Notes on ‘Mr. Benjamin’s Pen’

The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality – James A. Michener

FICTION writing is an intricate art which demands dexterity and mastery of the genre, anyone who therefore dabbles into it thinking it is simply an art of make believe would be surprised if any wrong step is taken. It is therefore a pleasure when you pick up a work of fiction and you are gripped in the pages of a story which makes you want to race to the end and see the denouement. Tony Nwaka’s Mr. Benjamin’s Pen belongs in this class.

The barely 131 pages is a racy story that a fast reader could read in one sitting. It is about a dual personality. There is Mr. Benjamin, a writer and politician and Mr. Mordi Enujeko, a senior civil servant who one day hopes to rise to the pinnacle of his career by been appointed as a head of service of Coastal State. Mr. Benjamin, who divides his time between politics and writing has just won a writer’s competition. This is a surprised to him because he does write by the sides and not as a main job. So, the day of his glory came and he dressed up to attend the event with his wife and friend. A writer winning a writing competition is a big event in the life of one who writes because it shows that the feet of such a writer is getting firm on the sands of time. It was like that for him on that day and nothing should stand in his way on his day of honour. 

But as most things in life are often encountered in usually unlikely spaces; things began to happen and events turns from twists to corners and sharp spins which he could not himself understand. The story revolves around him and the special pen he got at the award ceremony. In the world of his dream and going from Mr. Benjamin to Mordi he begins to circulate in the two worlds interchangeably as the story race along. The politician who is a special aide to the governor of his state, Coastal State, begins to move on. However, things begin to take a different turn for him on the day he attended a party event and had to lend his pen (not the cherished one) to a fellow party faithful to use. The pen was returned to him days later.

It was the return of this pen by a man whom many people in the party regard as someone with some dubious power and influence now seem to be the origin of the fall of Mr. Benjamin from grace. He begins to withdraw from his favourite friends and even at home he becomes a slightly changed personality. This his change of personality and his own realization that the return of the pen was like the beginning of his plight did not help. Should he throw away the pen or return it to the dubious personality? Why in the first place did he collect the pen back, when it was not even his cherished trophy that he won as a result of his writing prowess?   

The story in very deft manner of writing takes the reader around the double worlds of Benjamin and Mordi in a way that is enjoyable and goes between reality to the world of dream and it is told from the different perspectives of the characters involved in the story. This is a pattern that has been perfected by Isidore Okpewho in his classic novel about the Nigerian civil war. Nwaka must have perhaps read Okpewho’s The Last Duty, in which the writer perfectly allowed each character to tell his or her own story from their own perspective. This is a narrative style that is very intricate and could only be realized by a talented writer. Nwaka has demonstrated his mastery of this pattern which hopefully would grow better in the future.

Benjamin the political aide to the governor has to face many tempests of politics and the intrigues of whether to continue to support his governor when many of his aides have begun to double time when they discover that his political fortune in Abuja was shrinking. He decides to stick on to the last when he actually also feels that he is no longer in the inner caucus of his political godfather. All attempts to may him drop the gauntlet and try his own fortune to contest on his own did not yield anything with him. 

Tony Nwaka with Mr. Benjamin’s Pen (2019) has succeeded in writing an experimental novel which takes the reader from the realms of reality to the dream world. His craft as a novelist is growing. Before this he has written three others: Mountain of Yesterday (2017),Lords of the Creek (2018) and Shadows of Nothing (2019). All are published under the Kraftgriots imprint of Ibadan based Kraft Books Limited.