Fight for freedom
Ben Okri has never hesitated to take on big issues and big enemies. It’s resulted in his name featuring on death lists in his native Nigeria. Get past the portentous, nearly pretentious preface of his new novel and you meet the first sentence: “It is written in the oldest legend of the land that all humans are born in prison.” That’s quintessential Okri — the folklore reference, the incantatory language, the addressing of individual condition and global situation.
The Freedom Artist evokes a post-truth world in which a young woman begins asking a simple, shocking question: “Who is The Prisoner?” Almost immediately, she vanishes, taken away by men in grey suits. Her lover begins a search for her and finds deception, brutish violence, a devious erosion of language and meaning.
You’ll think of Orwell, Kafka, even Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and its book-burning. Giant, watching eyes stare from buildings; there are rumours of a prison the size of a country where generations have lived in captivity.
It’s simultaneously mythic and contemporary. Surveillance is everywhere. Truth weakens and warps. Eloquence is scorned and words get you into trouble.
“The rich have taken over the earth . . . radio stations have fallen to ranters.” Scholars are employed to rewrite ancient myths. Ordinary people scream in the night.
But an improbable hero begins to call for freedom. Karnak (the names are heraldic and lyrical) starts as a supplicant, grows to be pilgrim and then warrior. He and others wander and orate, strive to comprehend.
It’s a surreal progress. Objects are transformed, sometimes terrifyingly; buildings appear, then vanish; strangers claim intimacy; a colossus strides around the world.
Ultimately, helped by a bookshop girl (sic), Karnak goes into battle against The Hierarchy in their dark tower, guarded by police with the jaws of jackals. “Stories can make the heart bigger”, Okri has written elsewhere and they also shape the ending here.
Structure is as remarkable as content. The novel is a flicker of runic conversations, minilegends, italicised reveries, lists of aphorisms. It’s typical of the author’s “dream logic”, his preoccupation with the plural natures of reality.
A few whiffs of self-indulgence but this is a fabulous book. Literally — it’s rich with fable. It’s also visionary, elusive, unsettling and profound. You’ll be transfixed and quite possibly transfigured.