Wole Soyinka
the other protagonists of the novel, is of course equally dramatic and
tragic, but it is given far less narrative space than the death of Noah.
Apart from these deaths, no earth-shaking event happens in the novel
and we see no monstrous acts of duplicity or atrocity, as inThe Man Died,
Season of Anomy,Ibadanand, to a much lesser extent,Isara. Moreover, in
its manner of telling which constantly shifts between past and present
and “outer” and “inner” in the lives of the novel’s protagonists – with
the links thinly supplied by the echoes, traces and resonance of words
and phrases spoken, thought or remembered – the novel makes little
concession to culturally and ideologically conditioned expectations of
readers for narrative continuity, causality and coherence. However, for
all its relative “thinness” of action and event, and its radical disruption
of linearity and continuity,The Interpretersis remarkable in being a novel
that is highly evocative of “real” time, place and people. This particular
point compels us to explore carefully the maturity of artistic vision and
nuanced, progressive social criticism that mark this very youthful work.
Very early in the novel, Egbo contemplates the difficult choice he
faces between, on the one hand, accepting the throne of a small fishing
community that comes to him from the line of descent established by his
maternal grandfather and, on the other hand, his civil service job as a
top bureaucrat in the foreign office of his newly independent nation. The
former option binds him to the past, to ancestral heritage and indigenous
cultural matrices, while the latter, potentially at least, opens out to the
wider world and the external relations of the emergent nation. Egbo
ultimately sticks to his bureaucrat’s job, but according to the narrator
in a phrase which evokes the tragic fate of his parents, this choice is
“like a choice of drowning,” for Egbo “knew and despised the (new)
age which sought to mutilate his beginnings.” In other words, Egbo sees
clearly that he works to prop up the power structure and moral order of
an age that is gradually and inexorably mutilating what was good and
wholesome in the world of his ancestral heritage. The question then is,
if not much happens in the novel by way of truly heinous, evil events
and acts, how can the narrator of this novel give credible force to such
portentous, devastating negative commentary on this new age of black
elites replacing the departing white colonizers?
One answer to this question lies in the fact that though the novel does
not have great earth-shattering events, it does contain memorable pro-
files of aspects of the moral order of the new black pseudo-bourgeois
elite, with riveting passages on specific and general aspects of the social
malaise such as miasmic corruption in the ranks of the political and