Book Review: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Since moving house, last April, a significant proportion of my books remained resolutely, mournfully, packed away in want of sufficient shelf space. After many months of waiting, said shelf space finally materialised in July of this year and the books joyfully emerged from their long hibernation. Having devised a pleasingly complex organisational schema, I was left with two conclusions:
- No amount of bookshelf is ever going to be enough bookshelf
- I own a lot of books I haven’t read
The first conclusion is, alas, a fact of life but the second felt like a challenge. Rather than continually acquiring fascinating sounding tomes I resolved to actually read some of them. There seems no better place to start than with Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, if for no other reason than Achebe’s surname puts in at the beginning of almost any reasonable organisation schema. Also, it’s quite short.

Achebe’s account of life in pre-colonial Nigeria, first published in 1958, is also something I’d long been meaning to read. For reasons I forget, I spent hardly any time with “post-colonial” writing whilst studying English. It is therefore a genre (if genre is the right term) that I’m shamefully unfamiliar with. I did however know something of Things Fall Apart in advance. It is never absent from lists of the “Greatest Novels of All Time” (or similar) and is heralded by many as the archetypal, perhaps prototypical, novel in English about the African experience of colonial rule.
For those not familiar, the novel it centres on the life of Okonkwo, an Igbo man of the Umuofia tribe. It is told in three chronological phases, through which Achebe slowly expands from a tight focus on Okonkwo’s daily travails to a broader societal lens. The first part has a timeless, almost mythic, quality that gives little or no hint as to when or where events are taking place. It is in fact a stretch to say events, beyond the agrarian cycle of planting and harvest, are really taking place at all. Achebe is far more interested in evoking a culture, and crafting nuanced portrait of his flawed protagonist, than in plotting. This balances tilts dramatically at the end of the first act, presenting the chance for the Achebe to begin to slowly, delicately, layer on the broader his social and historical context through parts two and three. First Okonkwo leaves his village and then, on his return, finds that in many ways his village has left him.
Achebe’s writing style would be reason enough to read this novel. He is simultaneously lyrically and spare. There isn’t a single extraneous word and yet it is not remotely spartan. It is instead a forceful description of a superstitious, oftentimes opaque, world. Although written in English it is shot through with the idiomatic, proverbial structures of the Igbo dialect that Achebe references at the outset. Through Okonkwo and those he engages we are able to access the richness of Igbo culture and understand his worldview. We are however also quickly able to see what he can’t, or often won’t, see. This blindness, wilful or otherwise, increasingly hampers Okonkwo’s ability to adapt to a world that changes around him.
The storied past Achebe displays is not romanticised, glamorised or sanctified. It is shockingly brutal, casually cruel, and riven with injustices large and small. But is all the more accessible as a result. The veracity allows all readers feel something of what it must be like for your thousand-year-old culture and customs to come under sustained, oftentimes pernicious, assault, in the name of “civilisation”.
I feel Achebe’s novel is rightly celebrated as a landmark piece of 20th Century literature. In the very last paragraph the reader hears, for the only time, directly from The White Man. The faceless “Commissioner” ponders that:
One could almost write a whole chapter on him [Okonkwo]. 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.”
It is an extraordinarily caustic piece of satire on which to end. The supposedly sophisticated, and historically pre-eminent, view of “civilising” power shown up in its all-consuming ignorance. There is nothing pacifying the repression of a nation, just as there clearly was nothing inherently primitive in the society of the Lower Niger. The reader is left in no doubt that one must never be firm in cutting out details for it is in the details that a true sense of an individual’s, a tribe’s, a country’s experience lies. Achebe’s delivers these details with stunningly memorable force.
If you enjoyed this you can read my thought on other books, films or plays here. If you are feeling bold you could also take a look at what I think about the distinctively less creative, and often less tasteful, world of politics.
