CHAPTER & VERSE — Things Fall Apart

Rufus McCrae: Evening, all, and welcome to Chapter and Verse, where every great book gets chewed over down the pub. I'm Rufus McCrae, the bloke at the end of the bar, and tonight my reading group has a book that's sold something like twenty million copies and very nearly got lost in the post. Round the table: Professor Edmund Cavendish, who's brought his annotated Yeats and is daring someone to ask him about it. Iris Marchetti, our psychologist, who's diagnosed tonight's hero and reckons he'd never turn up for a second session. Alice Pemberton, who read this at sixteen, hated it, read it again this month and wants a stern word with her sixteen-year-old self. And Arthur Nightingale, who brought tonight's book and has been holding it like a hymn book since six o'clock. The book is Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. And up in the balcony, as permanent as the damp, Humphrey Thwaite and Mortimer Finch.

Humphrey Thwaite: The damp was here first. And it's better read.

Mortimer Finch: Damp's quieter, too. Hymn book, is it? I thought Arthur was rehearsing for my funeral.

Humphrey Thwaite: Nobody's singing at your funeral, Mortimer. There's going to be a raffle.

Mortimer Finch: First prize, you don't have to come.

Rufus McCrae: Right. Arthur, your book, your round. Sell it to me like I'm a bloke who's only ever read the back of a crisp packet.

Arthur Nightingale: There's a man called Okonkwo. Strongest man in nine villages, in Igboland, what's now south-eastern Nigeria, end of the nineteenth century. Champion wrestler, three wives, barns full of yams, titles to his name. And every waking minute he is terrified of turning into his father. For two-thirds of the book you just live in his village. Harvests, weddings, wrestling matches, gods, gossip. And then, very quietly, the white men arrive. And the last third is that whole world coming apart in his hands.

Humphrey Thwaite: The first one turns up in a neighbouring village on a bicycle. They call it an iron horse. They tie it to the sacred tree, in case it runs off to fetch its friends.

Mortimer Finch: Listen to him. Calls it homework, knows exactly where the bike was parked.

Humphrey Thwaite: I read it in nineteen sixty-two. I have a long memory for bicycles.

Mortimer Finch: You've a long memory for everything except buying a round.

Rufus McCrae: Alice, you're our reader's advocate, the one who checks whether a book actually works on the page. Does it?

Alice Pemberton: The sentences do. Short, plain, clean. You could read them to a ten-year-old. That's the trick of it, it reads simple and it absolutely isn't. My problem at sixteen was I thought it was a textbook about yams.

Mortimer Finch: Well, it is a bit about yams.

Alice Pemberton: It's loads about yams! But the yams are the point. Yams are how a man's worth is counted in Umuofia. Once you clock that, every yam's a bank statement.

Rufus McCrae: So the yam's a pay slip. I'll never look at a jacket potato the same way. Edmund, you're the man for the canon and the context. Who was Chinua Achebe, and why does it change how we read this?

Professor Edmund Cavendish: Born nineteen thirty in Ogidi, eastern Nigeria. Christened Albert Chinualumogu Achebe. The Albert, if you please, after Prince Albert. His father was a catechist and teacher for the Church Missionary Society. So he grows up in a Christian household, in an Igbo town, standing on precisely the crossroads this novel is about. And at university in Ibadan he quietly drops the Albert.

Rufus McCrae: Sacks off the Prince Consort. Good lad.

Professor Edmund Cavendish: And at Ibadan he reads Mister Johnson, a novel set in Nigeria by Joyce Cary, much admired in England. Achebe found it a picture of his own people drawn entirely from the outside, an African as a figure of fun. He decided somebody had better tell it from the inside. He used to cite a proverb, and it's the whole book: until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

Mortimer Finch: That's the entire novel on a beer mat, that.

Rufus McCrae: And it nearly never happened, did it?

Professor Edmund Cavendish: Oh, this is my favourite bit. Nineteen fifty-seven, he's working at the Nigerian Broadcasting Service. The manuscript is handwritten, his only copy, and he posts it to a typing agency in London. And nothing. Weeks. Months. Letters unanswered. The most widely read African novel ever written, sat in a drawer in somebody's office.

Humphrey Thwaite: A typing agency. The natural predator of the novelist.

Professor Edmund Cavendish: His boss at the broadcaster, Angela Beattie, was going to London on leave. She marched into the agency and sorted it out, and the typed copy came home. Heinemann took it, their reader said it was the best novel he'd read since the war, and they printed a nervous two thousand copies in nineteen fifty-eight. Today, something like twenty million, in more than fifty languages.

Mortimer Finch: Saved by a woman on her holidays. That's most of history, that is.

