9 - The critic as novelist: Anthills of the Savannah

Summary

About one-third of the way through Anthills of the Savannah, one of the characters writes:

For weeks and months after I had definitely taken on the challenge of bringing together as many broken pieces of this tragic history as I could lay my hands on, I still could not find a way to begin. Anything I tried to put down sounded wrong – either too abrupt, too indelicate or too obvious – to my middle ear.

(AS, p. 82)

This passage suggests several of the distinctive qualities of Achebe's fifth novel – its structural complexity; its self-consciously literary nature; its concern with the problem of finding the right words and the right mode, and the importance of the ‘middle ear’ in locating that language and style; the role of women not only as subjects, but also as central protagonists and voices – for the quoted passage is written by a woman who acts in some ways as Achebe's surrogate novelist, and who takes over from the men the task of storytelling.

When Achebe wrote his first four novels there was no established tradition of writing in Anglophone African fiction to allude to. His first novel reacts to and departs from the realist, omniscient narrative mode of earlier European fiction, particularly the colonialist fiction epitomized by Joyce Cary's African novels, and turns to the model of oral storytelling to suggest alternative epic and episodic modes – a model which encourages its audience to intervene, to judge and to participate, and which also departs from Cary's unitary narrative voice to suggest a multiplicity of voices, both within the story and within the consciousness of the narrator.