No Longer at Ease (1960) By Chinua Achebe

 

No Longer at Ease is the third book of what is known as The African Trilogy, independently written books by Chinua Achebe, recipient of the Man Booker International Prize for Lifetime Achievement. The trilogy collectively creates a timeline of colonial history in Nigeria.

The three books could be viewed as a “how to” manual of establishing British colonial rule, or more accurately, “how it was done.” First were the Christian missionaries, then the strong-arm military take-over, and finally the establishment of what is effectively a puppet “independent” government.

At the end of Arrow of God, the second book, the Igbo village chief realizes they will not be able to further oppose colonization, and makes the fateful decision to send his son Obi to missionary school.  In No Longer at Ease, the final book, the village elders decide to underwrite Obi's university training in London. By so doing, they believe Obi will be able to protect/promote the village’s interests in the new colonial government.

Years later when Obi returns to Nigeria, he is given a civil service position in the government. He stands ready and proud to help build a new Nigeria. At this point however reality intercepts idealism, eventually trapping him in a corrupt system of payoffs.

An interesting aspect of his downfall relates to the need to repay the money his village invested in his education (aka: a student loan), while at the same time establishing himself financially as he advances in his career. The villagers not only expect him to repay the loan, but also want immediate return on invest vis-a-vis the reason they made the loan to begin with: helping the villagers.

Book One: Things Fall Apart

Book Two: Arrow of God

No Longer at Ease, and in fact the entire trilogy, puts a personal face on the challenges faced by, and facing, the independent countries of Africa as they exit colonialism.

Recommendation:  Yes, particularly for history buffs.

And Call Me Conrad / The Immortal (1966) By Roger Zelazny

 

To deal with being a winter shut-in last week, I decided to pick up a science-fiction book, RogerZelazny’s book And Call Me Conrad (also titled This Immortal).

In the book, the people of Planet Earth have -- predictably -- trashed the place and fought a nuclear war. The war is known as the “Three Days,” which though never stated, represents the amount of time between the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the war’s aftermath, much of the Earth’s population has fled to the Planet Titan, where they are welcome, but given the treatment received by immigrants universally. Of the life-forms who remain on Earth, four million are mortals, and a whole lot are nuclear mutants. It is thought that once Earth restores itself, the humans on Titan will return to Earth.

The species who are native to Planet Titan are the Vegan, blue human-like creatures derogatorily referred to as “Veggies.”  They have no interest in colonizing Earth. However, as a people who have never experienced nuclear warfare, they are scientifically interested in Earth as a case study. The Veggies have purchased the majority of the habitable parts of Earth from the people who fled to Titan – at bargain basement prices. They use their land buys as tourist resorts, and for archaeological expeditions.

The Vegans also have no particular interest in the day-to-day administration of post-apocalypse Earth, so they created a quasi-government of the humans who stayed on Earth to run the place. The government is called Radpol. It is headquartered in Port-au-Prince, Haiti a city unaffected by the nuclear war.

The politics of the Radpol forms the action theater in the book. One faction wants a peaceful co-existence with the Vegans, the other faction wants to expel them. The two sides are represented by two demigods who have been summoned to Port-au-Prince, one is charged with protecting a prominent visiting Vegan official, the other has been hired to assassinate him. Having a basic understanding of Greek mythology is not required to enjoy this book, though it certainly helps.

Recommendation: Okay, quite clever in spots, though not the best sci-fi book I have ever read.

The Voice At The Back Door (1956) By Elizabeth Spencer

 

Judges for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1956 unanimously selected The Voice at the Back Door by Elizabeth Spencer for the award. The Pulitzer Board of Directors however chose to ignore the vote and announced they would not be making an award that year. They believed Spencer’s book was too explosively controversial, it deals with racial injustice in small town Mississippi.

Anyone who does not understand how racial injustice could be considered too “controversial” a subject matter in 1956, need only tune in to any news source today. America has yet to successfully drive a stake through the remnants of confederacy, or its proud child Jim Crow.

The time period when the book was written and published was indeed tumultuous. Near the end of WWII, President Truman ordered an end to segregation in the military; and would be politically vilified for doing so. In 1954, the Supreme Court would issue a unanimous ruling in the Brown v. the Board of Education proclaiming that the mantra of “separate but equal” was a fallacy, declaring “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." In 1955, a 14-year-old African American boy, Emmett Till, was accused of “flirting” with a white woman in a grocery store. He was kidnapped from his aunt & uncle’s home at night, physically mutilated and murdered with his body dumped in a nearby river.

These real-life events, and countless others like them, set the background for Spencer’s book about the post-civil war Jim Crow era, when white southerners had to relinquish ownership of African American slaves, but replaced it with a system of state and local laws enshrining white supremacy, as their God-given "southern way of life.”  Spencer’s book is a textbook on how that “way of life” operated. Her vantage point as author is that of a Southerner, she was born and raised in Carrolton, Mississippi.

Like Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird (which did win a Pulitzer Price five years later), the book begins with a Black man being accused of a crime. It flashes back to the cold-blooded execution of “12 Negroes” that took place in the courthouse before a trial had even convened.

While one should read The Voice at the Back Door as a civil rights history, let me tell you it also reads like a page-turning murder mystery played out alongside a complex love “quadrangle,” with a thriller primary election campaign for County Sheriff setting the timeline – and a Prohibition subplot for a little added spice.

The novel has three main characters. One is Duncan Hunter, a "townee," whose family has owned the grocery store for generations.  Dubbed “Happy Hunter” he was a college football star and is now a reluctant candidate for Sheriff. The second main character is Jimmy Tallant. He is a country boy, grown up to be bootlegger. Tallant and Hunter went to grade school and high school together. Their personal rifts over girlfriends and perceived rights and wrongs, and family histories, are the fodder of generations of small-town gossip.  The third main character is Beck Dozier, an educated Black man, his father was one of the 12 Negroes gunned down in the courtroom, his nephew is a kid called W.B. who works as a delivery boy for Hunter's grocery store.  

Recommendation: Absolutely. The Pulitzer judges were right, the Pulitzer Board was cowardly.