Born Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike (28 April 1931 – 9 January 2020) anddescended from Ikelionwu, the founder of Ndikelionwu in AnambraState, Ike numbers among Nigeria's most misunderstood and, from theperspective of literary scholarship, under-appreciated novelists.For instance, Chinua Achebe asserted during the public presentationof Chukwuemeka Ike's Expo’ 77 (1980)that ‘Chukwuemeka Ike has explored a wider spectrum of Nigerian lifethan any other novelist. Each of his … novels takes a differentperspective of our story, drawing its material from a differentfacet of his own rich and diverse experience’ (quoted inEzenwa-Ohaeto Chinua Achebe: ABiography: 219), Ernest Emenyonu would lament sometimein 1991 that ‘for too long, Chukwuemeka Ike has remained untouchedby African and indeed Nigerian critics’ (‘Of Visions, Youth andFuture’ 118).

There is no doubt that the recognition of what Achebe identifies asIke's ‘rich and diverse experience’, which has rubbed off onvirtually all his eleven novels, influenced Ezenwa-Ohaeto'sdescription of Ike as ‘the relevant Novelist’. A closer interactionwith Ike's novels provides a mosaic that brings up the validity ofDavid Cecil's postulation when writing about Victorian novels that‘a good novel is not just a work of art, it is also a picture oflife’. Without a contextualization of Chukwuemeka Ike's writingswithin the body of Nigerian literature, it will be difficult toappreciate why the evocation of an atmosphere of palpableverisimilitude in his novels has endeared him very much to thegeneral reader and the few scholars who have engaged the near-Dickensian flavour of his canvas.

Whatever backgrounds that have impacted on the realism portrayed inhis works seem to derive from the acuteness of the exposure he hadin his formative years, especially while receiving primary andsecondary education at the Aro Settlement Primary School,Ndikelionwu, Anambra State and the C.M.S. Central School, Ife,Ezinihitte in Mbaise, Imo State, among others. Experiencesencountered at these schools and the Government College, Umuahiamust have made his artistic consciousness to register optimally. Ashe reveals in the course of an interview with B.E.C. Oguzie,