The Freedom Artist by Ben Okri (Head of Zeus, $33)

The Freedom Artist is a startling novel. To quote from Ben Okri’s own brief introduction – it’s ‘‘a novel written in three languages, the language of fable, the language of truth and the language of our secret predicament’’.

To review this book is as little like trying to review Homer’s Odyssey. It is a contemporary mythology, something classical but modern or even futuristic. It is a way of looking at the present world or what our world might become or

is becoming. It is, then, in large part, a frightening exegesis, but one which also offers hope.

The Freedom Artist portrays a world (our world) in which everyone is in a prison, the prison existing at many levels: one’s body, the world, the universe – into which people are dropped unceremoniously at birth. Within this prison, The Hierarchy keeps everyone in check, the members of which no-one has ever seen, but who nevertheless rule through a police force with draconian effect.

This is a world in which there are no books or films; a narrow world of work, food and sleep; of nightmares and night screaming; of police who eventually, in jacka-llike form, eat anyone who is determined by the state to be a miscreant. In fact, all are imprisoned in a form that renders

them asleep whilst they are awake. They do not know of their own imprisonment.

Fortunately, in the way of mythologies, The Freedom Artist has its heroes, for there has to be the possibility of enlightenment for the population at large. The love of a young man’s life – a wonderful, ethereal being – disappears, and so begins his quest. He must find her, find out what has become of her and in so doing, perhaps find his way out of the prison.

There is a young boy, perhaps a little like an incarnation of the next Dalai Lama, who is taught much by some shadowy elders and is taken to the brink of his enlightenment and potential heroism – a possible saviour in an otherwise hopeless world. There is also another young woman, who had been taught much by her sage-like father who seemed to be somehow outside the prison walls. He even managed to put all the great books of the world in holographic form.

These three each followed their own quest and in their hands held the future of humanity. Without them and their heroic possibilities, the world would surely end in a hell of torment and viciousness.

The Freedom Artist portrays a massive crime against humanity – a crime, like many others, that can only be dealt with by genuine heroism, be this physical or intellectual or even moral. Perhaps more importantly, the book is a significant modern fable, from which it would be difficult to remain unmoved.

Ben Okri won the Booker Prize in 1991 for The Famished Road. The Freedom Artist is also likely to be a contender. The book is an important message for this time in which individual freedom is being attacked and eroded by what seems an almost inevitable march of development, a sort of misplaced, somewhat warped evolutionary scramble.

It’s ‘‘a novel written in three languages, the language of fable, the language of truth and the language of our secret predicament’’.