Title: The Famished Road
Author: Ben Okri
Year: 1991
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 978-1-529-11491-1
Any group sharing a common trait can be stratified based on the degree to which that trait is expressed. There are usually a few members, between 1 & 5 who are exemplars of that trait and then the rest of the group would be varying degrees of mediocrity or excellence. Thus, in global politics, which is about power, you have the 5 most powerful countries forming the UN Security Council. In African wildlife hunting, which is concerned with the difficulty of killing the prey, there are the big 5 of elephant, rhino, cape buffalo, lion and leopard. In global finance, there is a big 4 of audit firms, a bulge bracket of investment banks and similar groupings for other industry segments.
In the classification of Nigerian authors, the big 3 are Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and (arguably) Cyprian Ekwensi. If the group is expanded to maybe 5, Ben Okri would have to be included. He is a much-celebrated author that I have been ashamed of having never read, until this book.
The book is about a boy who has strong ties to the spirit world. Given that the book was published in 1991, perhaps that ogbanje trope was not a cliché at the time. So, I could overlook it. What I could not overlook was the excessive and repetitive description of the environment to show poverty. Almost every chapter would talk about how the boy’s parents were struggling – to pay rent, to repay debts, to buy food. There are so many descriptions of the mother, who is a hawker, coming home without selling anything. There are descriptions of the father, a laborer, coming home covered with mud and dust and stinking. It was repetitive. And the repetitiveness was pointless, because it did not advance the story or develop the characters or reinforce the theme, which was supposed to be a magical road. While there are many mentions of a road in the book, they were disjointed. Actually, the entire book was disjointed. Many of the chapters are episodes of fantasy (with repetitive descriptions of spirits) or pointless violence or slices of cliched village life. The only common thread was the boy’s perspective. I suppose it could be argued that since the story is from a child’s perspective, the incoherence is deliberate, meant to show how a child experiences the world. If so, it achieved its aims too well, because the impression I have of the story is a jumble. The kind of jumble that is not worth untangling, like the frequent mentioning of the color blue, which did not seem to have any significance. And if it did, I could not be bothered figuring it out.
Another reason I disliked the book is its style. A lot of recent Nigerian art is not to my taste because it’s direction of development is influenced by a sort of emphasis that lacks subtlety. Take the repetitive descriptions of poverty, which seems like a glamorization of the situation. Not only is it unnecessary, but it is also ridiculous how it is seen as a requirement; like when a popular artiste called Davido (who comes from a really rich family) sang about being from the ghetto. There is a lot of poverty porn in our art. To be fair, there is often an unsubtle emphasis on wealth too. Especially when movies show tacky people in tacky houses copying what they imagine white (thus rich) people would be doing. Also, many times, there are references that are out of place, thus jarring. Like how in this book, which was set in pre-independence Nigeria, there was a mention of paper plates at a poor people’s party. That did not make sense.
The book won him the Booker Prize, and honestly, I wonder if it was given to him for reasons of political correctness. That type of pc-ness that would praise a work if produced by a member of a fashionable minority group. There is a popular picture of Papua New Guinea’s ambassador to the UN wearing his traditional dress to a General Assembly meeting. I can understand people not being ashamed of their culture. But if acclaim is the standard, then the wider the acclaim, the more objective the standard. I would not give the PNG costume a prize, except maybe for bizarreness. The same way, if I was the giver of the Booker Prize, I would not have given it to Mr. Okri.
The book has been compared with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I do not recall if I’ve read that book. However, it reminds me of Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World. Both books are about poor people living close to a forest and who do not understand modernity. I did not like that one either. One magical realism book which I loved, other than the universally loved one by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is The Dictionary of the Khazars by Miloran Pavic. And I deliberately mention it because while it has repetitiveness, being 1 story told from 3 perspectives, it is sufficiently coherent, its descriptions sufficiently imaginative and the language sufficiently beautiful that the story is delightful. A Nigerian magical realism book which I really liked is Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-wine Drinkard.
The Famished Road is the 1st book in a trilogy. I disliked it so much; I will not read the other 2. And I will give all 3 away. I intend to give the books to someone who would appreciate them since tastes differ.
I doubt I will read Mr. Okri again.