New York : Anchor Books, 1993.
500 p. ; 24 cm.
There have been some great YA books recently by authors that have used the rich well of Nigerian history and culture to create their fictional worlds. I'm thinking of the incredibly talented Nnedi Okorafor (reviewed here) and the highly successful Tomi Ayedemi. But I had no idea that Ben Okri was setting wildly fantastic fiction in Nigeria (his homeland) back in the early 1990s.
I had simply wanted to read some of the African fiction that we have in our collection and I liked the title (!) and the fact that The Famished Road had won the prestigious Booker Prize back in 1991. When I started reading it, I had no idea it was such a romp through the strange and surreal. The novel follows the harsh life of a boy born to poor parents in Nigeria as the country transitions from the depredations of colonialism to the depredations of corrupt and predatory capitalism with its violence of political upheaval.
There is a lot to admire in the novel: a rich surrealism and dreamy realism that weaves back and forth through the novel, and some moments that are painfully relevant, e.g. battles between the Rich People's party and the Poor People's party. I think the weakness of the book is that it is long and rambling and would have had a lot more emotional power if had been edited by about 30%. That being said, I think it would make an interesting pairing with Achebe's Things Fall Apart, or with Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude. Also it's a wildly original novel.
I don't think it's a book I'd highly recommend to students unless someone was asking about African fiction or magical realism.
