"But whatever the artistic merit of Achebe's work, which is considerable to say the least, it is in his novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1988), that his literary-story-telling skills began a terminal decline. Indeed the novel marks a notable decline in his liberal vision and creative acumen. The novel is, by any standard, a trivial thriller and is uneven in linguistic and literary quality. Arguably, large parts of Anthills read like pulp fiction, or a crudely crafted political thriller. The storyline is fragmented; the attempt at covert plotting is unsuccessful; the narrative exposition is slow and cumbrous; the style of representation is too thin and shallow; the plot is threadbare and thin, perhaps even superficial in many instances. The dialogue is unconvincing, heavy, and tedious, and the characterization is one-dimensional. For example, neither Ikem, Beatrice, Abdul on the one hand nor Professor Okon, Sam, and Osodi on the other has any emotional and psychological depth. Indeed no character in that novel has convincing uniqueness of character, and none is admirably individuated. Moreover, the characterization and dialogue are stagey, as can be seen in the first person account of the First Witness, Christopher Oriko (Chapter 1) and the dialogue in the opening section of Chapter 2. Anthills is also marred by obliquities of narration and an undisciplined, un-integrated multiplicity of viewpoints: the novel's attempt at an epic-scale representation of a dystopian land and its failure to offer an intensely imagined, superbly coordinated narrative irony are telling. Yet all this may be accounted for by the novel's melodramatic structure and the poor quality of its speech representation.
Frankly, Anthills of the Savannah is a disappointing work; little wonder it failed to win the 1987 Booker McConnell Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award. For example, the novel combines melodrama with a political roman á clef, as can be seen in the closing section of the narrative, the journey on the "Great North Road" (Chapter 17). Indeed, this chapter presents a veiled dystopian narrativization of northern Nigeria, which is variously called "the scrub-land", "the scorched landscape", "another country", "full of dusty fields [and] bottomed baobab tree[s] so strange in appearance", etc. In this novel, the rainforest ("the rain country") of the South is favourably contrasted with the "parkland of grass and stunted trees… of mud walls and reddish earth", the North. One conclusion, which, of course, may be problematic from a strictly literary-critical perspective, is that unlike the Exceptional Southerners, the Northerners don't know how to make the North "prosperous" (the roads are full of pot holes) so that all the talented, intelligent, hardworking, economically gifted, and industrially-savvy Southerners could migrate to the North (perhaps in the mode of mission civilatrice), which is, as of now, wallowing in economic and social desperation (see the opening pages of Chapter 17)."
- Professor Bello-Kano writes from the Department of English and French, Bayero University, Kano
- Ikhide
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