The first sentence of the novel does what every first sentence of a Homeric catalogue does: it names the hero and sets the radius of his fame. Okonkwo of Umuofia, by the opening page, has already thrown Amalinze the Cat in a wrestling match that the elders still talk about. He is a man of titles. He has two barns full of yams. He has three wives. He has a son. He has, Achebe tells us with the straight-faced precision that will carry the whole novel, a bad temper and a quiet terror of being like his father.

The father, Unoka, was lazy, improvident, gentle, musical, in debt. He died without a single title. He was buried badly, in the Evil Forest, because he had swollen in his last illness and that was taken by the clan as a sign of an offence against the earth. Okonkwo has spent his whole adult life not being Unoka. Every yam he has planted, every wife he has brought home, every title he has taken, every blow he has struck at a wife or a child, has been an argument against his father.

Achebe lets us see this without ever naming it. He does what a great short novelist does: he shows us a man bent under the weight of a secret he himself does not recognise. Okonkwo is afraid of weakness in the way another man is afraid of drowning. When his son Nwoye shows anything resembling his grandfather's temperament — a preference for his mother's stories over the father's, a softness in the way he answers — Okonkwo's fist closes without his having chosen it.

And yet the yam farm chapters are not about fury. They are about order. Umuofia in these pages is a working, humming, theologically complete world. There are feasts. There is the oracle of the Hills and the Caves. There is the week of peace before the planting, in which no violence may be done. There is Ezeudu the old warrior, Obierika the thoughtful neighbour. There is the slow work of clearing bush, heaping the earth into mounds, planting, weeding, waiting for rain. Achebe writes the farm work the way Tolstoy writes the hay in Anna Karenina: with the patience of a man who believes that what a civilisation grows is also what it thinks.

By the end of the first three chapters we have been given a whole social world — its proverbs (the ones Achebe calls the palm-oil with which words are eaten), its laws, its gods, its humour — and one man standing in it, upright, prosperous, admired, and very frightened. The novel's whole architecture is already laid. Okonkwo is too rigid for a world that is itself, though he does not yet know it, about to be broken. What will break him is not that the world ends. What will break him is that the world changes shape, and his shape cannot.

Three years before the killing, a girl from Umuofia is murdered in a neighbouring village. By the law of the clans, the guilty village owes Umuofia two lives: a virgin to replace the woman, a boy to be held until the clan decides. The boy is Ikemefuna. He is perhaps fourteen. He is placed in Okonkwo's household. He calls Okonkwo father. He grows close to Okonkwo's eldest son Nwoye in a way Nwoye has never been close to his own father. He teaches Nwoye how to make flutes. Okonkwo, secretly, is fonder of Ikemefuna than of his own son, though he would never say so and would never let the boy see it.

And then, after three years, the oracle of the Hills and the Caves pronounces. Ikemefuna must be killed. Achebe handles the pronouncement with the quietness of a neighbour mentioning the weather. Ezeudu, the oldest man in the village, comes in person to Okonkwo's compound. He says the clan has decided. He says the boy calls you father — do not bear a hand in his death.

Okonkwo goes anyway. He walks with the men. He walks behind Ikemefuna, who has been told only that he is being taken home. The path is long. The forest thickens. The boy begins to feel something wrong. The first man strikes. Ikemefuna is cut, he staggers, he turns and runs back down the path towards Okonkwo crying my father, they have killed me, and Okonkwo — afraid, Achebe tells us in a single quiet sentence, afraid of being thought weak — lifts his own machete and cuts the boy down.

Achebe does not dramatise the scene. He gives us the sentence, and then he gives us the walk home, and then he gives us the week in which Okonkwo does not eat. He gives us Obierika, the thoughtful friend, who when Okonkwo comes to see him a few days later says quietly: if the oracle said my son must die I would neither dispute it nor be the one to do it. He gives us Nwoye, who was not there, who only knows that Ikemefuna has not come back, and who hears a new silence settle on the house.

Something has broken in Nwoye. Achebe is very careful here. The narrator tells us that something gave way inside him, something like the snapping of a tightened bow. It is not named. It is not explained. But from this chapter forward Nwoye will be a boy waiting to be met by a different god than his father's. And from this chapter forward Okonkwo will be, though he cannot say so, a man who has killed his own son in order not to be called soft.

