Published by Faber & Faber, 1952, 136 pages.

This is the story of a man who does nothing but drink palm wine, something he has done since he was ten years old.

His father, realizing that his son would never do anything else, gives him a palm-tree farm with 560,000 palm trees so that he would never run out of palm wine. He also engages an expert palm-wine tapster whose sole function is to supply the drinkard with palm wine.

Things go well for several years. The drinkard (who also narrates the story) has many friends who come for his wine. But one day, the tapster falls from the palm tree and dies. Now there is no one to supply wine, and the drinkard’s friends all vanish.

The drinkard cannot find a replacement for his tapster, and he cannot live without his beloved palm wine. So he sets off to find the tapster, to try to track him down to where he must have gone after death. To protect himself throughout the journey, he arms himself with various jujus.

It is this quest that forms the story. Along the way, the drinkard meets many strange creatures. A man promises to help him if he can bring Death to him, thinking that Death will get the him first. But the drinkard uses one of his powerful jujus to outwit Death and capture him. But when the man sees him approaching with Death, he runs away.   

Another man says he will tell him where to find his tapster if he can rescue his daughter, who has been taken from the market. The drinkard frees the woman and marries her. She joins him in his quest.

As the drinkard and his wife journey to the land of the dead, they meet those who help them and those who try to harm them. His wife, fortunately, is clever and the couple help each other.

The book is based on Yoruba folklore and is written in a sort of Pidgin English. The book was initially criticized in his native Nigeria because of Amos Tutuola’s use of “broken English”. It has since become a classic. I personally love the way that Tutuola uses language. To quote from the introduction by Wole Soyinka, “Tutuola…chose to invent his own tongue, festooned with uproarious images…”. The title reflects this: calling the narrator a “drinkard” rather than a drunkard makes sense: although he drinks a prodigious amount, he is never drunk, but seems to keep his wits about him.

This is a quest story, but Tutuola subverts the genre. Unlike other quest stories, where the hero tends to go off in search of something that is important to humanity, the drinkard just wants a way of being able to provide himself with palm wine. But there is an arc to the character: he returns from his quest as someone who has become more than an irresponsible drinkard.

Another thing I loved about the book is that there are no limits to Amos Tutuola’s world, no boundaries between the living and the dead, between humans and supernatural creatures. Everything is interconnected, and the real and otherworldly coexist. Again, to quote Soyinka, Tutuola creates “a world that was too realistic to be liminal, too paranormal to be realistic, each segment intersecting with others according to its own laws…”

This is an unusual and enjoyable book.