The Famished Road (1991)
Who wrote it?
Ben Okri, OBE (1959-; active 1980-), born Minna, Nigeria. Okri spent his early childhood in Peckham, south London, before returning to Nigeria as a family in 1968. He is a member of the Urhobo people, growing up in a culture rich in mythology and storytelling, with the line between the mythic spirit-world and “reality” blurred in a way that clearly influenced his writing.
Something of a prodigy, he was rejected for admission to university at the age of 14 and turned instead to poetry as a calling, publishing poems and short stories in Nigeria, some featuring criticism of the government which he says led to him being placed on a “death list”. He moved back to the UK in 1978 to study comparative literature at Essex University. When his funding fell through he found himself sleeping rough but says this inspired an outpouring of writing. He published his first novel, Flowers and Shadows, aged just 21, and became the youngest winner of the Booker Prize in 1991 for The Famished Road, the writing of which he claimed saved his life. He was awarded an OBE in 2001.
What's it about?
The Famished Road is the first part of a trilogy (with Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998)) following a “spirit-child” (or abiku) living in Africa (most likely Nigeria) named Azaro (a shortening of Lazarus.) The long, dream-like and poetic novel explores Azaro’s connection to a world of magical and often grotesque spirits, ingrained in the traditions of his culture, as well as his relationship with his parents, struggling in poverty in a rat-infested room in a compound controlled by an unpleasant landlord.
The novel does not follow a linear plot but rather tells stories, some repetitive, of the pains of daily life and Azaro’s escapes into the equally terrifying spirit world. Some of the more coherent threads unfolding alongside this are the battle for attention in the newly independent country between the “Party of the Rich” and “Party of the Poor”, the character development of bar-owner Madame Koto whose journey from barkeeper to relative prosperity (signified by her bringing elecricity to her bar and owning a car) is accompanied by an alignment with the aforementioned “Party of the Rich”, and Azaro’s father’s attempt to escape his grinding poverty by becoming a boxer, defeating various monstrous enemies in fights which further blur the line behind reality and mythology.
What I liked
The more “realist” components of the novel offer a striking view of poverty-stricken life in post-colonial Africa. The hardship is memorably described, never more so than in the description of the death of dozens of rats in the family’s home.
The writing, at times, does have a luminous, magical quality that grabs you and carries you along.
Azaro as a character is likeable and interesting, if underdeveloped in terms of plot. I would be intrigued to know if the subsequent two novels in the trilogy offer much more in terms of resolution of the many threads that develop around him. Has anyone read them?
The exploration of the coming of modernity, and with it divisive and corrupt politics, is super interesting. Again, I think the telling is generally too vague and allegorical to fully satisfy but there are moments that stand out - such as the poisoning of the village by the Party of the Rich with their “free milk” offer.
Overall there’s a lot that sticks in the mind - it’s a very visual writing style and some of the father’s fights and descriptions of eyeless and limbless beggar/spirits could come straight out of fantasy literature.
What I didn't like
In all of the above I tended towards admiration rather than active enjoyment.
Overall it’s a long old slog. As many others have commented, there’s a lot of repetition in here. It’s undoubtedly deliberate and intended to convey some of the mundanity and exhaustion of the lives being described (with the spirit world absorbed into this as equally “everyday”, as it would certainly have seemed for a child of the time)
It’s a little too episodic, even impressionistic, for my tastes. There’s a lot in here, but it’s often hard to see where it’s going. When the writing is good, it carries you along, but there’s no real plot to speak of and therefore it’s hard to stay engrossed when the writing slips.
In places it just all gets a little too much. The spirits blur into one, the repetition becomes exhausting to the reader as well as the characters, and in a world where reality and fantasy/myth are given equal priority, it sometimes feel hard to care about either.
Food & drink pairings
Palm Wine / Ogogoro and Peppersoup, obviously.
Fun facts
Very interesting thoughts on the judging process this year, from Nicholas Mosley - who resigned from the panel after getting none of his choices on the final list. His comment that
“[Winning the Whitbread in 1990] had itself been a surprise, because it seemed I was out of favour with the literary establishment, having been labelled a “novelist of ideas” while what was in favour was “style”. And style seemed most easily to be exhibited in stories that were outlandish, or grim, or quaint. I looked forward to judging the Booker because I thought I might give a boost to “ideas”.”
He describes Okri’s winner as “a beautifully written (yes) story” (I love the “yes”!) - his preferred choice was Allan Massie’s The Sins of the Father, a story of what might have happened if a notorious ex-Nazi and the child of a Jewish victim fell in love - “But these are controversial questions, and thus conventionally to be avoided.”