The whole novel is already in this scene. Okonkwo's rigidity, which was admirable in the farming chapters, has taken its first life. Nwoye, half-absent and listening, is already preparing, inside himself, to be available when the missionaries come.

Ekwefi, Okonkwo's second wife, has borne ten children. Nine have died in infancy. The tenth, Ezinma, is ten years old and alive. By Igbo belief Ezinma is an ogbanje — a spirit child, one of those beings who are born and die and come back again to the same mother in a long, cruel game. Ekwefi has spent ten years trying to persuade this particular spirit to stay. The medicine man has dug up the child's iyi-uwa, the small stone that ties her to the other world, and Ekwefi has watched for signs ever since that Ezinma is, at last, permanent.

Into this tenderness Chielo the priestess arrives one evening. Chielo is ordinarily a market woman, a neighbour, the mother of one of Ezinma's playmates. But on certain nights she becomes the voice of the oracle of Agbala. On this night she comes to Okonkwo's compound and demands that Ezinma be given to her. She must take the child to the oracle's cave in the hills. Okonkwo, frightened but not willing to say so, consents. Chielo disappears into the dark with Ezinma on her back.

Ekwefi does not consent. She follows. Barefoot, at a distance, through villages and along the long path up into the hills. She can see nothing. She can only hear Chielo's chanting voice going up and up and up the track. Her heart, Achebe tells us plainly, is beating in a way it has not beaten since she lost her third child.

The chapter is one of the great passages in African literature. It is a mother walking through the darkness behind an unseen priestess carrying her only child. It is absolutely not melodramatic. Achebe gives it to us in short sentences, the smell of the forest, the sound of a cock far off, the glimpse of Chielo's shape for an instant when the moon comes out. Ekwefi prepares herself, somewhere on the path, to die if the priestess does not come back with her child.

Okonkwo, eventually, follows too. He waits at the mouth of the cave. He paces. He waits. Ekwefi sees him there and says nothing. The two of them stand, through the long second half of the night, outside the hill where their daughter is alone with the god.

And at last, toward morning, Chielo comes out of the cave carrying Ezinma asleep on her back, and walks the long path down again with the child, and delivers her, alive and unharmed, to her mother. Nothing is said. Nothing is explained. Chielo resumes being a market woman in the morning.

Achebe does two things at once in this chapter. He lets us see the fierceness of Ekwefi's love, which stands quietly next to Okonkwo's rigidity and which is, in the architecture of the novel, its counterweight. And he lets us see the Igbo religious system from the inside — not as superstition, not as colour, but as a working cosmology, a real priestess carrying a real child to a real god for real reasons the narrator does not condescend to explain. A few chapters later, when white men arrive and begin calling this world heathen, we will already know what they are failing to see.

The locusts arrive for the first time in living memory. The elders have heard of them in stories — they come once in a generation, they eat everything, they are also, if you move quickly, an enormous quantity of protein. The village goes out with baskets. The children laugh. The sky darkens with the small bodies. Achebe gives us a paragraph of almost festival prose. It is the last such paragraph in the novel.

Because on the same night that the village is eating roasted locusts, Ezeudu — the oldest man in the clan, the one who had warned Okonkwo not to lift a hand against Ikemefuna — dies. The funeral is enormous. Drums. Cannons. Masked spirits from every village in the nine. Okonkwo, firing his old rusted gun into the air in the way men do at such funerals, is doing what every other man is doing.

The gun explodes. A piece of iron flies out. It strikes Ezeudu's sixteen-year-old son, who is standing near, and kills him instantly. The drums stop. The dancing stops. The clan looks at Okonkwo.

By the law of Umuofia, the killing of a clansman — even accidental, even at a funeral — is an abomination against the earth goddess. Okonkwo must be cleansed. Okonkwo must leave. He has seven days to pack his compound and go into exile among his mother's people in Mbanta. During the night his own neighbours, including Obierika his closest friend, will come with torches and burn down his house, pull down his red walls, kill his animals — not out of anger but because the earth requires it. Obierika helps with the burning and weeps for Okonkwo while he does.

