In a train travelling across Europe, a film crew is making a documentary. The documentary is about Arcadia: what this notional paradise might be, the perennial yearning for it and whether such a place can be found. That such a charmingly naive documentary would be commissioned in these so not-naive days is unlikely, and this gives Ben Okri’s new novel, his first for seven years, a dated but timeless character from the start.
And timelessness turns out to be the substance of The Age of Magic . . . if it could be said to possess substance. It has promising novelistic components. A situation, a cast of characters thrown together in foreign parts, a constantly movable scene. The main protagonist is Lao, a poet who is presenting the documentary. Lao's girlfriend, Mistletoe, an artist, has come along. There is Jim, the moody director. There are also Husk, Jute, Riley and a couple of others who fill different film-making roles. These idiosyncratic characters are desultorily sketched, but really they're interchangeable. As individuals they hardly matter, because their interactions are slight. And, anyway, to all intents and purposes they're dropped along the way as Lao and Mistletoe's dreamings and musings take over.
The train is soon dropped, too, and with it the potentialities of the journey and the movable scene. The crew gets off the train and on to a bus and, for no persuasive reason to do with the film, holes up for a few days in a small Swiss town.
Meanwhile the Qulpyh, an animal creature, has appeared in Lao’s compartment to offer him advice, a group of fellow passengers have been filmed offering their not very profound thoughts on Arcadia, and Jim has revealed to Lao his encounter with the devil, a beautiful person who has, to Jim’s disappointment, refused the offer of his soul. The idea of “eviling” – a kind of interior hostility that the characters may or may not project – has been introduced.
A character called Malasso is often referred to. A malign figure, he functions as a kind of Godot. They all seem to know who or what he is but wouldn’t necessarily welcome his appearance. He might be their interior daemon. For a while Jim dominates. Over dinner in the hotel he engages the others in a long and woolly discourse on the importance of the will. He seems to be the materialist among them.
Finally he asserts that our civilisation relies on the exercise of the will and without it we will be overtaken by another ready to exercise theirs. Lao disagrees.
For the rest of the book Jim is basically silent. But the talk goes on. Philosophical meditations on dreams and reality, good and evil, heaven and hell, strung like chunky beads on the thin necklace of the most nebulous of plots.
In fact there is no plot, no story. As the other characters retire to their rooms or go off to film the landscape, Lao and Mistletoe mooch around the town, “adventuring”. This adventuring mainly means imagining. Surreal scenes are conjured up, by them or by unknown forces. Mistletoe wanders into a circus that Lao can’t see. A white horse appears, with or without a rider, according to their different perceptions. A troubled young man begs Mistletoe to tell him the secret of how to live.
Lao and Mistletoe are soulmates. Their happiness in each other’s company has an unquestioning prelapsarian quality. Together they walk in magical realms. They also give off an air of smugness. Mistletoe draws all the time when she’s in company, wearing her enigmatic smile, and this is as annoying as it would be in real life. She is the more courageous of the two but Lao has more of the answers.
The town is typically prosaically Swiss but also has a mysterious beauty. The lake, the mountain that towers above it, the velvety star-strewn sky assume quasimagical properties. The characters who briefly reappear are changed by it, that tenuous, apparently momentary but possibly seismic change that can take place in the presence of beauty.
Lyrical beauty
The town turns out to possess a wisdom that has come from a hard-earned knowledge, a fall from grace back then in the between-the-wars. That it may unexpectedly be the Arcadia our characters are looking for is more than hinted at. If there’s any novelistic development to be found in the text, it’s probably here.
Whimsically dealing in ideas, assertions and abstractions that are a hotchpotch of religions and pop psychologies, The Age of Magic is more fable or allegory than a novel. Like the best fairy tales it has lines of smoothly lyrical beauty. You have to applaud Okri for it. To get a novel that's not a novel, that so blithely eschews the structural conventions of the novel, from a Booker-winning novelist – Okri won for The Famished Road, in 1991 – is fresh and revitalising. To perceive the insubstantial as real as the substantial, to see what is only immanent as no less real, is fresh, a welcome visiting of African breadth on the European literary mind. The African mind, Okri says here, is given to abstraction, and, he himself being African, this could be said to be a quintessentially African novel.
But as a text it’s also exasperating. At least I found it exasperating to read. A book of ideas should be illuminating and original enough to make it worth the effort and the ideas Okri explores are mostly banal and well tried. To be aware, to be alive in the present, to let go and surrender “to the angel’s kiss”.
Although there was one statement I did love: it’s about happiness. That happiness is “a perfect balance between illusion and reality”.
Maybe every reader could find a statement or idea to love in The Age of Magic. And like one good poem in a collection being enough, maybe one good idea is also enough. Anne Haverty's novels include The Far Side of a Kiss, The Free and Easy and One Day as a Tiger
