Purple Hibiscus

I’m not a voracious reader. I read a lot but I pick at books a bit like I tend to pick at my food. When I’m hungry I’ll devour them with relish and I can’t get enough. At other times I carry on reading because other people have raved about a book and I’m waiting for the part that really grabs my attention. I’m hoping to be seduced.

This is exactly how it was with Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She’s a young Nigerian writer who’s lived her adult life in the U.S. She’s only 31 but her first novel (Purple Hibiscus) received rave reviews and was nominated for various awards. I was a bit put off at first though because my latest ex had raved about it and I didn’t particularly want to be reminded of her. So I didn’t immediately take to Kambili, the 15 / 16 year old narrator. Her dad is a tyrant, a staunch Catholic who punishes her, her brother and their mother for the smallest infraction. As the novel progresses the scale of the domestic violence gets worse but you also see that Eugene (the dad) is a complex character. He loves his family very much and is just doing to them what was done to him.

The parallels to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart are deliberate and cleverly done. The opening line of Adichie's book reads: "Things started to fall apart the day that Jaja didn't go for Holy Communion" (or something like that). Themes of the personal and the political, tradition versus progress, dictatorship versus letting people decide for themselves. But it’s the personal story of Kambili that I warmed to. About halfway through the novel she manages to leave her strict father for the first time and go to stay with her university lecturer aunt in Nsukka. The family dynamics there are brilliant. And it is there that Kambili has her first intimations of a “sexual awakening”. She falls in love at any rate and the contrast between the sweet, attentive priest whom she falls in love with and her strict (but loving in his own way) father makes for compelling reading. Kambili’s story is played out against the backdrop of political instability in Nigeria which is also building to a climax. The ending is a bit of a let-down after the finely worked middle of the novel but it’s still stayed with me enough for me to want to write this review.

In retrospect it’s the mother’s story which isn’t adequately developed. We see her as the dutiful but terrified wife and mother but we don’t see why she’s like that. Her actions at the end don’t really make sense because we don’t have access to her thoughts. It’s almost as if she doesn’t have an interior life the way Kambili does.