No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe
No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The title of this novel is curious, encapsulating the pervasive discomfort of the most modern period of Africa in Achebe’s trilogy. Obi Okonkwo, descendant of the protagonist of the first novel, has been sent to England to be educated in the Western manner so that he can join the bureaucracy in Nigeria; the people who sent him are the members of an Igbo social club who have organized to retain their collective identity in their new urban surroundings. They have pooled their money for Obi’s education and look on him as an investment for their own future, a sign that their people can cope with the new order as well as their neighbors have. This is a parallel to Ezeulu sending his own son to be educated in Christian ways in Arrow of God, and in the same way as the earlier novel the end result is not predictable or simple. Obi learns too much in his sojourn in England and is no longer quite of his people when he returns. He joins the civil service but sees its corruption, officials taking bribes at every turn. In fact the book begins with Obi’s arrest and conviction for taking a bribe himself, so that his downfall is already complete at the start, and the novel backtracks to show the disintegration that preceded his crime. He never intends to be dishonest but his moral character is not strong. As is usual with Achebe, the novel does not depict these events in a didactic or heavy-handed manner; we simply witness Obi’s life as though we were perched on his shoulder. The book is skillful but much less engaging than the earlier novels because it is a study of weakness and uncertainty; Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart may be caught up in his own blindness but he has great purpose, bent as it is; and Ezeulu in the second novel is a pillar of surety. Obi, by contrast, has lost his sense of who he is and his trajectory is downward. This kind of novel suffers from Achebe’s detachment. He is meticulous in cataloguing Obi’s small and continuous failures without creating much sense of empathy. In this kind of novel it would be better to offer more of his feelings, his interior, which was never necessary in the earlier books. It is nevertheless a fine book, but not a fine read. But it is a true depiction of what has been implied from the beginning of the cycle by the changes that overtake the Ten Towns and Nigeria through contact with Britain.