Booker prize-winning Ben Okri's first novel in five years stands in the grand tradition of myth-making exemplified in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight's Children, although the book has a vision and voice uniquely its own. 'This is a story my mother began to tell me when I was a child. The rest I gleaned from the book of life among the stars, in which all things are known.' The opening sentences are typical of the overall style, the apparent simplicity of fable, the unselfconscious mysticism.
Like many fables, there is a king whose son, the prince, will be tested through trials and tribulations, who must suffer on his path to greater insight and maturity. During this journey, he'll meet a maiden, who comes from a secretive tribe of master artists, and fall in love. On this level of love story, the novel tells a tale that is archetypal, the desire and pursuit of the whole, but it is a book that consistently operates on many levels of meaning, its apparent simplicity, in fact, part of a rich fabric of symbol, echo and allusion.
It is also a novel about art and its capacity to creatively reconfigure the cruelties of the world. The maiden's tribe, we are told, 'did not favour such simple things in its art as order, balance, harmony. These were easy, and had been fully explored for generations. The tribe had advanced to the higher harmony of broken cadences, discord as beauty'. Okri loves paradox, one of the striking affinities he has with Blake, and uses words to point at the hidden, the space where the sacred lives and breathes. 'To understand too quickly was a failure. It was a blinding. Understanding stopped them from seeing and looking.'
For a book of indirections and paradoxes, it is a surprise when the land of the novel is directly named as Africa; into this Africa comes 'a strange plague ... a cold white wind and wherever it blew it created vacant spaces ... the white wind began to erase hills and valleys, it erased the memories of people, it erased villages and towns'. The intrusion of humanity's inhumanity anchors the metaphysical lyricism of the book, creatively chills its enchanted air, reminds us that all the best fairy tales hold a mirror up to the darkness and terror of the world. This is a vision of a paradise both found and lost.
Okri's vision pervades every page and a vision so spiritualised, so peculiarly optimistic, will not be to everyone's taste. There is not a shadow of cynicism or knowingness here; the ironic, the distanced, are remarkable by their absence. But it is the imaginative generosity and peculiar purity of the writing that continually touch the heart. Here is a prose with a tender tread, alive to human frailty. 'The king loved to watch over sleeping beings. Often he wandered the kingdom at night, watching over his sleeping subjects ... the good and the bad all slept in the same way, under the mercy of immense forces, under the mercy of the ultimate mysteries.'
Starbook is a novel at 'the mercy of ultimate mysteries'. Okri does not wish to solve or reduce these mysteries, he reveres them too much for that, and instead seduces the reader with a rapt recounting of the infinite within the particular.
