Larger than life

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.

You can read more about Ben Okri's writing at: http://literature.britishcouncil.org and http://www.thenewcanon.com (and on Wikipedia). Or you can pick up the novel...