The Famished Road by Ben Okri

The finalists for the Man Booker International Prize 2011 were announced last week.  The prize is awarded every two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language.  In contrast to the Man Booker Prize awarded every year for a particular book, it reflects the body of work by an author.  Which got me thinking about the prize-winning books I have read so far which have introduced me to new authors whose other books I would be keen to go on to read.

Unfortunately, Ben Okri is not one of these inspirational authors.  I just seem to have completely missed what it is that is so respected by other readers for this book to have won such a prestigious prize. To be honest when I finally got to the end I felt compelled to do some research about the book and the author to be able to say anything constructive.  And even this research left me at a bit of a loss, as other people’s effusive praise left me feeling as though I had a read a completely different book.

In my opinion ‘The Famished Road’ failed to deliver on story or characters and was not even redeemed by writing style or the message it was attempting to convey.  It was written as though by a child, a fantastical story in the vein of this happened and then this happened and then this happened…in tedious detail.  With no variation in pace it existed on one mundane level despite reasonably exciting events and a spirit world mixed in with reality.  I suppose that as the story is told from an abiku’s (a spirit child) perspective this could be being echoed in the writing style but I suspect this was not the required effect.  Moreover, despite the story being written in the first person, I got no real impression of what the protagonist was like, merely an observer of the world around him.

I wondered whether the repetitive nature of the story was used to reflect living in poverty in Africa, but it unfortunately rendered me ambivalent to the various characters’ fates.  In fact most of the themes that I thought the book may be trying to highlight such as political corruption, the interwoven nature of the spiritual realm with reality and the fight for survival in the tough environment of Africa, were overshadowed by the oddness of it all which detracted from the reader’s involvement in the characters’ world.

So in reference to each book being a possible springboard to reading other works by the author, this was possibly the complete opposite.  I barely cared enough to finish this book let alone the remaining two in the trilogy, in fact I felt that if I had skipped whole sections of the book it wouldn’t have made much difference as the same ridiculous things kept happening anyway…  It may have been trying to convey traditional African stories and myths and profound insights into life and our place in this world, however, it just didn’t do it in an engaging way and lacked the provenance of other spiritual texts I’ve battled my way through namely the Bible and the Qur’an.  In short, I just don’t get what all the fuss is about.