Earlier this year I went on a modest buying spree through Amazon.com UK when I discovered they had a big collection of African fiction. Of course, then my semester started (along with my student teaching) and I was sucked into a vortex of YA fiction. Determined not to let the year end without cracking open at least one of these treasures, I chose the classic, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. This brilliant book should be taught everywhere -- classes on African history and colonization, philosophy classes, mythology classes, classes on world religions, and, oh yes, English classes.

As with the best books, this story is simply told and the truths revealed about the human experience startled me. Why? Because I expected a book about Africa, a book about remote people in remote tribes with beliefs quite remote from my own. In other words, I expected this book to be an anthropoligical experience, instead, it became quite personal. At first it was easy to read Okonkwo's story, of his violence, his pride, his pursuit of power and wealth, and feel detached from his experience. Wealth measured in yams? How quaint! Twin babies abandoned to Earth Mother in the Evil Forest? How barbaric! But then, as Okonkwo suffers from guilt after following tribal orders, worries over his favorite daughter's health and that his son will be weak like the father he reviled, in other words, as Okonkwo's life fills with all the woes of adulthood and parenthood, I could not help but connect with him, his beliefs and his tribal world. How does one face change? Should we fight it tooth and nail, or bend and yield to the good and the bad that it brings? Though written in 1958, this book has not aged a day. This is a story filled with hard questions, messy answers, and, best of all, characters you won't be able to help loving. ( )

I detested this in high school but have come to love this novel. The incredibly moving account of one man's downfall in the face of English imperialism. ( )

Subtle and poignant tale of a remote African tribe and their customs and what happens when white men begin to bring their religion (and government) to their villages...think title of the book. Achebe deftly shows the fall of powerful, strong men who would rather die than see their way of life and values change. The last sentence of the book is truly powerful and really stuck with me. Even though I am a Christian, I felt extremely sad to see the cruelty of the white missionaries and slow eradication of a unique and beautiful culture. ( )

This book is a superb example of the art of the novel told through Okonkwo's development and his clashes, successes, crises, and sometimes shocking behavior toward his family and community. He's a leader, a tyrant, a generous benefactor, a man committed to his principles and upholding the values and old ways of his culture in the face of his own internal conflicts and challenges from his people. In the end, he remained apart and, in his death, untouchable. Magnificent. ( )

Things Fall Apart (1958) is a magnificent novel. Like all great writers, Achebe is at once compassionate and detached, and his story is both intensely local and universal. One of the great strengths of the novel is its refusal to do the reader’s work for him and interpret the events as they unfold. Achebe, in his strong, classical prose is the ideal artist described by Hamlet, “whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.”

Achebe grew up in a devout Christian home, and it is not difficult to detect in Things Fall Apart the literary style and influence of the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, the Hymn Book, and Pilgrim’s Progress. Achebe is deeply respectful of his ancestral Ibo culture, but does not equivocate in post-modern fashion with regard to monstrous aspects of that culture, such as the throwing away of twins and the killing of Ikemefuna. Although no doubt disagreeable to some secular readers, Achebe beautifully conveys the way the Christian faith grew because it answered a longing in the hearts of reflective people such as Nwoye:

“It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul—the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna, who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul. The words of the hymn were like drops of frozen rain melting on the dry palate of the panting earth.”

Achebe’s depiction of the primitive church in Nigeria is entirely convincing. His father, Isaiah, was an early Ibo convert to Christianity, and doubtless many of the details of the Christian community in Things Fall Apart come from his reminiscences.

The principal value of the pre-Christian Ibo culture will be familiar to readers of Homer: honor. Like Homer’s Greeks, this culture emphasized nobility, courage, loyalty, and generosity. More skeptically, one might add to this list, the domination of women. Kwame Anthony Appiah, however, in his introduction to the Everyman’s Library edition, writes that the Ibo culture of Things Fall Apart was not characterized by domination of women, but “a balance between masculine and feminine that [Okonkwo] does not acknowledge in part because he is ashamed of his father who has failed to be a real man.” Appiah’s view seems to me especially apt because one of the principal dynamics of the book is the powerful, even menacing Oedipal temper that drives the protagonist. Okonkwo loathes his father, and in the end, his hatred leads to his destruction.

As a western, Christian reader, it is tempting to assume that Achebe regards the end of Ibo independence and traditional culture as a small price to pay for the coming of Christianity. The novel’s title, however, taken from a line in Yeats’ poem The Second Coming, suggests that Achebe is ambivalent about the coming of the white man:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Things Fall Apart was followed in 1960 by No Longer at Ease, and in 1964 by Arrow of God. No Longer at Ease is the story of one of Okonkwo’s Anglicized grandsons, and Arrow of God takes place amongst the Ibo villages in the 1920s. Together, Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God are sometimes referred to as The African Trilogy.

Published in Regent University Library Link, November 2009
http://librarylink.regent.edu/?p=245 ( )