Arthur Nightingale: And the title's Yeats, Rufus. 'The Second Coming.'

Rufus McCrae: Go on then, Edmund, you've brought the annotated—

Humphrey Thwaite: 'Turning and turning in the widening gyre... The falcon cannot hear the falconer... Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.'

Mortimer Finch: ...Well. Edmund, put your book away, the tea towel's spoken.

Humphrey Thwaite: It's on the wall of every sixth form in England. It is not a confession.

Professor Edmund Cavendish: But here's the beauty of the theft, Humphrey. An Irish poet's line about Europe collapsing, and a young Nigerian takes it to describe what Europe did to his people. He borrows the empire's poetry and turns it round to face the empire.

Rufus McCrae: Iris, you spend your days working out why people do what they do. Okonkwo. What's wrong with him?

Iris Marchetti: Everything he does is a reaction to one man, his father, Unoka. Unoka plays the flute, borrows money, is lovely company at a party and never pays anyone back. And the village has a word for a man with no titles, agbala, which is also the word for a woman. So Okonkwo builds his whole personality as the photographic negative of his dad. Achebe tells you straight out: 'But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness.'

Mortimer Finch: I knew a fella like that. Hated his dad so much he turned into him from the other direction.

Iris Marchetti: That's it exactly, Mortimer. Overcorrection. He's so afraid of looking soft that every feeling he has gets converted into anger. Which takes you to Ikemefuna.

Rufus McCrae: The boy.

Iris Marchetti: A boy handed over to the clan to settle a dispute. He lives in Okonkwo's house for three years and calls him father. Then the Oracle decrees the boy must die, and the old man Ezeudu warns Okonkwo to have no hand in it, because the boy calls him father. Okonkwo goes anyway. And I'll read it, because you can't paraphrase it: 'He heard Ikemefuna cry, "My father, they have killed me!" as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his machete and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak.'

Alice Pemberton: That last sentence. I read that at sixteen as a fact. It's a verdict.

Humphrey Thwaite: He's a brute. I've no sympathy for him whatsoever.

Mortimer Finch: You've plenty of sympathy, Humphrey. You keep it in a drawer with the Yeats.

Rufus McCrae: So which is he, Iris? Tragic hero or thug?

Iris Marchetti: That's why he's still alive on the page sixty-odd years on. Achebe never lets you pick.

Rufus McCrae: Arthur. You brought it, you've been clutching it all night. The last page, please.

Arthur Nightingale: Okonkwo has cut down a court messenger in front of the whole clan, and the clan lets the other messengers go. Nobody follows him. He goes home and hangs himself, which for his people is an abomination. His own clan can't touch the body; strangers have to take him down. His oldest friend Obierika turns on the Commissioner and says: 'That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia. You drove him to kill himself; and now he will be buried like a dog...' And then the last paragraph. And we're inside the Commissioner's head. ... 'The Commissioner went away, taking three or four of the soldiers with him. In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man down from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.'

Mortimer Finch: ... A reasonable paragraph.

Arthur Nightingale: Two hundred pages of a man's life. And he gets a paragraph.

Rufus McCrae: Thank you, Arthur. Right. Breathe, everyone. Alice, you went down the Goodreads mines this week. What are the one-star brigade saying?

Alice Pemberton: I'll paraphrase, because there are thousands of them and they say the same three things. One: Okonkwo is a horrible man who beats his wives, so why should I care. Two: the first hundred pages are a list of customs and nothing happens. Three, mostly from people who read it for school: the ending just stops.

Mortimer Finch: The ending just stops. That's what endings do, love. That's the job description.

Alice Pemberton: I've sympathy for complaint one, mind. He beats his wife during the Week of Peace. He fires a gun at another one. He is not good company.

Iris Marchetti: But Alice, nobody's asked you to like him. The village doesn't like him either. They punish him for the Week of Peace. The people saying he's unlikeable are proving the book works.

Humphrey Thwaite: It's complaint two that gets my goat. Nothing happens! A whole civilisation happens. Courts, gods, a justice system run by masked ancestors, an economy in yams, poetry in every conversation. What they mean is nothing happens that they recognised.

Rufus McCrae: Ooh. Edmund, back him up or knock him down.

Professor Edmund Cavendish: Back him up, I'm afraid. The shape is the argument. Achebe makes you live in Umuofia for two-thirds of the book, so that when the missionaries call it primitive, you know they're lying. Start with the bicycle and you'd have been riding the bicycle.

Alice Pemberton: Fine, but he still has to keep me turning pages for a hundred of them, and there are stretches where it's a touch Encyclopaedia Igbo-ica.

