Saturday, December 26, 2015

BREAKING NEWS: Police Officer Kills 4, Self In Lagos




Adjekpagbon Blessed Mudiaga

A mobile police officer has killed four young men and himself at Hotel Paulson Plaza, Anibaba Street, Aiyedere-Ketu, Lagos.
The cause of his action is yet to be known as onlookers interviewed expressed shock over the incident while the victims’ bodies were being carried into a police patrol vehicle, at about 5:45pm on Saturday, December 26.
One of the victims simply identified as Jeje, was said to be a resident of the popular Oluwalogbon Street, Ketu. The street was in a sad mood at the time of filing this report, as those familiar with Jeje were lamenting his abrupt death in the yuletide season.

Thursday, December 10, 2015

Book Review: The Last Good Man



Human Beings With Their Complex Malfunctioning

Book: The Last Good Man
Author: Patience Swift
Publisher: Beautiful Books Limited
Pages: 174
Reviewer: Adjekpagbon Blessed Mudiaga

The Last Good Man is no doubt a very enlightening intellectual jeremiad of loneliness, love and tragic happenings to individuals due to their own lifestyles or natural elements of the world.

Made up of Fourteen Chapters, the novel’s plot begins with the description of a massively built man simply known as Sam, who has been orphaned at the age of four. He is the protagonist of the novel. The setting is an unnamed village.

Like many orphans experiences in life, Sam goes through a lot of challenges with his widowed mother whom he later lost to the cold hands of death. After dropping out from elementary school, he works as a labourer in the village before venturing out to different cities to work as a construction worker.

His mother’s illness before her death makes Sam return to the village to take care of her, and he lives in the village ever after her death.

Meanwhile, there is a lady known as Isobel who absconded with her boyfriend from the same village and leaves her mother lonely. Her mother later dies of cancer. By the hands of destiny Isobel falls in love with Sam years later, after his discovery of a nameless dumb little girl whom he revived at a bay after he met her dead as a result of drowning.

Through the aforementioned characters, the author shows how some people love and care for their parents while others are indifferent and careless. Sam represents those that care, while Isobel represent the careless.

Nonetheless, there are several other lessons one could learn from the novel’s musings, such as why some people live reclusively, the need for love, care and cooperation among family members / neighbours on one hand, and the importance of daily interaction with the opposite sex or married couples as a way of living a fulfilling life, on the other.

The author display her creative onions and vivid understanding of the fundamentals of literature, humanity and natural sciences by relying on apostrophic stylistics while describing Sam’s unnatural way of communicating with his house, kitchen, cooker and bench in the story line, which reminds the reader about Lobsang Rampa’s postulation in Saffron Robe, that solid or inanimate objects like stone, walls and desks contains live and silent voices.

The novel can also be described as a string of woes that happened between two lovers namely- Abelard and Heloise whom Isobel had read about in one of the various books she came across while working as a bookshop assistant to an old man in the village before her elopement to a city with her lover. While Isobel sees herself as Heloise, she considers Sam as Abelard. Her work in the bookshop had overtime made her develop interest in writing a book of her own too. This underscores the importance of reading and how it could engineer creative instincts in a reader.

Another noticeable feature of the novel observed by the reader is the author’s reliance on palilogy to reinforce some tiny but important points in the story line by way of refreshing the memory about what one needs to do when in the danger of drowning through powerful water current and how to revive a drowned person brought out of water on time even when he/she is already pronounced dead. The sprinkling of poetic alliteration here and there at intervals is also a commendable creative style employed by the author.

In conclusion, it is sad that Sam who is described as the ‘’Last Good Man’’ by Isobel, is killed at the end of the story with the connivance of trigger-happy policemen and some ever gossipy poke-nosing folks he lived with, despite his taking very good care of the little girl he met dead in a shallow water at a bay, whom he resuscitated but later became the cause of his untimely death.