Ben Okri won the
Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel The
Famished Road in 1991.
Looking back at the
shortlist for that year, I was surprised to discover another of my favourite novels of the
Nineties on the list of novels that never made it to the shortlist: Hanif
Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia.
But I loved Ben Okri’s
story of Azaro, the “spirit child”. Reviewing the novel in the Sunday Times, Angela Carter said: “Azaro’s
scary, awesome, hallucinated childhood is a piece of sustained invention that
turns out to be glorious...” At around 500 pages, it seems to be a novel
readers love or hate – are captivated and can’t put it down or remain unmoved
and simply can’t get through it.
The “famished road” of
the title is metaphorical and suggests an African nation’s imminent independence
and the chaotic and often destructive social, political and technological changes
already underway.
It has been diversely
characterised as postmodern, post-colonial and magical realist – a label Okri has
always rejected. He has said that he draws on realism and philosophy, and
traditional African storytelling and beliefs.
These are from a
series of illustrations of characters from the novel. I wanted to
capture something of their startling and unsettling power, as well as how vividly they
came across to me reading the novel.
The first two characters
are quite minor. They’re the king’s bodyguards. The king of the spirit world is
described as “a great cat with a red beard and eyes of greenish sapphire”. The dashiki (one of the names for the loose shirt or
robe men traditionally wear in West African countries) and kufi (one of the
names for the round cap) that the men wear are not very accurate and many of
the fabrics are actually far more detailed and beautiful than I’ve imagined. Like many of my sketches at the time, and perhaps suitable to a “fantasy” novel,
these weren’t done in a realistic, but in a naive style.
And this is Madame
Koto and the boxer who Azaro’s dad takes on. The very heavy and larger than
life Madame Koto almost makes the boxer appear skinny. The local bar owner, Madame Koto introduces electricity to the community. She is generous but vain, powerful and increasingly corrupt.