Mortimer Finch: Encyclopaedia Igbo-ica! I'm having that. I'm putting that on a T-shirt.

Arthur Nightingale: But Alice, the proverbs! 'Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.' That's the first half. That's how they talk. It's music.

Alice Pemberton: All right. I'll give you the palm-oil.

Rufus McCrae: And complaint three, Edmund? The ending just stops?

Professor Edmund Cavendish: It doesn't stop, Rufus. It's confiscated. Achebe holds the pen for the whole novel, and in the final paragraph the Commissioner snatches it.

Mortimer Finch: Confiscated. Like my car keys.

Rufus McCrae: Here's where I want a proper row. Achebe gives you a nice missionary, Mr Brown. Patient, sits down with the elders, builds a school, a hospital. Then he's replaced by Mr Smith, who sees the world in black and white. Is that Achebe being fair, or being clever? Alice?

Alice Pemberton: Fair. Scrupulously fair. That's why it's lasted when the angry books haven't.

Humphrey Thwaite: Fair my foot. Clever. Mr Brown is the dangerous one. Mr Smith you can fight. Mr Brown builds you a school, and in one generation your grandson is a clerk at the court that hangs you.

Iris Marchetti: But it isn't only coming from outside, Humphrey. Look who converts first. The outcasts. The mothers whose twins were left in the Evil Forest. Okonkwo's own son, Nwoye, broken by what happened to Ikemefuna. The new religion answers a grief the old one created.

Humphrey Thwaite: Oh, so it's the clan's fault now.

Iris Marchetti: It's a crack. The missionaries put a crowbar in a crack that was already there.

Professor Edmund Cavendish: And Obierika says it, near the end: 'The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.'

Mortimer Finch: That's not a crack, Iris. That's a man telling you how he got burgled.

Alice Pemberton: But that's the genius. He doesn't make Umuofia paradise. Twins in the forest, Ikemefuna, Okonkwo with his gun. Make it paradise, and the other side gets to say: see, propaganda.

Humphrey Thwaite: And instead they get to say: see, the natives had it coming. He's handed the enemy the evidence.

Professor Edmund Cavendish: That's the risk he took, Humphrey, and it's precisely why it isn't propaganda. Seventeen years later he gave a lecture on Heart of Darkness and called Conrad, in the published version, a thoroughgoing racist. The literary establishment fell off its chair. But the novel never shouts. It simply hands you the Commissioner's paragraph and lets you do the sum.

Rufus McCrae: ... Right, before Humphrey starts throwing beer mats. Takeaways. One thing to carry out of the pub. Alice, you've had a conversion of your own tonight, so you first.

Alice Pemberton: Go back to the books they made you read at school. You weren't wrong at sixteen. You were just sixteen. This one waited for me, and I owe it an apology.

Mortimer Finch: She's apologising to a book. Humphrey's never apologised to a person.

Rufus McCrae: Iris, from the therapist's chair?

Iris Marchetti: What destroys Okonkwo isn't weakness. It's the terror of it. A hardness that can't bend, snaps. And that's not a lesson about Africa in the eighteen nineties. That's every man who never let himself cry at his father's funeral.

Mortimer Finch: ...

Rufus McCrae: Humphrey. Mortimer. Last word's always yours.

Humphrey Thwaite: I said he was a brute. He is. But after the boy, Okonkwo doesn't eat for two days. Sits drinking palm-wine from morning till night. Calls himself a shivering old woman. ... My father was a hard man. I thought for forty years that was strength. ... It wasn't. It was a man who'd done something he couldn't grieve, because nobody had ever told him he was allowed to.

Mortimer Finch: ... Right. That's the Yeats wearing off. Somebody get him a crisp. Mine's the paragraph. When we go, somebody writes it. Probably somebody who never knew us, in a hurry, cutting out details. So tell your own story while you've got the pen. Write it down. Tell your grandkids. Don't leave it to the Commissioner. ... Humphrey, I'll do yours. It'll be a reasonable paragraph.

Humphrey Thwaite: Spell my name right.

Mortimer Finch: No promises.

Rufus McCrae: Here's mine. Things Fall Apart is a masterpiece. A bit slow in the middle, Alice is right, and I wouldn't cut a single yam. It makes you live somewhere long enough that when a stranger turns up and calls it primitive, you know he's lying. Every pub that ever shut got written up by the brewery in one line of an annual report. Underperforming asset. The regulars could've told you three hundred years. Achebe wrote the three hundred years. Read it if they made you read it at school and you hated it. Read it if anyone's ever summed you up in a paragraph. And Mortimer, make it a good one for him. Read the actual book, though. Don't just listen to us bang on about it. That's Chapter and Verse. See you next week.