Things Fall Apart

A friend of mine finds watching the Michael Cimino film Heaven’s Gate incredibly frustrating because she says you can see the good film in there, it’s just been so poorly edited that it’s lost.  That’s sort of how I feel about Things Fall Apart.  It’s one of those books I’ve heard a lot about without actually hearing anything about. One of the everyone knows it, some studied at school type books that (I suspect) very few people have actually read.  Like a slightly obscure Dickens.  And, like much Dickens, I wasn’t that impressed.

The problem is, this isn’t a bad book.  I just read it far too late.  If I’d have read it when I was thirteen or so, no doubt I’d have a great appreciation for it.  The blurb claims that this is a classic tragedy and, while it does have that narrative arch- Okonkwo’s succeeds because of his resolve and ambition, but these ultimately cause his downfall- it’s not really that tragic.  Achebe uses such a simple syntax through that everything seems at a distance.  I really think this might be the first book I’ve read in about a decade that doesn’t even whip out one metaphor.  He spends half of a 164 page book setting the scene and telling us of far more traditional customs than are relevant at the detriment of character development.  The marriage of secondary characters’ daughters is not important, the feelings of the main character when his daughter is on death’s door could be.  There could be at least an explanation when she recovers.  The first part almost reads like a guide to another culture, all foreign words written in italics, emphasising their other-ness, with near total indifference to its characters.

When the plot finally does get going and Okonkwo is banished from his village, there is too little of the book left in which to tell a story.  It’s ostensibly about the British colonisation of Africa through missionaries, but the tale lurches forward years at a time, providing only a snapshot of life at each point.  By the end, Okonkwo’s waging war on some bloke who’s only been around for three pages and it’s impossible to care that both have gone too far.

I realise that literally everything I’ve said about Things Fall Apart is negative, but I don’t hate it.  Some of the customs are incredibly interesting, the idea that the reason so many children die is because they are all the same child reborn and infected with an evil spirit is fascinating.  My problem is, the entire novel reminds me of the kind of thing studied in school.  It wouldn’t be out of place on any year nine SATs curriculum as a reading comprehension text, the dreadfully boring kind that takes hours because of the illiterates pissing about in the back row (NB trying to convince someone who’s been teaching you for months that you now have Tourette’s because you saw it on TV is stupid, futile, and insensitive).  I don’t know why Achebe just didn’t make the book a little bit better.  He’s clearly got talent, but at every turn he chose the most simplistic route.  There is so much potential for character depth and introspection and literary devices that is not capitulated upon.  Maybe the most damning thing of all is that my favourite bit is the Yeats epigraph…

Next time on the blog: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.