The Economist November 6th 2021 Books & arts 77Against the orthodoxy of the time, she thus
maintained that there was no yawning
chasm between facts and values.
Anscombe argued along similar lines in
a seminal paper published in 1958: Hume,
Kant, Bentham, Mill and others all came in
for a drubbing. Moral philosophers, she in
sisted, needed to rethink many of their be
liefs about human nature and psychology.
Two years earlier, she had made headlines
in the wider world by objecting to the
award of an Oxford degree to Harry Tru
man. In her eyes, the bombings of Hiroshi
ma and Nagasaki made him a massmur
derer. The dons of one college were told to
go and vote Anscombe down, because “the
women are up to something”.
The four women in Mr Lipscomb’s live
ly tale did not only philosophise about
morals (and, in Anscombe’s case, much be
sides).They campaignedto improvethe
world,accordingtotheirlights.Anscombe
wastwicearrestedatabortionclinics;Mur
doch was refused an American visa
because ofher pastmembership ofthe
CommunistParty.Footwasdevotedtothe
antipovertycharity,Oxfam;Midgleywas
activeintheanimalwelfare,environmen
talanddisarmamentmovements.
Itmay havebeen thewarthatmade
them.Midgleyreckonedshehadfoundher
voiceasa philosopheronlybecausethere
weresofewmenatOxfordwhenshestud
iedthere.Theyweremostlyaway,fighting.
TheonlytimewhenmostOxfordphiloso
phystudentshavebeenwomenwaswhen
thisquartetwereundergraduates.n
Nigerianfiction
Body blows
W
riters, like most people,tendto
slow down with age. Not Wole Soyin
ka, Africa’s first Nobel laureate in litera
ture. After focusing for nearly 50 years on
plays, poetry and activism, at 87 he has re
turned to fiction, which he last published
in 1972. As the narrator says of the mysteri
ous enterprise at the heart of his new book,
this is not some “mumbojumbo, cocka
toofeather, driedleatherthong, cowrie
andtortoiseshell operation”. Eccentric as
the tale may seem, it is a tense, wellplot
ted novel comprised of several stories that
come together in the final pages.
Four old friends go way back. As boys
theymadea secretpact, swearing to sup
port one another come what may. They
called themselves the “Gong o’Four”. “Four
for one, one for four, gungho!” they re
peated when they met. Farodion was the
first to lose touch, but he was always a bit
of an outsider. Badetona was similar in
character, marked out by his passion for
figures. Gregarious Duyole, they all agreed,
had the most fertile mind, a font of ideas
that were “shared, not hoarded”. His bond
with Kighare Menka, who became a
renowned surgeon, was always special.
Dr Menka narrates. He works in north
ern Nigeria, operating on the victims of
bombings by Boko Haram; the people in
his chronicles are hardly happy. When he
finds that a trade in human body parts is
being run out of his own hospital, his pro
fessional demeanour cracks. He embarks
on a search that will transform his life—
and those of the rest of the Gong o’Four.
Famed as a playwright, Mr Soyinka likes
playing with words, and his prose is full of
puns and witticisms. Above all, though, he
enjoys dramatic set pieces, in which Nige
rian society abounds; he brings funerals
and fundamentalist prayer meetings to life
in all their lurid splendour. But his purpose
is not merely to ridicule his fellow Nigeri
ans. During a scene in which a suspected
robber is set upon by a market crowd and
almost decapitated, Duyole turns to the
narrator. “Something is broken,” he tells
the doctor. “Beyond race. Outside colour or
history. Something has cracked.”
On one level, this is a sophisticated
thriller. On another, it is an excoriating
moral satire about the vanity and corrup
tion of Nigeria’s political class, with its
business cronies and kleptocratic preach
ers. In Mr Soyinka’s telling, the country is
not so much a failed state as a sick one.
Infected with greed,vanity and selfdelu
sion, its body politicappears, in his novel,
to be beyond cure. nChronicles from the Land of the Happiest
People on Earth. By Wole Soyinka.
Pantheon; 464 pages; $28. Bloomsbury
Circus; £20
Agloomy diagnosisBooksandsocialmediaWord of mouth
A
young womanholds up a book and
smiles. “This is day one of me reading
‘The Song of Achilles’,” she says. The video
jumps forward. “And this”, she moans, her
face stained with tears, “is me finishing it.”
Another clip, entitled “Books that will
make you SOB”, offers written notes on
how assorted stories got readers to cry,
such as “I can’t think about it without
bawling” and “ended up crying sm [so
much] i had to change my shirt”. This is
BookTok, as the literary wing of the app
TikTok is known. Imagine the emotional
pitch of a Victorian melodrama, add mu
sic, and you have the general idea.
BookTok is passionate. It is also profit
able—at least for publishers. Bloomsbury,
a publishing house based in Britain, re
cently reported record sales and a 220%
rise in profits, which Nigel Newton, its
boss, put down partly to the “absolute phe
nomenon” of BookTok. On Amazon, Book
Tok is so influential that it has leapt into
the titles of books themselves. The novel
“It Ends With Us”, for instance, is now list
ed as “It Ends With Us: TikTok made me
buy it!” Evidently TikTok did a good job: the
romance is riding high in the top 100 in
both Britain and America.
The medium is not quite as gushy as it
might seem. Much of the overdone emo
tion is ironic, and some of the videos are
very funny—particularly those with the
hashtag #writtenbymen, which poke fun at
the male gaze. Nonetheless, many wouldA new form of literary criticism is
boosting sales of booksThe new tastemakers