“We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves. ”

Night-time driving. Midway Point, Tasmania. May 2021.

The Famished Road by Ben Okri

There is certainly some lovely writing in Ben Okri's The Famished Road. Lovely writing that delivers many exotic and imaginative stories. Some of these stories are rooted in the certainty of the real world. Others exist on another otherworldly plane.

It's just that there is so much of it. So many words, so many deviations, departures and detours from the story and the point that I do believe that you could skip three hundred pages and you wouldn't really notice.

The entire novel exists in a kind of fugue state with characters cycling in and out of death and sleep and work and life and reality and unreality that the reader themselves surely also drifts in and out of consciousness (this reader felt like he did).

I suspect that this maddening aspect of the tale is itself for life in Africa, so perhaps the point is well made. However, I am not sure that 600-odd pages are required to make it.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Comments

Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

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This will hurt me...

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