The New Canon is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on great works of fiction published since 1985. These books represent the finest literature of the current era, and are gaining recognition as the new classics of our time. In this installment of The New Canon, Gioia looks at The Famished Road by Ben Okri.
The main characters of Ben Okri’s novel The Famished Road move back and forth between the human and spirit worlds with the ease of urban commuters changing subway trains. This novel, a winner of the 1991 Booker Prize, is a classic of magical realism with a distinctively African twist. Yet, departing from the more fanciful examples of this genre that we have encountered from South America and elsewhere, Okri offers his readers a ghost story in modern garb, with details that are more likely to unsettle than delight.
Few novels cover such a wide range — from the grittily realistic to the utterly fantastic — in such a compressed setting. The entire book transpires in an unnamed Third World city apparently based on the landscapes of the author’s native Nigeria. Yet this is a Nigeria of the mind, as much as it is a place on the map, and it sets outs its boundary lines in folk tales, legends, rumors, and incantations, rather than in geographical terms.
“There was not one amongst us who looked forward to being born,” the narrator Azaro tells us at the outset of The Famished Road. “We disliked the rigors of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world.” Azaro is an abiku or “spirit child,” whose ties to the real world are weak. “There are many reasons why babies cry when they are born,” Azaro explains, “and one of them is the sudden separation from the world of pure dreams.”
Azaro’s parents can tell that their child has a precarious hold on life, and that he may return at any moment to the realm of the spirits. At one point, the youngster lingers between life and death for two weeks, and when he awakes he finds himself lying in a coffin - his parents had given him up for dead. Yet the death of a child may only serve as the beginning of a new tragedy in this charged setting - sometimes the abiku is born again and again to the same parents, each time abandoning them before reaching adulthood.
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