Falling Apart

I'm trying to come to terms with the fact that Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart was first published some 68 years ago. That's almost a decade more than the gap in time between Achebe's first novel and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, that being just 59 years. Both incontestably great works, though I suspect Achebe would contest that statement since he famously considered Conrad's novella an offensive and totally deplorable book. I think Achebe was wrong, but I can understand why he felt that way, and reading Things Fall Apart again was a powerful reminder for me of what he knew that Conrad didn't which led him to that conclusion.

It's astonishing how fresh Achebe's novel seems, especially placed side-by-side with Conrad. The great English (or Polish?) writer's prose reads as decidedly dated, for all its virtues, but this is not at all true of Achebe's writing. The great Nigerian achieves something quite remarkable - a version of English that transcends any kind of nationalism: it reads as effortlessly international, incorporating a story-telling voice that is recognisably African, generally sounding quite simple, yet making subtle demands upon its readers to recognise the complexities of the world it delineates. It's also astonishing just how much he crams into his short novel, less than 200 pages in the Penguin edition I finished yesterday, reading the whole in just a couple of days.

In fact, Achebe doesn't really cram things into his work. If anything he leaves things out, judiciously so. His characters suggest depth, but we are never given much in the way of actual detail. So it would be easy for the casual reader to see Okonkwo simply as an unpleasant bully, rather than a genuinely tragic figure. His complexities in fighting against the humiliations involved in being the son of a negligent, hopeless father and then facing what must seem like deep betrayal from his eldest son are brilliantly implied.

What struck me most of all on this reading of Things Fall Apart is just how desperately sad the plight of the people of Umuofia is as they face the collapse of all that gives their lives meaning and purpose. Perhaps that's one of the reasons the text seems so fresh? We live, after all, in a world of collapsing values with a bleak awareness of how nothing is guaranteed to last.