“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

If you want to be loved, be lovable.

Henry admires the view.

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I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral

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This will hurt me...

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