Novel
The Only Son
John Munonye · 1966
Synopsis
Chiaku is a widow and has only one son, Nnanna, the last of a line whose name the village keeps. She refuses to remarry, farms, sells, and puts everything into this child. The mission opens a school; the catechist insists; she finally sends the boy there, hoping he will take on the white man's learning without ceasing to be one of her own. Nnanna succeeds there too well: he is baptised, and decides to marry a Christian woman and to leave.
Context
The twenty-first title in Heinemann's African series, this first book was written by a schools inspector who spent his whole career in the schools of the East. It opens a sequence of three novels, continued in 1969 and then in 1978, in which the same people are met again thirty years apart. Critics have noted the deliberate dryness of the narrative, which keeps to gestures and privations without comment, and its refusal to put either of the two camps in the wrong. The book was long read alongside Achebe's, whose point of view it reverses.
Who it is for
In English, with no French version. The language is simple and the narrative short. It helps to know that an only son alone carried the name of a lineage, and that being taught by the Fathers amounted to apostasy.
Prizes and reception
This first book led to its author being compared with Achebe, a comparison that served him as much as it harmed him. It is today the most studied of his six novels.