't seem big enough to tip him over the edge. Nor did I understand why Moses (so named, I assume, because the Moses in the Bible kills a cruel overseer of the oppressed Israelites during the sojourn in Egypt) killed Mary. He must have known she was leaving the farm the next day. Why did he suddenly snap? So, although the setting was brilliant, I was unable to suspend my disbelief in terms of the psychology of the characters.

The portrayal of the black 'natives' may offend modern sensibilities but for its time this would have been an indictment of the racism endemic in Zimbabwe then.

Mary makes an abortive attempt to run away exactly half way through the novel which suggests good pacing although I felt that the interminable but inevitable break down of the marriage made the novel drag slightly in the second half. 

Selected quotes:

• "It was the tradition to face punishment, and really there was something rather fine about it. Remarks like these are forgiven from native commissioners, who have to study languages, customs, and so on; although it is not done to say things natives do are 'fine'." (Ch 1)
• "'White civilization' ... will never, never admit that a white person, and most particularly, a white woman, can have a human relationship, whether for good or evil, with a black person." (Ch 1)
• "Loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship." (Ch 5)
• "He had become accustomed to the double solitude that any marriage, even a bad one, becomes." (Ch 7)
• "A poverty that allows a tiny margin for spending, but which is shadowed always by a weight of debt that nags like a conscience, is worse than starvation itself." (Ch 7)
• "When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid) his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip." (Ch 8)
• "He was obeying the dictate of the first law of white South Africa, which is: 'Thou shalt not let your fellow whites sink lower than a certain point; because if you do, the nigger will see he is as good as you are." (Ch 10)
• "Charlie was fighting to prevent another recruit to the growing army pf poor whites, who seem to respectable white people so much more shocking (though not pathetic, for they are despised and hated for their betrayal of white standards, rather than pitied) than all the millions of black people who are crowded into the slums or on to the dwindling land reserves of their own country." (Ch 10)
• "She said suddenly, 'They said I was not like that, not like that, not like that.' It was like a gramophone that had got stuck at one point." (Ch 10)
• "Time taking on the attributes of space, she stood balanced in mid-air." (Ch 11)

Wonderful descriptions.

Other novels reviewed in this blog written by Lessing, who won the Nobel Prize in 2007:

• Her breakthrough, feminist novel: The Golden Notebook
• The Fifth Child and its sequel Ben, in the World
• The Good Terrorist

May 2023; 206 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"At Night All Blood Is Black" by David Diop

 A Senegalese soldier fighting for the French in the trenches of World War One witnesses the death of his best friend, his "more-than-brother". His terrible revenge tips him over the edge into a madness so extreme that it stands out even in the organised madness of the trenches.

Written in the first person and immersed in the protagonist's perspective, this beautifully written short novel makes use of repeated phrases (such as "more-than-brother", "la terre a personne, 'no-man's-land', as the captain says", and "God's truth") which make the simple narrative into a sort of epic poem.

It is structured with short chapters. There is a major turning point half-way through the novel so that this novel, despite seeming to ramble, is carefully structured.

The author's surname is Diop, which is also the name of the murdered friend, which resonates with the clever (and significant) twist at the end.

Selected quotes:

• "My stench is the stench of death. Death has the stench of the inside of the body turned outside its sacred vessel. In the open air, the inside of the body of any human being or animal becomes corrupted. From the richest man to the poorest, from the most beautiful woman to the ugliest, from the most feral animal to the most harmless, from the most powerful to the weakest." (Ch 3)
• "The rumour spread. It spread, and as it spread it shed its clothes and, eventually, its shame. Well dressed at the beginning, well appointed at the beginning, well outfitted, well medaled, the brazen rumour ended up with her legs spread, her ass in the air." (Ch 6)
• "I had left the door of my mind open to the thoughts of others, which I mistook for my own." (Ch 8)
• "Here, there isn't any real sun. There's only a cold sun that doesn't dry anything. Mud remains mud. Blood never dries." (Ch 10)
• "That's war: it's when God lags behind the music of men, when he can't untangle the threads of so many fates at the same time." (Ch 12)
• "In war, when you have a problem with one of your soldiers, you get the enemy to kill him. It's more practical." (Ch 13)
• "You have to promise me that when you get back you'll stop mutilating the enemy, understood? You will content yourself with killing them, not mutilating them. The civilities of war forbid it." (Ch 13)
• "The captain is a devourer of souls. He showers war with presents, he spoils her with countless soldiers' lives. The captain is a devourer of souls." (Ch 13)
• "Mademoiselle Francois returned my smile right away and her gaze lingered on the middle of my body." (Ch 15)
• "Until a man is dead, he is not yet done being created." (Ch 16)
• "He was as old as the immutable landscape, she was young like the changing sky." (Ch 16)
• "God's truth, my body had experienced all sorts of great joys before Fary. I had felt its power in back-to-back wrestling matches. I had pushed it to the edges of its resistance in long races on the beach after swimming across the river. I had sprayed it with seawater beneath a sun as hot as hell, I had quenched it with cold water drawn from the deep wells of Gandiol after swinging a daba in my father's and Sire Diop's fields for hours and hours. God's truth, my body had known the pleasures of reaching the limits of its power, but never had anything been as powerful as Fary's warm, soft, and moist interior." (Ch 18)
• "My father is a soldier of everyday life who only lived to protect his wives and his children from hunger." (Ch 19)
• "If the hidden story hides too well beneath the well-known story, it stays invisible. The hidden story has to be there without being there, it has to let itself be guessed at, the way a tight saffron-yellow dress lets the beautiful figure of a young girl be guessed at." (Ch 25)

