An Interview with Ben Okri
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This interview was conducted in London on April 29, 2015.
Your most recent novel, The Age of Magic, appeared in 2014, seven years after your previous novel Starbook, and it appears as a follow-up to In Arcadia, published twelve years before in 2002. In the meantime, you published stokus, essays, and poems. Had you been writing the novel during all these years when you were working in other forms? And why did you choose to set the novel in Switzerland?
The novel existed, in one form or another, all these years, and was influenced by the different forms that I was working on at the time. I do and I do not think of it as a continuation of In Arcadia. It looks at the Arcadian idea from the aspect of magic, for want of a better word. In Arcadia has to do with initiation and with the energy of beginnings. That is why it is written in that particular way. The Age of Magic is quieter, the technique cubistic. It explores the relationship between Faust and Arcadia, and the chaos unleashed in quests for Arcadia. It is about internal Arcadias. Switzerland was an excuse, an alchemical bowl in which many secret preoccupations would come to the surface. It is about the town itself. It is about the relationship between what you are, what you seek, and the place in which you seek it. There has to be extraordinary resonance between the three things for the true narrative to emerge.
The Age of Magic is a journey just as In Arcadia was a journey. Would you say that all your books are journeys to a certain extent—literal, metaphorical, imaginary, or spiritual journeys?
In The Age of Magic the journey is vertical. The real journey takes place into stratas of consciousness, into Arcadias and anti-Arcadias. Journeys interest me. All my books are not about journeys. I wouldn’t say The Famished Road is about journeys.
And yet The Famished Road puts forward the road, and the evolution of Azaro is a form of journey, isn’t it?
It is not a physical journey. Now that you mention roads, the journey comes into mind. I can see the paradox of what I am saying. The journey is a great archetype. There [End Page 1053] aren’t that many archetypes in literature. If you examine any writer’s work deeply enough, you’ll find they tend to gravitate around a few great archetypes that enable them to best express the complex ideas. If there’s anything I like about the journey, it is its revelatory quality. It carries within it the reality of change. The person who leaves is not the same as the person who arrives. By its very nature journey lends itself to narrative, to analysis, and to revelation. A journey can be a physical vehicle for something more mysterious. Maybe the greatest problem with the novel is finding the right vehicle for the inner narrative to emerge. The inner narrative is what interests me. The outer form is an excuse.
An important book about a journey—which I know is very dear to you—is The Odyssey, and one aspect that particularly interests you about The Odyssey is that it’s a book about homecoming (Ismail). The first book of The Age of Magic is entitled “The Journey as Home” and the Quylph tells Lao that the luckiest place to be is “to be at home everywhere.” Later on, a character called Emily says home is “the place for feelings of peace.” Why is homecoming so appealing to you? And what is home to you?
Maybe homecoming is the central theme of all literature. All the stories we tell are about human beings in exile, in one form or another. Being alive is, in itself, a state of exile. Homecoming combines all our journeys, our spiritual, physical, and intellectual journeys. But homecoming is maybe the most difficult thing that we embark on. It is easier to leave home, harder to return. This is because of the ambiguity of what home really...
