Reality Bites

Ben Okri’s attempts at Orwellian dystopia tip over into the farfetched and fantastic.

- Charlotte Grimshaw

In a recent interview, Ben Okri cited the calamitous state of the world as motivation for writing his new novel, The Freedom Artist: “The temperature of the world is high. Intolerable. We’re asphyxiating ourselves. The rhetoric, the lies, lies as truth, truth as lies … We’re f---ed up. We really are.”

Okri has often combined mysticism with a strong awareness of the hard facts of life. His novel The Famished Road, for which he won the Booker Prize in 1991, told the story of a child living in an unnamed Nigerian city. The boy was an abiku, a spirit child, who inhabits the harsh reality of the city and also the land of the dead. The novel made use of African myths, in particular the notion that the dead exist alongside the living. More recently, in 2017, Okri tackled urban injustice in his poem about the Grenfell Tower tragedy, a furious elegy that went viral on line: “If you want to see how the poor die, come see Grenfell Tower.”