THE FREEDOM ARTIST

(Head of Zeus €20.99) WHEN Ben Okri’s publisher calls this his ‘most significant’ novel since The Famished Road, which won the Booker Prize in 1991, it’s an endorsement that sounds faintly double-edged, given that Okri wrote seven others in between.

Set in a prison state ruled by a shadowy hierarchy that helps keep its citizens docile by getting rid of books and stoking their obsession with celebrities, the story focuses on a man, Karnak, who searches for his lover, Amalantis, who has been arrested as a subversive ‘question-asker’.

Okri says the idea for the novel came out of his ‘seismic reading of our times’, but for all the visionary fervour, it’s boil-in-the-bag dystopia, with minimal effort put into making you care about the characters.

The lofty-sounding narration seeks the tone of fable, but only drains the book of drama by making its mounting horrors seem over-egged.