Short Notices

ARROW OF GOD by Chinua Achebe. 287 pages. John Day. $5.50.

Chinua Achebe, Nigeria's leading writer, continues his heroic efforts to impose a pattern of fiction on his native land, to give his people a chronicle of their own past against which the new values of the emergent nation may be measured. In A Man of the People (TIME, Aug. 19, 1966), Novelist Achebe showed that life in the capital of his country did not always represent an advance on tribal society. In Arrow of God, he demonstrates the confusing effects of white man's law and religion on the jungle villages.

As an Ibo, Achebe writes of Ibo civilization as something not simply to be supplanted and forgotten. The story centers on a religious chief, virtually a god to his tribe, whose most potent magic is achieved through a sacred python. Though he distrusts Christianity, he allows an earnest, not more than ordinarily obtuse district officer to send one of his sons to a mission school. To the chief's horror, the Christianized boy zealously imprisons the sacred python in a box. "An abomination has happened," cries one tribesman. "Today I shall kill the boy with my own hands," says the chief.

Achebe's novel is set in the early 1920s, but it would be helpful to think of it as a book that might very well have been written by an Anglo-Saxon chronicler about the 4th century A.D., just before the last Roman legion was to leave Britain; when Roman law was about to disappear and leave a crude, illiterate people to deal as best they could with Celtic chaos, superstition and the flickering light of Christianity. Modern Nigerians oppressed by a feeling of culture lag may optimistically reflect that the natives of Britain had in their future a Shakespeare, a St. Paul's Cathedral, and the will to build empires of their own.

HORNBLOWER DURING THE CRISIS by C. S. Forester. 174 pages. Little, Brown.

.95.

If it had not been for Horatio Hornblower, the world today would be a far different place. It would be French.

As his aficionados well know, it was Lieutenant Hornblower who decimated "Boney's" Spanish fleet in the West Indies in 1800, Commander Hornblower who intercepted the French troops that Napoleon tried to sneak into Ireland in 1804, Commodore Hornblower who inspired Sweden to join the war and gave Czar Alexander the courage to stand up and fight in 1812. And when the end finally came at Waterloo, there was Lord Hornblower, leading a band of guerrillas that tied up nine battalions of Napoleon's troops. Not until now, however, did anyone guess that it was young Captain Hornblower who was responsible for sinking Napoleon's fleet at Trafalgar.

Unfortunately, Hornblower's contribution to Trafalgar is not completely documented, for Author Forester died last year at 66 before he could finish the story. He left notes, however, telling briefly what Hornblower would have done. Equipped with Napoleon's official seal (captured by Hornblower from an unsuspecting French brigantine), he would have arranged to deliver Napoleon's fleet to Trafalgar, where Admiral Nelson was waiting in ambush. As far as it goes, this last Hornblower story is, like its eleven predecessors, told with impeccable, salty craftsmanship and a fine, bracing conviction that history needs to be improved on.

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