First thoughts on "The Famished Road" Book One by Ben Okri

What a beautiful story. I'm struck by the distinction between the road and the river it once was, because the distinction seems woven into and out of every scene. The road is hard, definitive, solemn, while the river is flowing, pregnable, and alive. To me, the road is reality as we sense it, and the river is reality as it is felt, experienced. That the road was a river suggests that spirit and life precede form; that the road is famished (for its inability to swallow like it could as a river) suggests it is starved for its wild, powerful, emotive dimension to be recognized, fed.

The boy's narrative tells the story of his day-to-day, but following this trail of a famished objectivity, I wonder if aging is a hardening. Like what has happened to the road... certainly the boy's concept of sensed reality becoming increasingly acute, relative to the moments following his birth.

The magic and strangeness of the ethereal world is a little jarring at first, but I think it gives a look of how the boy interprets his surroundings. The "hard" narrative leads the story along, from place to place, moment to moment, but the flourishes and wanderings and lights and smoke and spirits and ghosts all paint a picture of what the boy feels, all without simile or metaphor. The soft, wispy spirits are as real as the hard world, and far more insightful as to his immediate perception of people and situations. I've never seen an author do this--create an alternate, surreal dimension of reality to get at what the protagonist is really feeling. It's always by comparison, not a real, "seen" world.