Visionary mythopoesis in fictional and nonfictional prose fantasy, daytime nightmares and absurdist language games to negotiate
his monumental listlessness; and Bandele’s sensitive, compassionate tac-
iturnity. Each of these collective protagonists is compositely drawn and
also functions as a technical device, but many Nigerian readers of the
novel whose formative cultural experience goes back to the period cov-
ered in the narrative have long played a sort of “show and tell” which
identifies each “interpreter” with the famous artists and writers of the
Mbari group, with Soyinka himself – as more or less Egbo – featuring
prominently in the speculations.
The Interpretersis thus also very much a novel of place, of a specific
milieu. Concretely, and like the extended portraits of cities like Paris and
Dublin in canonical works of Western modernist fiction, Soyinka’s first
work of fiction is a novel of Lagos and, to a lesser extent, of Ibadan,
the city and the university, in the earlys. Not only are well-known
suburbs, streets and thoroughfares of Lagos named and evoked in a
manner that Soyinka would later reprise in writing of the city of his
birth, Abeokuta, inAk ́e, his autobiographical memoir, butThe Interpreters
also alludes to famous or notorious events and personalities of the pe-
riod. These include the infamous “Aladura” prelate who pronounced
himself the reincarnation of Christ, Odumosu, “Jesus of Oyingbo”; the
notorious Preventive Detention Act of the Balewa regime and its rabid
anti-communism; the emergent subculture of university students, with
its jejune, women-hating, scandal-mongering yellow journalism; and the
rise of “national” daily newspapers tied to bitterly fractious elite political
and business groups. There is also the narrator’s love-hate attitude to
Lagos: the filth and squalor of the cityscapes, as well as the casual bru-
talities of the city’s populace are registered with a scatological piquancy
only a few steps behind the scale of Ayi Kwei Armah’s depiction of Accra
and its environs inThe Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. At the same time, the
novel also celebrates the vitality and vibrancy of the city’s street culture
and night life.
As a novel that is evocative of a particular place and time,The Inter-
pretersis remarkable in the way that it eschews an event-driven plot and
an expository narrative technique. The most dramatic event that hap-
pens in the “recent” temporal sequence of the narrative is the death of
Noah at the unwitting hands of his would-be homosexual seducer, Joe
Golder. This is somewhat paralleled in the “past” temporal sequence
of the narrative by the death by drowning of the parents of Egbo, per-
haps the most prominent of the “interpreters.” Sekoni’s death in a road
crash, and the several emotional and psychic responses it provokes in