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are. For brevity, places and things are named by their
description: “The Red-People in the Red Town” or,
rather wonderfully, “The Skull as a Complete Gentleman”.
The latter is a bare cranium that hires body parts
and a nice suit and poses in the market place as a kind
of Bryan Ferry in order to lure pretty young women.
Events are compressed, time collapses, a decade passes
in a sentence. It is, appropriately, a drunken logic.
The plot, such as it is, follows the eldest of eight children.
His “work”, as he puts it, is to drink palm-wine.
He is an expert and drinks 225 kegs of it a day. He
cannot even drink plain water any more. The drinkard
is supplied by a tapster who falls fatally from a tree and,
because nobody can tap palm-wine as well as this character,
the narrator sets off for Deads’ Town to find his
posthumous incarnation. On the way, the drinkard finds
up a wife, uses all kinds of juju and meets incredible
characters such as “The Invisible-Pawn”, “The Hungry-
Creature”and “The Faithful-Mother in the White Tree”.
Inside the White Tree is a kind of hotel-cum-hospital
with a great ballroom. Scale is immaterial in the bush.
It is like a mutilated episode of In The Night Garden or
an adventure from The Mighty Boosh.
The transmission of folk tales follows evolutionary
principles. Oral traditions enforce that each retelling of
a story will mutate it according to personal and local
bias and that the most mnemonic elements will carry
from one teller to the next. Fantastic and grotesque de-
BUY Amos Tutuola books online from and
tails are the organizing DNA rather than psychological
depth or moral reckoning. What is the ‘use’ of a fairy
tale? The briefest glance through the Brothers Grimm
or Calvino’s collection of Italian stories will demonstrate
that ‘happy ever after’ is only one strand of many
different outcomes. Often stories will take delight in
punishing the hero. These seem to be stories told for the
sake of telling, for the sake of variation, imagination
and invention. Like turn of the evolutionary dice, folk
tales are always tweaking the seeds.
Tutuola’s writing seems inherited from an oral background.
It shares the same splashy colour, the incredible
and the memorable. The Palm-Wine Drinkard is an intensely
visual story, a vivid engagement with the imagination.
One impossible to convey in any other medium,
even anime. The sparseness of descriptive detail works
on the reader, like a parasite working on the cortex to
produce vivid hallucinations. One imagines Burroughs
enjoying Tutuola’s magic. All other art forms would be
too literal, filling in the spaces that Tutuola is able to
exploit. How would cinema, for example, deal with the
great and elusive time span of this novel, expanding
and contracting as it does?
The Palm-Wine Drinkard is mischievous. That the
journey fails in its original purpose is barely given
consideration and there is little in the way of moral
resolution at the book’s abrupt ending. At one point
the narrator must act as a court judge on the hilarious
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