ABOUT THE BOOK

Set in an unnamed African country at an unspecified time (thought the similarities with Nigerian in the early 1960s are unmistakeable), The Famished Road is narrated by Azaro, an African spirit-child or abiku who, in the folklore of southern Nigeria, is destined to move continually between life and spiritual paradise in an unending cycle of infant death and rebirth. Azaro, however, is tired of never staying long enough to experience life, and decides on this occasion to remain. Pursued by vengeful spirits, and endowed with special powers that lead him into mischief, Azaro introduces us to a whole world of wonders. However, as political corruption becomes endemic and as old tribal traditions clash with the forces of urbanisation, the author shows us the extraordinary mix of hope, despair and the sheer vitality that characterises his community.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben Okri was born in Nigeria in 1959 and travelled to Britain when he was just four-years-old. He is a journalist and writer by trade and published his first novel, Flowers and Shadows, in 1980, whilst studying Comparative Literature at the University of Essex.

In 1987, his book of short stories, Incidents at the Shrine was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize and in the following year, his second book of short stories, Stars of the New Curfew, was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize. In1994 he won the Booker Prize for his most famous novel, The Famished Road.

Ben continues to write and has also written for several leading Newspapers such as the Guardian, Observer and New Statesman.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

Newsday, July 1992

Sitting at ease in a New York City hotel room, far from the central Nigerian town where he was born, the novelist Ben Okri remembers how he began writing at the age of 14.

"On this particular day, it rained," he says, "and this day changed my life. Everybody was out and I was in, alone. I was sitting in the living room and I took out a piece of paper and drew what was on the mantelpiece. That took me about an hour. Then I took another piece of paper and wrote a poem. That must have taken me ten minutes. I looked at the drawing and I looked at the poem. The drawing was dreadful and the poem was . . . tolerable, bearable. And it became clear to me that this was more my natural area."

Stories have always been at the heart of his writing. The Famished Road, a novel, is a nearly encyclopaedic collection of tales about its boy-hero, Azaro, as he moves easily between the world of the flesh and the world of spirits. This generous storytelling comes naturally to Okri.

"You see," he says, "I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.

And it never occurred to us that those stories actually contained a unique worldview. It's very much like the river that runs through your backyard. It's always there. It never occurs to you to take a photograph or to seek its mythology. It's just there; it runs in your veins, it runs in your spirit.

And for me, it was only after I had made too deep a journey into modernism, after I had begun to feel that my ambition was better than my craft, after a period of loneliness and homesickness away from Nigeria, that slowly all those old stories came back to me with new faces and new voices. And I saw that all human beings have their signatures stamped in the stories they tell themselves in dreams, the stories that are embedded in their childhood."

Also embedded in Okri's childhood are memories of civil war in Nigeria, of the constant high-life music of his youth, of his secondary education 400 miles away from his family in Lagos (the sheer travelling involved was a good experience because, he says, "it earthed me among my people") and of his later move to England, where he studied at the University of Essex.

CLICK HERE for full interview.

STARTING POINTS FOR YOUR DISCUSSION

1. The Famished Road does not deal in conventional narrative sequence, and yet Okri is able to give the book a structure that allows the story to develop dynamically and purposefully. How does he create a balance between Azaro’s visions and the naturalistic description of the settlement, between action set pieces and scenes of more quiet contemplation?
2. The spirit-child is a central myth in Nigerian folklore, why does Okri choose to have a spirit-child as the narrator of his novel? What freedom does this afford him?
3. Madame Koto undergoes a dramatic change in the course of the novel. Plot the development of that change. How far are the shifts in fortune that affect her and her bar a metaphor for the wider changes affecting the country as a whole?
4. There are many instances in the book where Azaro’s descriptions of his father blur the line between myth and reality. How does this affect our understanding of the character of Azaro’s father? What does Okri wish us to see in him?
5. How well does Azaro’s father’s description of the clash of old customers and the new politics of modernity fit with Okri’s own opinion of the changes taking place? How important to Okri is ritual and tradition?
6. Animals are ever-present in Azaro’s narrative, particularly in his visions. What purpose do they fulfil?
7. The Famished Road is an ever-present image in the novel. What do you understand the famished road to mean?

OTHER BOOKS BY BEN OKRI

NOVELS
Flowers and Shadows
The Landscapes Within
Songs of Enchantment
Astonishing the Gods
Dangerous Love
In Arcadia

SHORT STORIES
Incidents at the Shrine
Stars of the New Curfew

POETRY
An African Elegy

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

One Hundred Years of Solitude ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Anthills of the Savannah ~ Chinua Achebe
Sunset at Dawn ~ Vincent Chukwuemeka
The Iliad ~ Homer
Our Mutual Friend ~ Charles Dickens

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