The tallest tall tale ever of what one champion boozer did to get a decent drink.
A psychedelic quest as mindbending as Yellow Submarine the film, but written fifteen years earlier and thousands of miles away.
A myth told (unusually) in the first-person by a trickster-god-slash-Herculean-hero, with a Taoist-fresh voice like a tarot Fool.
Whilst, thanks to one or two other people on Goodreads, I'd already figured that The Palm Wine Drinkard was a book to read because it's fun and interesting and strange - and not [just] in aid of wholemeal-sackcloth reasons like diversity quotas, with which much of the internet pushes/afflicts fiction from African countries - I didn't expect it to like it quite this much, or that I'd find it so funny.
Sense of humour is personal, yes, and no-one else has tagged this book as humour - but here it was one of those works during which one feel laughter bubbling under the surface most of the time [except during two or three brutal scenes], then every now and again an audible fit of the giggles erupts. Out of context, without the tone and build-up, it's probably not clear why that particular phrase did it.
- Some of the humour might run on the contradictions of conjunctions and other small words - like a child might write (many bizarre sequences of 'what happened' and less of how people thought and felt), or, yes, like a drunk person might say, or a transcript of conversation, where sense chenges slightly as you go along. e.g. because he was very clever and smart as he was only a Skull and he could jump a mile to the second
- Scenes that can be read as if they're satirising folktales because of the ridiculously convenient timing: for example someone changes into an animal and overhears a conversation at exactly the right point to hear what they needed. Not like they just missed it, or had to hang around for nine hours waiting. Dunno what the intention was, but it worked to read them as knowing: the naivety of the voice is perfect, yet it's all so well constructed.
- There is a lot of absurdity, but perhaps you have to be there, reading the whole book, to really laugh: These unknown creatures were doing everything incorrectly, because there we saw that if one of them wanted to climb a tree, he would climb the ladder first before leaning it against the tree.
Or, a man asks to borrow some money: after that I asked him where he was living, and he replied that he was inside a bush which nobody could trace.
- MJ's review lists some of the other great bizarre chapter titles, but my favourite was this (aided and abetted across decades by echoing Bridget Jones' famous pronoun-elisions): AFRAID OF TOUCHING TERRIBLE CREATURES IN BAG
This new edition has an excellent introduction by Wole Soykina that, to my mind, clears up points some earlier GR reviewers seem to have been scratching around for. Discussing the initial negative reception of the book, Soyinka mentions "dismissal and condescension" in Britain, and Nigerian concerns that it pandered to ideas of "uneducated colonials" - but in many ways, Dylan Thomas' enthusiasm for the book made other critics and writers take a second look (he considers it needed to be a Celt, not an Englishman, who'd get it, being more anti-establishment and with a closer connection to fantasy and myth).
What an imaginative rupture of spelling, to have turned a negative association into a thing of acceptance, if not exactly approval. Not ‘drunkard’ but – ‘drinkard’. Difficult to damn ‘drinkinness’ with the same moralistic fervour as drunkenness. The social opprobrium attached to the grammar-strict word is dissipated and the anti-hero is accepted as a first-rate raconteur. The title then sets the pattern for a narrative of weird encounters. Tutuola was not shut off from the ‘correct’ usage of the English language; he simply chose to invent his own tongue, festooned with uproarious images, turning it into a logical vehicle of the colonial neither-nor (or all-comer) environment. This was a polyglot proletariat... Tutuola intuitively realised that the more common ‘broken English’, or patois, would not suffice to capture the sounds of such a community – a world that was too realistic to be liminal, too paranormal to be realistic, each segment intersecting with others according to its own laws.
There are inevitably various bits and pieces in reviews characterising the book as quintessentially African, or primitivist or something. But [whilst knowing not much at all about Yoruba, or African cultures in general, and also seeing a universality in its folktaleness, reminiscent of myth-based stories from and about elsewhere] I'd say this is quintessentially African like Mark E. Smith's songs are quintessentially Northern English. That's definitely there, part of the spirit of the exercise, but the main thing is actually this surreal genius doing strange things with language and images and ideas, things that could look simple and crazy but are actually very clever indeed.
(read & reviewed Sept 2015; the review on Goodreads.)
