by Ben Okri
She considered that, of the four, the lady who spoke with confidence was the ideal person to speak for the group. Husk thought she had the most interesting personality. She explained all this to Lao while they were standing between compartments, and she had to raise her voice because of the grinding of the wheels.
‘They’re a lovely group. I’ve spoken to them all. Just be calm. Are you sure you’re all right? You look as if you’re not quite here. The lady called Barbara is definitely the leader. She’s got great personality, as you’ll see. Are you sure you’re okay?’
From the beginning of the journey Husk had entertained doubts about Lao as the presenter of the film. She doubted he had the qualities required, doubted his grasp of the subject, and his character. Lao was aware of this, and of his reputation for being difficult, and it amused him.
‘I think so,’ he replied.
‘Just remember the one with personality,’ she said.
7
While they were waiting for Sam to set up the cameras, Lao thought about the nature of personality. He wondered how much of a role it played in the outcome of events. He wondered how much was possible, or failed to be possible, because of it. But what is personality, he asked himself? The general theory is that it is active, performed, and larger than life. But it seemed to him that personality is the outward presence of an inner accomplishment. It exerts its influence unseen, like the moon on the tide. It sways without knowing that it does. It is akin to talent or an innate gift. The strategies of Alexander, thought Lao, are a metaphor of his personality rather than of his calculation. History might be the story of personality acting on time and memory. Maybe, when we immerse ourselves in the genius of existence, Lao thought, personality can even overcome fate.
Sam sent word through Riley, his gamine assistant, that the cameras were ready, and that filming could begin. But what happened next taught Lao a significant lesson about what is generally called personality. He learned about the power of the silent ones.
8
The film crew were ready for him; all seven of them were there in the compartment. The camera infused its drug into Lao’s system. He tried to become a seducer of eyes. Love me and lie, he thought to the camera, as he went to meet the four Americans.
They were seated together at a table. The two women, Emily and Barbara, had the window seats. The men, Bob and Scott, were big clean-shaven fellows. Scott, Emily’s husband, was facing the direction of travel. Bob was backing it. All four in their late fifties looked healthy and prosperous, and seemed reasonably pleased with their lives. They looked at Lao with expectant faces. Whom should I address, he thought, in a mild panic? Do I speak to all four as if they are one person? He decided to address them individually.
He told them about the journey so far, and engaged them in the small talk of all travellers. His idea was to enter the profound through the simple gate. He let them choose their own leader from among them, the one who had the most to say and said it well. The two men seemed friendly enough. They regarded him with an openness touched with scepticism, Bob apparently the more open of the two.
‘Have you heard of Arcadia?’ Lao asked them.
There was a curious silence as they digested the word.
9
Lao noticed, for the first time, the architecture of the word. It began and ended with the first letter of the alphabet. Beginning with a beginning and ending with a beginning too. There was also a beginning right at its centre. It occurred to him that letters might be symbolic, might conceal deeper meanings. He glimpsed the word’s hinterland.
Begin at the beginning; at the mid-point begin again; and at the end return to the beginning. Never move far from the alpha of life. Replenish yourself in the aleph. Renew the core with the alf. In A we begin and to A we return. Four rivers flow into the Garden of Eden. In one of them, as an old commentary says, the gold of the land is good. A fifth river can be said to flow from Eden to Arcadia, and its allegories are wonderful, its gold good. When we are young we set out with dreams. In the middle of the journey of our lives we find perhaps that we have lost our way. At the end we find the origin; and we begin again.
10
Lao shook himself.
‘Have you heard of Arcadia?’
Bob spoke first. He had a good face and an eye that distrusted salesmen.
‘Well, Arcadia is where we’ve come from, and I’ve heard about the one you’re travelling to,’ he said.
Lao realized that they had been briefed by Husk, and this threw him a little.
‘What does Arcadia mean to you?’
‘I don’t know.’
Jim, who had been following the conversation, came over and whispered something slowly in Lao’s left ear, as if engaged in a serpent-like form of hypnotism. It made Lao uneasy. He told Lao to restate his theme for the camera’s benefit. Lao, inwardly bristling, asked the group:
‘Which is best, travelling or arriving?’
‘Arriving,’ said Bob.
‘I’d say the travelling itself,’ said Barbara. ‘There’s something new each day, a sense of anticipation about things you haven’t seen before.’
‘I think both,’ said Scott, who worked in the US Navy. ‘It’s interesting to see other cultures, see how other people live.’
The silent lady near the window hadn’t spoken yet. She had a thoughtful smile, and a glow that emphasised her silence.
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About this Book
A group of angry and ill-assorted people accept an invitation to make a journey. Inspired by a painting and financed by a mysterious benefactor, they set off to discover the real Arcadia. Or what remains of it.
Their journey begins in ignorance and chaos at Waterloo station and takes them through superstition and myth to harmony. In the Louvre, in front of Poussin’s masterpiece, they begin to understand.
