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General Overview
A war novel is a novel in which the primary action takes place in a field of armed combat, or in a domestic setting (or home front) where the characters are preoccupied with the preparations for, or recovery from, war. The war novel's main roots lie in the epic poetry of the classical and medieval periods, especially Homer's The Iliad, Virgil's The Aeneid, the Old English saga Beowulf, and different versions of the legends of King Arthur. All of these epics were concerned with preserving the history or mythology of conflicts between different societies, while providing an accessible narrative that could reinforce the collective memory of a people. Other important influences on the war novel included the tragedies of such dramatists as Euripides, Seneca the Younger, Christopher Marlowe, and Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Henry V provided a model for how the history, tactics, and ethics of war could be combined in an essentially fictional framework. Romances and satires in Early Modern Europe--Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, to name two of many-also contained elements of military heroism and folly that influenced the later development of war novels. In terms of imagery and symbolism, many modern war novels (especially those espousing an anti-war viewpoint) take their cue from Dante's depiction of Hell in The Inferno, John Milton's account of the war in Heaven in Paradise Lost, and the Apocalypse as depicted in The Bible’s Book of Revelations.
As the prose fiction novel rose to prominence in the 17th Century, the war novel began to develop its modern form, although most novels featuring war were picaresque satires in which the soldier was a rakish rather than realistic figure. The war novel came of age during the 19th Century. Works such as Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, about the Napoleonic Wars in Russia, and Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, about the American Civil War established the conventions of the modern war novel as it has come down to us today. All of these works feature realistic depictions of major battles, visceral scenes of wartime horrors and atrocities, and significant insights into the nature of heroism, cowardice, and morality in wartime.
Africa and Civil War: Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty
Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty is a war novel that explores the psychological make up of characters in the war drama. In this novel, the Federal and the Secessionist armies are locked in a fierce battle. But the author plays down the drama of external violence and concentrates fully on its deeper human dimensions. We have committed characters giving account of their experiences and roles in the war. We have Chief Toje, a big chief who conspired to the arrest and detention of his greatest business rival Oshevire. He used the opportunity of Oshevire’s arrest to attempt sexual exploitation of his wife, Aku. Aku is from the secessionist part of the country and feels unprotected in the course of the war. Chief Toje pretends offering her protection but with the intension of exploiting her. However, Toje’s impotence could not allow him achieve his evil intention. His nephew, Odibo, the cripple often goes on errand for him to Aku’s place. Aku, being sexually abused without actualizing it decides to allow Odibo calm her troubled sexual nerves. This single act makes Odibo realize that he is beyond destitution. He begins to challenge Chief Toje and this leads to the most heinous experiences of the war beyond the battlefront. Both men slaughtered each other. Aku is taken over by Major Ali for protection. Oghenovo, Aku’s son and the only child narrator in the story is busy expecting the return of his father from prison. All he does is to fight against Onome or anyone who calls his father a thief. At the return of Oshevire after being proved innocent of the charges against him, he decided to do his last duty of restoring his image, home and conscience. This leads to another tragedy which marks the unending trauma of wars.
By adopting the “collective evidence” technical style of narration, we watch without any inhibition, the adventures, the feelings, the hopes, the fears, the emotional burden and the moral state of the characters in their process of formation. Each character’s narrative portion and perspective is proportionate to his degree of involvement, and response to the conflicts. By presenting action from many points of view, the writer allows the reader to judge the entire situation himself. The dramatized or pictorial adopted allows Okpewho to give full and free verbal expression to his characters’ emotions, even those that will normally be suppressed as a result of public consciousness.
Starting with Major Ali, both the narrative and the plot structures expand gradually as if from an aperture into a wider channel until the climax is reached when the three main characters lose their lives tragically over a woman. The themes also come tumbling in one by one, one linking the other until there is a complex network of themes: the disruption in communal life, the mischievous manipulation of military authorities for the settlement of private scores, the sexual oppression of a destitute and forlorn woman, the abuse of children and the handicapped, the heroic assertion of personal integrity in the face of daunting odds, moral chastity pulverized by destitution, domestic crises, psychological depression, sexual impotence, etc.
In the novel, we see each character contributing his quota to the main issue. The main issue is not the civil war demon that is currently
devastating the land as this is only a catalyst for the internal psychological crises plaguing all the major characters. The war only reverberates at the background and remains peripheral to the main plot of the narrative. The writer’s emphasis is on the series of individualized “civil” wars that each individual has to confront: the desperate tug-of- war between Chief Toje and his failing manhood, his death-knell struggle with his business rival, Oshevire, the fratricidal war between him and his servant over the beautiful wife of another citizen who has been jailed on trumped up charges, his pursuit of pre-war social and financial privileges, Oshevire’s struggle against war time wickedness, Aku’s moral battle with destitution and unlawful sexual urges, Major Ali’s fight to maintain law and order, etc.
In the novel we see that there is much emphasis on honor, honesty, integrity and fellow feelings. The novel does not celebrate any heroic exploits in battle, but a heroic resolve to be just and compassionate under impossible circumstances. The series of micro “civil wars” are bitter, more destructive and more physically and spiritually agonizing than the real civil war. There is economy, not only of words and action, but also of details. The tragedy is worked out within the strategic temporal space of a border town. By selecting a small border town as setting, we are offered the sense of an enclosed arena, which allows no intrusion, or escape from this world of tragedy. Okpewho chooses appropriate characters to dramatize the tale, from the peasant to the noble, from the honorable to the villain. The nature of the human problem presented in the narrative is as complex, touching and realistic as the deft technical construction of the work. Okpewho displays an impressive understanding and insight into the deep world of his characters' inner lives. Okpewho explores this grave human situation with responsibility and sympathetic understanding. Each character makes his choice and bears the consequences of his decision. In Okpewho's artistic vision, choices stem from the characters’ inner selves; thus he explores the characters' thoughts fully. He focuses his tragic vision on a closely-knit series of events and maintains this vision through a supremely controlled authorial distance as well as a dramatized angle of observation. There is an effective combination of emotional detachment and an incisive display of sympathy and fellow feelings.
Okpewho has helped to make the war alive to us in a new and fresh way. He succeeds very well in deploying techniques to make the reader a collaborator with him and with the characters in creating a conception of the Civil War that leaps out of the text. The novel enlarges our sympathy and opens our eyes to areas of civil war experience we never really knew well. The novel explores the dark places of human nature, the ethical and moral values of both pre-war and during-the-war Nigerian society. One basic tendency in some of the best war novels is that many of the narrators see war in more personal than social terms. They seem to have concentrated on the fate of the innocent individuals who are trapped by a destructive machine whose magnitude they cannot even imagine and whose power they are helpless to oppose. Not even children are immune. The extent to which children are affected by war is driven home by the experience of the little Oghenevo in The Last Duty. War is an organism that consumes all who come in contact with it.
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