T. M. Aluko is one of the most productive, though most undervalued, of modern Nigerian novelists, and his seven novels offer a distinctive insight into Nigerian society during the middle decades of the twentieth century. As early as the 1940s he received recognition for his short stories, but since then for much of his writing career critics have been almost uniformly hostile toward his satiric portraits of villagers, administrators, politicians, and clergymen. He has never been a full-time writer. His primary occupation has been civil engineering--in the civil service, as a university professor, and in consultancy work--and his books reflect the realism and perhaps the inevitable elitism of his special vantage point; they certainly reflect a practical man's impatience with more theoretical commentators. His distanced irony and his political skepticism distinguish him from the cultural committedness general in writers of the immediate preindependence and postindependence periods, and such...