A worthy winner of the 2021 International Booker Prize.

December 2021; 145 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Other winners of the International Booker Prize can be found here. 

Other books about war which are reviewed in this blog can be found on this page.

"Arrow of God" by Chinua Achebe

The third novel in Achebe's African trilogy but, like the other two (Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease), it stands on its own.

It starts with Ezeulu, the Chief Priest of tribal god Ulu, who is watching for the new moon. “The moon he saw that day was as thin as an orphan fed grudgingly by a cruel foster-mother.” This part of his priestly job will become important at the end of the book. It is to do with the announcement of the new year, a task which gives him great power although in many ways "he was merely a watchman". "It was a fight of the gods. He was no more than an arrow in the bow of his god."

But for the most part the narrative meanders around the priest and his family. He has four sons: Edogo who wants to be a wood carver; Obika, a strong man and in some ways his father's favourite but headstrong and a lover of palm wine; Oduche whom has been sent by his father to the mission school so that he can learn the ways of the white man; and little Nwafo, still a boy, but perhaps the one most likely to inherit the priesthood. If there is a plot it revolves around the colonial officer's and their ignorant attempts to bring civilisation by building roads (with forced unpaid labourers who can be whipped) and appointing village leaders to become local kings. Ezeulu is one of those whom they want to appoint.

What makes this book great, and I would rate it higher than either of the other two, is that it understands the people. Each character is portrayed with their strengths and their weaknesses. It is a fond portrait of family life. And when bad things happen, blame is difficult to ascribe. Is it due to the well-meaning but ignorant intervention of the colonial conquerors or is it due to the superstitions and pig-headed clinging to tradition of the villagers?

There are some fabulous descriptions, such as a promise that “went no deeper than the lips.” A man with a hangover thinks “the walking was already doing him some good; the feeling was returning that the head belong to him.” A stubborn man “could never see something and take his eyes away from it.” Caught in a rainstorm two men get soaked: “the cloth clinging as if terrified to their bodies”. These are observations of humanity that transcend time and culture and place.

But perhaps the best thing about the book is all the wonderful proverbs within it:

• “What kind of power was it if it would never be used?”
• “To you whatever I say in this house is no more effective than the fart a dog breaks to put out a fire”
• “Wisdom is like a goat-skin bag; every man carries his own.”
• “In a great man's household there must be people who follow all kind of strange ways. There must be good people and bad people, honest workers and thieves, peace-makers and destroyers ... In such a place, whatever music you beat on your drum there is somebody who can dance to it.” This is repeated . The first time Ezeule says it; the second time it is said to him: “In all great compounds there must be people of all mind - some good, some bad, some fearless and some cowardly; those who bring in wealth and those who scatter it, those who give good advice and those who only speak the words of palm wine. That is why we say that whatever tune you play in the compound of a great man there is always someone to dance to it.” A number of the proverbs are repeated, sometimes very similar but often changed slightly to reflect the character or the context.
• “The white man is like hot soup and we must take him slowly-slowly from the edges of the bowl.” 
• “A man may refuse to do what is asked of him but may not refuse to be asked.”
• “The death that will kill a man begins as an appetite.”
• “If a man sought for a companion who acted entirely like himself he would live in solitude.”
• “A woman who began cooking before another must have more broken utensils.”
• “A man who asks questions does not lose his way.” 