Okri dislikes his work being described as magic realism, which despite superficially seeming surprising makes a degree of sense when you dig in. Others have gone for “Animist Realism” or even “African Traditional Religion Realism” which at least tries to explain the tradition in which he is writing and avoid the potentially culturally dismissive “magical” epithet. In his words:
"I grew up in a tradition where there are simply more dimensions to reality: legends and myths and ancestors and spirits and death ... Which brings the question: what is reality? Everyone's reality is different. For different perceptions of reality we need a different language. We like to think that the world is rational and precise and exactly how we see it, but something erupts in our reality which makes us sense that there's more to the fabric of life. I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality."
Apparently The Famished Road inspired the lyrics to “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” by Radiohead, if Wikipedia is to be believed. Who knew?
Vanquished Foes
Martin Amis (Time's Arrow)
Roddy Doyle (The Van)
Rohinton Mistry (Such a Long Journey)
Timothy Mo (The Redundancy of Courage)
William Trevor (Reading Turgenev)
So this is a somewhat notorious shortlist, in that it inspired the establishment of the Women’s Prize for Fiction (originally the Orange Prize.) As you will note, the nominees are all men, despite some 60% of novels published that year being written by women. The Orange Prize debuted in 1996, and in the intervening years the Booker saw only one more female winner.
Less importantly, I remember Time’s Arrow being one of my favourite Amis novels when I was ploughing through a bunch of them some years ago, so that’s something. Any other good ones on there?
Context
In 1991:
Dissolution of the Soviet Union; formal end of the Cold War
Boris Yeltsin elected Russian President
Dissolution of Yugoslavia, leading to turmoil in the region
Defeat of communist government in Bulgaria in October leaves no remaining communist governments in Europe
First Gulf War, as US-led coalition of 34 countries retaliates against Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
Formal independence of Germany following withdrawal of four post-war powers; Bundestag votes to move capital from Bonn to Berlin
End of Apartheid in South Africa
Nadine Gordimer, winner of 1974 Booker Prize and fierce critic of Apartheid, is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
Provisional IRA bombing campaign in London
Civil wars begin in Sierra Leone and Somalia
End of Cambodian-Vietnamese War
Death of Freddie Mercury from AIDS-induced pneumonia
Michael Schumacher makes his Formula One debut in Belgium
Hitoshi Igarashi, Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, is stabbed to death at the University of Tsukuba as a result of the fatwa issued against those involved in Rushdie's novel
Douglas Coupland, Generation X
Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Pat Barker, Regeneration
Sonic the Hedgehog
Street Fighter II
R.E.M., Out of Time
Primal Scream, Screamadelica
My Bloody Valentine, Loveless
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
The Silence of the Lambs
Life Lessons
Reality is what you make it, or something
Politicians are bad
Boxing is easier (if a bit predictable) when you have mythic spirits on your side
Score
6
A reminder that I’m ranking these based on personal enjoyment, not objective literary merit. I found this tough-going and a little lacking in reward, but I did enjoy much of the writing and it was an interesting one to think about post-reading, so not a total waste of time by any stretch.
Ranking to date:
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) - 9.5
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (1981) - 9.5
Moon Tiger - Penelope Lively (1987) - 9
Oscar & Lucinda - Peter Carey (1988) - 9
The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch (1978) - 9
Life & Times of Michael K. - J. M. Coetzee (1983) - 9
Schindler’s Ark - Thomas Keneally (1982) - 9
The Bone People - Keri Hulme (1985) - 8.5
Troubles - J.G. Farrell (1970, "Lost Booker") - 8.5
Possession - A. S. Byatt (1990) - 8
Saville - David Storey (1976) - 8
The Siege of Krishnapur - J.G. Farrell (1973) - 8
Rites of Passage - William Golding (1980) - 7.5
Offshore - Penelope Fitzgerald (1979) - 7.5
The Elected Member - Bernice Rubens (1970) - 7
The Conservationist - Nadine Gordimer (1974) - 7
Holiday - Stanley Middleton (1974) - 7 .
Heat & Dust - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975) - 6.5
In a Free State* - V.S. Naipaul (1971) - 6.5
G. - John Berger (1972) - 6
The Famished Road - Ben Okri (1991) - 6
Something to Answer For - P. H. Newby (1969) - 5.5
Staying On - Paul Scott (1977) - 5
Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner (1984) - 4.5
The Old Devils - Kingsley Amis (1986) - 4
*Read in later condensed edition.
Next up
The first of our second pair of “joint winners” in 1992, as I tackle the slightly shorter The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje before moving on to Barry Unsworth’s doorstop Sacred Hunger.
