Started reading this last week, and couldn't properly pace myself, like a drunken palm wine lover I had to hurry and finish it all in a couple nights... because it was sooooo good! What a great novel. Less and less I find myself drawn to character study especially of the tragic sort, but Achebe's writing is so friendly and wonderful, each sentence carefully composed, the whole thing making you shudder as a well-crafted sentence sums up the previous three pages... ouch how good it is. The novel is a very deep study of Ezeula, a priest of a local god Ulu... Achebe goes deeper and deeper into the man until by the end you can't get him out of your head, and I finally found my brain making a face for him... and then you get a brilliant finale ...The social scientist in me thought the novel a wonderful counterpoint to a lot of social science that generalizes the past in terms of effects on the present... Arrow of God explores all the nuance and personality that made the past different for each locality and each person. It helps remind you how idiosyncratic and contingent the past was for each place.
Since this week I was teaching Nunn and Wantchekon's paper on the enduring effects of the slave trade in eroding trust, I thought with amusement how their "hypothesis" is utterly absent from the novel.... and while the effects of the "white man" are everywhere traced and felt, one of the deft messages of the novel is to resist understanding the past as having simple effects and stark choices. Everything is messy and happening at the same time, and people involved are alive to all the possibilities, and they negotiate and misunderstand etc.
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