Achebe writes Obierika's grief as the novel's moral centre. That night, alone, Obierika sits in his hut and asks himself a question he has been trying not to ask for a long time. He asks: why should a man suffer so grievously for an offence he had committed inadvertently. He asks it and does not answer it. He only records that he has asked. It is the first small fracture in the clan's certainty about its own laws. Seven years before the missionaries arrive with their different certainty, a thoughtful man inside the old system has already begun to wonder whether the old system is always right.

Okonkwo, meanwhile, goes into exile. The exile chapters are the hinge of the book. The novel's first half is Okonkwo rising in Umuofia. The second half is what happens while he is away. Part Two begins. His mother's village receives him with kindness. His uncle Uchendu, grey and patient, tells him that a man's mother is there to receive him when his father's world has rejected him, and that this is what a mother is for. Okonkwo listens and does not listen. He spends seven years planting yams in another man's soil, and during those seven years, in the village he had to leave, the world he thought was permanent starts, very quietly, to change.

The missionaries come to Mbanta in Okonkwo's third year of exile. There are six of them, led by a white man who cannot yet speak Igbo and is accompanied by a nervous, earnest interpreter from another village. They ask the elders for a place to build a church. The elders, with the contempt of a settled people for fools, give them a piece of land in the Evil Forest — the forest where men with bad diseases are buried, where twins are thrown away, where no sane Igbo would walk after dark. They expect the missionaries to be dead in four days.

Four days pass. The missionaries are not dead. Then seven. Then a month. They are building a small mud chapel. They are singing hymns in the evening. A handful of people from Mbanta — the broken, the outcast, the mothers of twins, the osu (the cultically unclean) — have begun, tentatively, to listen. The clan begins, for the first time in its long history, to notice that its cosmology is being examined.

Among the listeners, unobtrusively, is Nwoye. Nwoye the boy who lost something inside himself the day Ikemefuna was killed. Nwoye who has grown up mostly silent under his father's eye, mostly kind, mostly a disappointment. Nwoye stands at the edge of the clearing and listens to the hymn. Achebe gives us one of the novel's most delicate sentences. It was not the logic of the Trinity that captivated him, the narrator says, but the poetry.

The poetry is about a man who suffered, who was gentle, who did not return blows, who called everybody brother. Nwoye has been waiting his whole life for this man. He has been waiting for a god who does not require him to be his father.

Nwoye converts. He does not tell Okonkwo. He is found out. Okonkwo, when he hears, seizes the boy by the throat and asks him where he has been and who told him. Nwoye says nothing. Okonkwo is stopped only by his uncle Uchendu's intervention. That night Nwoye leaves the compound and walks back to Mbanta and to the small mud church and to the white man who has baptised him James and is teaching him to read. He will not, in the rest of the novel, speak to his father again.

Okonkwo sits alone that evening and thinks with horror that he has fathered a woman. He does not see, because he cannot see, that the boy has in fact grown into the only kind of courage available to someone whose household is ruled by his particular kind of fear. For Nwoye, conversion is not a theology. It is a door out of a house he could not live in.

Achebe lets the scene land with his usual absence of commentary. The great missionary question of the twentieth-century African novel — did they bring God or did they break the world — is not answered in Things Fall Apart. It is held open. On one side stands the clan, which had a working cosmology and also threw twins into the forest. On the other stands the new religion, which received twins and also called the clan's entire inheritance darkness. Nwoye, a fifteen-year-old boy, walks through the middle of that question and out into his own life.

After seven years Okonkwo comes back to Umuofia. He has plans. He has been in exile long enough that his return, in his imagination, will be a triumph: two new wives, titles taken in a great double ceremony, his daughters married off to men of importance, his name restored to the first rank of the clan. He has spent seven years in another man's village keeping his ambition warm.

Umuofia, when he gets there, is not the Umuofia he left.

The missionaries are no longer a small oddity in the Evil Forest. They have a proper church. They have a school. They have converts in every compound. They have, most importantly, brought with them a government. There is a District Commissioner in a larger village up the road. There is a court. There are court messengers — Igbo men from other regions, in the uniform of the white administration, speaking a mangled Igbo that the Umuofians find offensive. There is a small prison. Men from Umuofia who have broken the new laws — laws they did not know existed until they broke them — have been in that prison and have come out shaved, humiliated, thinner.

