The Famished Road.

Nigerian-born poet and author Ben Okri won the Booker Prize in 1991 for his sprawling novel The Famished Road, which now sits as the start of a trilogy of novels about the spirit child Azaro, who moves back and forth between the spirit and material worlds until he decides to stay with one family in a nameless African country until he can make his mother happy. Okri’s prose is stunning and the book is replete with the magical realism common in postcolonial literature, but even a week after finishing it I still can’t quite decide what, if anything, this book was about.

Azaro, short for Lazaro (since he has seemingly returned from the dead multiple times), is the only child of a couple in a small African village where citizens are getting by, but where the mere appearance of a car or a radio is notable. Representatives of two political parties, the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor, visit the village, where the hub of activity is the bar owned by the mysterious Madame Koto, who lets Azaro hang around during the day while his mother hawks goods at a local market and his father does … well, a lot of nothing. Azaro’s father chases various chimeras throughout the book, at one point deciding he’s going to be a boxer and at another that he’ll be a politician, never doing much to earn money to feed his family (and, while he’s a boxer, eating more than his share, so Azaro and his mother go hungry). There’s also a blind man in a wheelchair who seems to just wish evil on Azaro and the other kids in the village, a photographer who runs afoul of the political thugs and begins to document the strife they cause in the village, and various incarnations from the spirit world who want to pull Azaro back to the other side.

Okri is a beautiful writer, and even descriptions of ordinary events and moments sparkle. Azaro is probably around eight or nine years old, but uses phrasings and imagery of a wizened adult – or, perhaps, an ageless being from the spirit world: “The only points of light were the mosquito coil, its smoke spiralling to the ceiling, and his cigarette. In a way I came to think of Dad as a cigarette smoked alone in the dark.” Even scenes of violence take on a mystical quality that lessens their graphic nature, which makes some of the rioting – a not infrequent event in The Famished Road – a bit easier to navigate as a reader.

I love both magical realism and postcolonial literature, but something about this book didn’t hit the mark with me, primarily because I couldn’t connect with whatever its underlying themes might be. It seems like Okri writes at a figurative level, but perhaps without the metaphorical meaning beneath it. If Madame Koto represents someone or something, or Azaro’s father does, I missed it completely, perhaps just because I lack the historical context (what I know of Nigerian history is fairly limited to their civil war), but even his depiction of the two political parties felt a little facile; if the message here is just “all politicians are corrupt,” well, sure, but I think we already knew that.

Because of Okri’s prose and the incredible imagery throughout the book, The Famished Road flies by, even at 500 pages, and even with a plot that meanders substantially. Okri sets a scene, creating a vivid environment with a clear atmosphere, but what happens in these scenes is murky and I was left with a constant sense that I didn’t really get what he was trying to express. It reminded me of Ng?g? wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, which seems thematically similar, but is more grounded in the concrete and, as a result, has a more powerful and evident metaphorical meaning as well.

Next up: I’ve finished Tara Westover’s Educated and begun David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue.