The heart of the matter
Peter Ackroyd
Season of Anomy Wole Soyinka (Rex Collings £3.00) The Wound Malick Fall (Heinemann Educational Books 60p) I may be white, but I'm no liberal. Unlike certain other critics, who profess to find black power as refreshing as the first cuckoo of spring and would no doubt nominate Bobby Seale for the Booker Prize, I find black revolutionaries a tedious lot. And even more so in print than in the flesh. So it came as a relief, if not a surprise, to come across two African novelists who are both literate and talented. Mr Soyinka has, of course, already captured the butterfly, heart of the liberal establishment (his blurb is amply filled with quotations from the Guardian and the New Statesman) and I was expecting. the usual, • prosaic rage and self-pity. I was wrong; Season of Anomy is a substantial book. It opens in Aiyero, a Nigerian village which is so appealing that I can only put it down to a case of that old black magic. Ofeyi, a promotions executive from a large firm which manufactures cocoa, has been sent there to analyse, prognosticate and generally steal its native charm. If you have sat through films with titles like 'The Song of the Bush.' you can guess the next step. Ofeyi becomes obsessed with pastoral Aiyero and regards it as 'home.' It is difficult to see why. The natives, like all natives in fiction, mouth banalities in a particularly ponderous tone: '"We do not believe," said the old man, "in the shackles of memory."' I got the impression of a whole race examining its navel. But it is at this point that the novel takes off, and becomes very exciting and very odd. Ofeyi has a change of heart, and makes a subversive film about the growth of the cocoa-plant. He meets a violent revolutionary known as 'the Dentist' (but I thought teeth were white) and starts beating the drum. He organises an under-bush revolutionary movement, staffed by expatriates of Aiyero, and rises against his alma mater, the Corporation. The upshot is wholesale violence and civil war, with the denouement in a leper-colony-cum-lunaticasylum. My brief summary is more vulgar and more lurid than the novel really deserves, Mr Soyinka writes with great fluency and subtlety, and Season of Anomy is an elaborate, careful book. I have one cavil and that is with an occasional over-lyricism, when he aspires towards being a black Mallarmi. and the writing becomes too grandiose for its theme. 1 don't use 'theme' advisedly here, since the narrative diverges into romance, intrigue, high comedy, political statement and bloody description. The landscape of the novel is, apparently, an historical mess and Soyinka has smudged or erased the conventional boundaries of fiction. In each other's arms, his
protagonists learn the politics of it all and in this particular revolution no aspect of life is left untouched.
Malick Fall's The Wound, in contrast, achieves all that it sets out to do. The wound in question belongs to Magamou, an itinerant and crippled buffoon, who acts like a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Beckett's Molloy. He has been locked in an asylum for smelling nasty (such things happen in Senegal) and — as is often the case with prisoners — immediately becomes something of a hero. The oppressed man-with-the-wound sounds too symbolic to be true, let alone, interesting, but Mr Fall has managed to create a character of some vivacity: "At the head of the platoon of chosen memories came the most fantastic, the most tragic and the most depressing situations; also enjoying a place of honour were encounters with whites or white-collar blacks." Anyone who can make fun of what others take so seriously can't be all bad, and Magamou turns out to be no paradigm of black activism. He finds total consolation in memory and fantasy, mime and caricature. When he escapes from the asylum, it is almost accidental and by no means advantageous. His wound is healed by age-old quackery, and he goes back into the land of the living with good intentions: "A pebble rolling down towards the highway. It will lose Its beautiful nakedness in the dust. It will clothe itself in the warmth of closeness to others like itself." But all intentions have unhappy endings, and without his wound Magamou is the corhmon-or-garden outcast. Where once he was the ringmaster, purging everyone with pity and terror, he is now one of the crowd (of which there are a great many in Senegal). His wound was his gun, and he longs for its return. There is, fortunately, a mob at hand and Magamou endures the ritual of being savagely beaten during a political rally. He is reborn without an eye and never, if you'll pardon the expression, looks back.
• But Mr Fall is too smart to fall into the trap of pointing a moral. And it is refreshing that so simple a narrative can be written without any laboured commitment to the 'outsider',or to the 'alienated,' once the regular staple of fiction. And how refreshing, too, that it should be high comedy. The novel aspires to what, in palmier days, was known as 'life' — toward what is human rather than what is stereo typed, what is ambiguous rather than what is polemical. The writing itself is stylish enough, although there is that same awkward for mality and archaicism about the dialogue which disappear in passages of narrative and description. No doubt students everywhere, and especially at LSE, will ruminate on this fact and blame it upon white exploitation of the art of conversation. At least Mr Fall has been well served'by his translator since, as the natives say, "it would be indecent to salaam without trousers."
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