Other great lines

• “He was as good as any young man, or better because young men were no longer what they used to be.”
• “My things always turn out differently from other people's. If I drink water it sticks between my teeth.” 

A great book by a writer who has really come into his power.

June 2018; 222 pages

"No Longer At Ease" by Chinua Achebe

This sequel to Things Fall Apart starts with Obi Okonkwo, grandson of the Okonkwo whose life made up the story of that book, on trial for having received a bribe. This book explains the pressures on a young man who has been funded by his village to get a University education in England; who, returning, discovers that he must pay back his scholarship, and pay towards his little brother's education and his mother's hospital bills, and car insurance, and income tax; and that he still cannot complain to people who salary is one tenth of his. Money troubles, and girlfriend troubles, turn his promising youth into a tragedy. As Obi, an English graduate, says: "I remember an old man in my village ... who suffers one calamity after another. He said life was like a bowl of wormwood which one sips a little at a time world without end. ... Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly for ever. Conventional tragedy is too easy. The hero dies and we feel a purging of the emotions." Perhaps this refers to the story of Africa itself. (Chapter 5)

Although Things Fall Apart is regard as Achebe's classic in many ways I preferred this book to the first. Perhaps this was because it had a more conventional plot. In the first book things happened. In this book things happen for a reason. Although in the first book it could be argued that the misfortunes piled onto the head of Okonkwo stemmed from his single impious act and that therefore the hero was responsible for his own misfortune, in this book Obi seems to have been cursed by fate. The badness that he does is almost forced upon him. But the chain of events in which tragedy leads inevitably to more tragedy  is more conventionally western.

At the same time Achebe produces an interesting portrait of Nigeria in the years just before independence. One could argue that this is a portrait of a society that has been irreparably damaged by the unintended consequences of colonialism. But that would be too simplistic. There is a clear clash between traditional and modern values but Achebe is careful to ensure that all opinions are put. For example, although it is clear that bribery is wrong and that Obi is noble (although naive) in his early stands against it, people accept bribery as part of the way of doing things, an essential for hard-pressed underpaid public servants, and somethings whose origins are African although some white men are beginning to take up the practice (perhaps it could be argued that they didn't need to before):

• "I am against people reaping where they have not sown. But we have a saying that if you want to eat a toad you should look for a fat and juicy one." (Chapter 1)
• "He should not have accepted the money himself. What others do is tell you to go and hand it to their houseboy." (Chapter 1)
• Another, more modern, character suggests that bribery is acceptable providing that you don't change what you would have done when you accept the bribe (so you are in effect taking a bribe and cheating the briber).

People, Achebe seems to say, are essentially selfish:

• "We are strangers in this land. If good comes to it may we have our share ... But if bad comes let it go to the owners of the land." (Chapter 1)

Although Clara is a strong portrait of a modern African woman the overall atmosphere is still heavily patriarchal and male-dominated.

There are some great descriptions:

• "He wore her sadness round his neck like a necklace of stone." (Chapter 6)
• "He had very bad teeth ... One was missing in front, and when he laughed the gap looked like a vacant plot in a slum." (Chapter 7)
• "There was always a part of him, the thinking part, which seemed to stand outside it all watching the passionate embrace with cynical disdain. The result was that one half of Obi might kiss a girl and murmur 'I love you', but the other half would say: 'Don't be silly'." (Chapter 7)

There are lots of African sayings:

• "He that fights for a ne'er-do-well has nothing to show for it except a head covered in earth and grime." (Chapter 1)
• "We are not empty men who become white when they see white, and black when they see black." (Chapter 5)
• "It is not right to ask a man with elephantiasis of the scrotum to take on smallpox as well, when thousands of other people have not had even their share of small diseases." (Chapter 10)

And other original perspectives:

• Obi is on the boat coming home form England, He looks across the sea. "What a waste of water. A microscopic fraction of the Atlantic would turn the Sahara into a flourishing grassland. So much for the best of all possible worlds. Excess here and nothing at all there." (Chapter 3); Achebe has clearly read Voltaire's Candide.
• "the government was 'they'. It had nothing to do with you and me. It was an alien institution and people's business was to get as much from it as they could without getting into trouble." (Chapter 4)
• "One felt very brisk after a cold bath. As with weeping, it was only the beginning that was difficult."(Chapter 13)
• "The impatient idealist says: 'Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth'. But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace." (Chapter 19)

Written in a very flat style, this book nevertheless develops some interesting characters and is a good read.

