No Longer at Ease
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Published in 1960, Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease follows Obi Okonkwo, a young Nigerian educated in England who returns to Lagos to take up a position in the colonial civil service. The grandson of Okonkwo, the tragic hero of Things Fall Apart, Obi belongs to a generation caught between inherited obligations and the promises of a changing society; his education has opened new horizons, but it has also left him estranged from familiar expectations. As he navigates family debts, romantic complications and the quiet pressures of official life, his ideals encounter a world in which corruption is both condemned and woven into the everyday machinery of power.
Set against the unsettled years approaching Nigerian independence, the novel explores the costs of ambition, the burden of communal responsibility and the uneasy distance between principle and survival. Achebe’s lucid, finely judged prose captures the particular tensions of a society negotiating colonial institutions and its own emerging future, while Obi’s predicament gives the story the intimacy of a personal tragedy. The novel is the second in Achebe’s loosely connected African Trilogy, following Things Fall Apart and preceding Arrow of God, and shifts the focus from the first encounter with colonial rule to its enduring consequences. Both a subtle portrait of a divided self and a sharp examination of public morality, No Longer at Ease remains striking in its account of ideals tested by the world they hope to change.
From the book
“The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place.”
— Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
On No Longer at Ease
“Achebe is a magical writer—one of the greatest of the twentieth century.”
— Margaret Atwood