THE FAMISHED ROAD

By Ben Okri
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday (1991)
$22.50 500 pages
Reviewed by J. Douglas Allen-Taylor

You will not find a much better writer of poetic modern English than Nigerian author Ben Okri. There are points in his mammoth novel "The Famished Road" when Okri is a master playing upon the
music of language, the result is electrifying, and you can see what influenced the British judges to award this book the 1991 Booker Prize. But then there are the problems...serious problems. "The
Famished Road" is puddle-shallow of plot and far too long, often dragging along like a massive, broken-legged bull antelope trying to pull itself forward by the sheer inertia of its own great weight.
Either shoot it or edit it, one wants to cry out.

Since the beginning of human existence, families around the world have attempted to cope psychologically with the terrible tragedy of children who die at an early age. In Nigeria, folk tradition holds the belief that these are not really children at all but are actually spirits, abiku, born again and again into the human world for brief visits but returning always to their spectral homes. "The
Famished Road" is the story of Azaro, an abiku who decides to abandon the land of the spirits to stay in the "real" world with his Nigerian parents.

The plot, what there is of it, staggers along like Azaro's drunken father between the economic struggles of his impoverished family, the political struggles of a newly-decolonized nation, and
the periodic attempts by the boy's spirit friends to reclaim him.

Okri's obvious strength is in his descriptive writing and in his ability to allow the reader to look at the world from a spirit's point of view. Thus, Azaro describes his father:

"There was a man asleep on the chair. I didn't recognize him.
He had a bandage round his head and his left arm was in a dirty
sling. He was unshaven and his bare chest heaved as he snored. The
room was very small. It was full of the mood of his sleep, of
hunger, and despair, sleepless nights and the gloom of candle smoke.
On the centre table, in front of him, there was a half-empty bottle
of ogogoro, an ashtray, and a packet of cigarettes. There was a
mosquito coil on the table as well and its acrid smoke filled the
air. The man sleeping on the chair was like a giant in fairy tales.
His big feet were on the table. He slept very deeply, frightening
me with the great movements of his chest."

Or again, when Azaro visits the home of a police officer and his wife and shares a meal with the ghosts of the officer's various victims:

"The ghosts were tall and silent and some had weak beards. An
incubus with white wings hovered near the window. ... Another, in
a policeman's uniform, had an amputated foot. He ate of the food
with bloodstained hands a moment before the officer did. ... I
must have been staring at them in astonishment for the officer
suddenly said: 'What are you staring at?' I shook my head. Then I
noticed that in a corner, across from where they ate with such
innocent relish, sitting forlorn and abandoned, was the ghost of
their son. He had lost both his arms, one side of his face was
squashed, and both his eyes had burst. He had bluish wings. He was
the saddest ghost in the house."

Or, finally, in as concise and poetic a summing up the impact of humanity upon our environment as you will ever find:

"It took longer to get far into the forest. It seemed that the
trees, feeling that they were losing the argument with human beings,
had simply walked deeper into the forest."

There are pages and pages of such treasures, and a reader can wander along and pocket them like sweet mushrooms found among the underroots of great trees, saving them for later savoring.

But it takes some sniffing out, and more than a little patience, because Okri gives little to hang these passages together. His failure is in the craft of writing, rather than in the art. The author's weakness is in his plot and narrative line, writing as if he were wandering about, glaze-eyed, until he found something that interested him. Okri does not seem to feel it important that a novel ought to build on a line of rising and ebbing dramatic tension, or else he just could not pull it off here. "The Famished
Road" reads like a long summer afternoon in a backwater village, nodding its way toward dusk, broken every now and then by bursts of wholly unexpected lightning from a cloudless sky.

With so much to say, and so many brilliant ways to say it, Ben Okri is certainly capable of giving us a better story. I expect that he will.