May 2018; 133 pages

"Things fall apart" by Chinua Achebe

Why did Achebe choose for his title three words from W B Yeats, an Irish writer? Was it because the Irish were also colonised by the English and became free? Or is there another reason? Does anyone out there know?

This is the classic story of Nigerian village life. Parts one and two are in the years before colonial rule. In part three there is friction as the Christian missionaries arrive and, soon after, the colonial police.

But is it really about that? Or is it about Okonkwo? The story traces his life. As a young man he is a famous wrestler and a three-wived farmer who strives as hard as he can to eradicate the memory of his father who was a lazy man and a musician. Okonkwo is man as macho as they make. He conforms to the customs of the tribe; his ambition is to be one of the big men. But somehow, things never quite go right for him. There is one dreadful season when his crops fail. He has problems with sons and daughters. He is forced to move his family away from his village. And in the end, of course, the rapid social changes engulf him and, for him at least, things fall apart.

It is a fascinating and tender portrait of village life. People are people. There is a lovely moment when a young girl is crying because she has broken a water pot and her mother promises to buy her a new one. What the mother doesn't know is that when the pot fell and broke the girl giggled but then decided she had to pretend to cry or she'd get into trouble. There are many little details like this.

It feels as real as it can be. This means that it doesn't seem to be guided by any message. Things just happen, one after another. In western story-telling conventions, the wicked deed that Okonkwo does would be the cause of his tragedy, like in Macbeth (though without the wifely influence). But in this story the retribution is left to the Gods, as in Greek stories. This means that the bad things that happen to Okonkwo, which come after he has done something bad, seem to be the result of bad luck. Perhaps this is the point. Perhaps a secular European like myself cannot hope to understand that it is the gods who are exacting revenge.

But perhaps there is more mythology to this. Okonkwo's son, who becomes a Christian and disavows his family and culture, takes the name Isaac. Perhaps this refers to the story of Abraham in Genesis who took his son Isaac and bound him and would have slaughtered him as a sacrifice as his god had commanded had not god in the nick of time changed his mind and told Abraham to spare the boy. Perhaps this explores what would have happened had Abraham killed the boy.

I don't want to make too much of this but this doesn't fit the western novel tradition. The novel assumes that there is a point to what is being written. The characters have character arcs; the bad things they do return to haunt them and the good things will be rewarded. The story has a similar arc. This tale doesn't seem to work on that level. It is more a social history of the village than anything I can understand as a novel.

I also expected that there would be a greater contrast between the innocent villagers and the terrible effects of white society. It is true that the Nigerian village life seems ordered and settled; there is no suggestion that it contains the seeds of its own destruction. The only mistake the villagers make is in being too nice when the missionaries arrive to build their church. But there are many ways in which one can see the arrival of colonial society is an improvement. It brings trade and this brings wealth. The first people recruited by the church are those who, seemingly through no fault of their own, are outcasts from village society; it also rescues the newborn twins who are traditionally abandoned in the forest. There is a great deal of superstition in the village, much seems pointless and some malevolent. The society is very heavily patriarchal and women have a very subordinate role. Of course I am judging all these things from my own encultured and limited viewpoint. Nevertheless, to this reader it made the apparent arbitrariness of the plot more forced.

Perhaps this isn't really a novel, more an ethnography.

The unflowery style of the prose reminded me of the first two chapters of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.

Many of the great lines seem to be proverbs and “Proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.” (p 6):

• “He always said that whenever he saw a dead man's mouth he saw the folly of not eating what one had in one lifetime.” (p 4)
• “the sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.” (p 7)
• “the bird says that since men have learnt to shoot without missing, he has learnt to fly without perching.” (p 20)
• “you will never hear. You grew your ears for decoration, not for hearing.” (p 62)
• “a man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.” (p 107)
• “it was like beginning life anew without the vigour and enthusiasm of youth, like learning to become left-handed in old age.” (p 114)
• “what is good among one people is an abomination with others.” (p 123)
• “Never make an early morning appointment with a man who has just married a new wife.” (p 124)
• “The words of the hymn were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the dry palate of the panting earth.” (p 129)
• “When a man blasphemes, what do we do? Do we go and stop his mouth? No. We put our fingers into our ears to stop us hearing.” (p 140)
• “when he stood or walked his heels came together and his feet up opened outwards as if they had quarreled and meant to go in different directions.” (p 163)

February 2018; 183 pages

The sequel, No Longer At Ease, tells the story of Okonkwo's grandson.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God