Things Fall Apart - The book-group speaks

Last night book group (8 of us, couples) met, discussed Things Fall Apart. Honestly, I was amazed that I was the only one highly critical of Okonkwe. Even more surprisingly, the four women were by far the most sympathetic to him and to his society. My argument: he's a bully, a thug, he severely beats his wife, terrorizes his children, despises his weak son, wishes his daughter had been a boy. The society itself, entirely misogynistic, male-dominated, the powerful men take multiple wives, leaving the weaker men with nothing and turning others into marauding thugs who (presumably) find their wives by invading other villages. Marge rightly pointed out that the misfits (e.g., O's son) are later in the book drawn to the church. Exactly! Some argued that you have to see the society in its context, that this society works on its own terms, the women were cared for and probably happy. My view is that plenty of people said the same thing about southern plantations. The society does not work - and I give Achebe great credit for building his story on an unsympathetic hero so as to show this. Lowell compared O. to Achilles - very good comparison in some ways. I compare him to Tony Soprano - fascinating, but horrifying, an avatar of a sick (doomed, in this case) way of life. I asked how we would have seen in had he been written as part of a different culture. Imagine this book, say, transformed to contemporary american urban street life. No doubt he would be seen as a thug and a criminal. But some said we have to see it in context. Exactly the argument Acheba opposes when readers try to understand Conrad's racism (in Heart of Darkness). No, the book is its own context, and it shows an ugly man in an ugly world doomed to vanish - even though the world coming in, the colonialism, the church, is horrible in its own way. Very good discussion on this challenging book.