The silver lining in my personal Covid-19 lockdown has been my re-engagement with reading fiction; pursuing two degrees in History on a part-time basis while working full-time meant that whatever spare time I had was more profitably spent in reading around my subject rather than reading for pleasure. The conclusion of my studies and the enforced restriction of movement has therefore opened up an opportunity for me to read purely for the pleasure of reading, and as a consequence I have finally got around to reading books, like Things Fall Apart, that have been on my mental 'to read' list for far too long.

All I really knew about this book before reading it was always hearing this book described as being the first post-colonial novel. So it was with very little in the way of pre-conceptions that I read this book. I found the novel well written, and felt it really introduced me to characters and into a culture and way of life that on the one hand is completely different to anything that I have encountered before, and yet on the other hand I found underlying aspects of the human condition with which I could more readily identify, and this was probably the most significant thing I took from this book. The central character, Okonkwo, was in a number of ways difficult to like: he often uses violence, including on women and youngsters, to define and express himself. While these actions are hard for me to see as acceptable, the point is of course that they are not in my context and Okonkwo's 'choice' of actions are arguably dictated to him by his gender, his position as head of his family and within his village society, and so on. His problems, and the book's dramatic development, really expand when conciously or unconciously he acts outside of these expectations, or comes into contact with cultural expectations which are totally alien to him (that is Christian, and European). In reading this book it did invite a consideration of culture clash, and personal perspectives upon it.

Well worth reading.