Achebe gives us the new world through Obierika, who tries to explain it to Okonkwo in one of the great short speeches of the novel. The white man, he says, is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.

The sentence is where the novel gets its title. It is also where Obierika, the thoughtful friend, becomes the novel's historian. He does not blame the white man entirely. He does not absolve him. He describes a mechanism. A clan that cannot act as one cannot defend itself. A clan that cannot defend itself is already administered.

Okonkwo listens and does not accept. He wants the clan to fight. He wants the clan to drive the missionaries and the court messengers out of Umuofia the way a man drives a snake from his compound. He looks around the meetings of elders and sees men who have grown careful, cautious, divided, some of them converts, some of them in-laws of converts, some of them afraid of the court. He sees that the clan he left is not there any more to be led.

Achebe stages the tragedy in the last short chapters with the inevitability of a Greek play. There is a provocation. Enoch, an over-zealous convert, unmasks an egwugwu — a masked ancestral spirit — in public during a ceremony. The clan, finally united in outrage, burns down the church. The District Commissioner, in response, invites the leading men of Umuofia to come and discuss the matter. The leading men of Umuofia, including Okonkwo, go. They are arrested. They are held. They are beaten. They are released only after the clan pays a heavy fine. They come home humiliated in a way no Igbo elder has been humiliated in living memory.

The next morning Okonkwo, sleepless, takes his sharpened machete to the village meeting called to discuss what to do. He has decided already. He does not trust the clan any more. He trusts only his own arm.

The meeting begins. The elders speak. They are speaking carefully, thinkingly, preparing for a long debate about how to resist without bringing the whole weight of the new government down on the village. And into the middle of the speeches arrive five court messengers. They have been sent by the District Commissioner to break up the meeting.

Okonkwo stands. The head messenger says something. Okonkwo's machete comes down twice. The head messenger's body falls. The other four messengers run.

And Okonkwo, still holding the machete, looks around at his clan — and sees no-one following. No-one reaches for his own weapon. No-one shouts. A man at the back says, only, why did he do that. The clan has made its decision without saying so. The clan will not fight. The clan will pay the fine, or the new fine, and will absorb this as it has absorbed everything else.

Okonkwo understands in a second what Obierika has been trying to tell him. He walks home. He does not say anything to his wives. He goes out behind his compound.

When the District Commissioner arrives the next morning with a small detachment to arrest Okonkwo for the killing of the messenger, Obierika meets him. Obierika asks the Commissioner and his men to follow. He leads them around to the back of Okonkwo's compound. There is a tree. Okonkwo is hanging from it.

Obierika, looking at the body, turns to the Commissioner and speaks the novel's most withering sentence. That man, he says, was one of the greatest men in Umuofia. You drove him to kill himself. And now he will be buried like a dog. By the clan's own law, a man who hangs himself commits an offence against the earth and cannot be touched by his own kinsmen. He must be cut down and buried by strangers. The Commissioner's men will have to do it. Obierika's voice breaks. He turns away.

Achebe does not end the novel with Obierika. He ends it with a paragraph that is one of the coldest in modern literature. The District Commissioner walks back toward his car. He is not an unkind man, Achebe tells us. He is thinking about a book he has been writing, or planning to write, for some years now, about his work in these regions. The book is to be called The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. He thinks, as he walks, that this whole business of Okonkwo would make an interesting passage in it. Perhaps a chapter. No, he corrects himself, not a whole chapter. Perhaps a reasonable paragraph.

The novel stops. Four hundred pages of a man, a family, a clan, a cosmology, a love, a loss, a whole world of proverbs and yams and masked ancestors and funerals and marriages — all of it, in the last sentence, being filed away by a tired Englishman as a reasonable paragraph in a book that will not be read, and in the act of that filing, renamed from Umuofia into a district on a map.

That is the end. That is the argument of the novel. Achebe has spent the whole book building, patiently and without sentimentality, the world that the Commissioner does not see. The final sentence is a camera lens closing on that world from the outside. Things Fall Apart is — in among everything else it is — the most precise account in English of the moment at which a civilisation becomes, to the people who are dismantling it, a paragraph.