Reviews
ON DANGEROUS LOVE
‘Okri’s masterpiece to date… solid, convincing and classical.’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Poetic writing of a very high order… tender, nightmarish, wise and soulful tragedy.’
Daily Telegraph
‘One comes to inhabit it as one reads… A reason for constant celebration.’
Scotland on Sunday
‘One of the world’s finest writers… A life-affirming, lyrical book.’
Options
‘A tough, ecstatic book.’
Independent on Sunday
‘No other contemporary author captures the ephemeral with as much success. Okri should easily pass the hundred year test.’
The Good Book Guide
‘Intelligent and moving.’
Spectator
‘The rippling, translucent style is deliberately pared down to tell a simple, memorable narrative of ambiguous love and disaster.’
Mail on Sunday
ON ASTONISHING THE GODS
‘A modern-day classic.’
Evening Standard
‘Amazing… This is as close as you can get to reliving the experience of a bedtime story.’
Guardian
‘Powerful, sensuous and philosophical.’
European
‘Graceful and enigmatic… Exciting, like a trip into a de Chirico landscape.’
Daily Telegraph
‘A new creation myth… a beautiful book… its mere task to make the impossible possible.’
Scotsman
‘A rare achievement… Fulfills Calvino’s prescription for lightness – being like a bird, rather than a feather… an impressive, brave, and often beautiful little book.’
New Statesman
ON A WAY OF BEING FREE
‘Okri imbues these essays with a writer’s insight… And he does so in an inimitably sinuous yet abstract style well suited to his theme… oblique, oneiric, rhapsodic, elliptical.’
Independent on Sunday
‘There can be no mistaking Okri’s passion and intelligence.’
Sunda
y Telegraph
‘Okri is marvellously enthusiastic at promoting the poetic cause, pouring out his love for creativity in “The Joys of Storytelling” with a passionate reverence.’
Daily Express
‘Thoughtful, concise, cultivated and clear.’
Scotland on Sunday
‘Okri is at once as foreign and as British as Joseph Conrad.’
Daily Telegraph
ON IN ARCADIA
‘Incantatory beauty. Profound and enchanting.’
The Times
‘A charm and magic that is bright and striking and angry.’
Irish Times
‘Mixing a densely metaphysical approach with a delightfully lyrical style… a truly fascinating work, and a hugely ambitious one too.’
Scotland on Sunday
‘The shaman of modern British fiction.’
Independent
‘You cannot fault Okri for confronting the big issues and asking questions of our secular age that few of his contemporaries have the innocence and bravery to attempt.’
The Observer
‘Arresting and evocative.’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Okri has chosen a big and bold subject and a highly original approach to it.’
Herald
‘The journey has inspired writers from Homer to Chaucer onwards… Okri gives it an ultra-modern twist.’
Daily Mail
‘A riddling quest for enlightenment.’
Independent
About the Author
BEN OKRI has published many books, including The Famished Road, which won the Booker Prize in 1991. His work has been translated into 26 languages and has won numerous international prizes including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the Chianti Ruffino Antico Fattore International Literary Prize and the Premio Grinzane Cavour Prize.
The recipient of many honorary doctorates, he is a vice-president of the English Centre of International PEN and was presented with the Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum for his outstanding contribution to the Arts and cross-cultural understanding in 1995.
He has been a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge and is an honorary fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1997, he was awarded an OBE in 2001.
He was born in Nigeria, and lives in London.
Also by this Author
Fiction
The Age of Magic
‘The Age of Magic has begun.
Unveil your eyes.’
Eight weary film-makers, travelling from Paris to Basel, arrive at a small Swiss hotel on the shores of a luminous lake. Above them, strewn with lights that twinkle in the darkness, looms the towering Rigi mountain. Over the course of three days and two nights, the travellers will find themselves drawn in to the mystery of the mountain reflected in the lake. One by one, they will be disturbed, enlightened, and transformed, each in a different way.
An intoxicating and dreamlike tale unfolds. Allow yourself to be transformed. Having shown a different way of seeing the world, Ben Okri now offers a different way of reading.
The Age of Magic is available here.
Dangerous Love
An epic of daily life, Dangerous Love is a story of doomed love, of star-crossed lovers, separated not by their families, but by the very circumstances of their lives.
Omovo, a Nigerian office-worker and artist who lives at home with his father and his father’s second wife. In the world of the compound in which he lives, Omovo has many friends and some enemies, but most important of all there is Ifeyiwa, a beautiful young married woman whom he loves with an almost hopeless passion - not because she doesn’t return his love, but because they can never be together.
Dangerous Love is available here.
Astonishing the Gods
A young man is transported to an enchanted isle in a quest to discover the secrets of visibility.
He finds himself amidst a society of invisible beings who have built a utopia based on a single law, ‘Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully for the first time.’
Astonishing the Gods is available here.
Essays
A Way of Being Free
Twelve of Ben Okri’s most controversial non-fiction pieces form this collection on the theme of freedom, ranging from the personal to the analytical, including a meditation on the role of the poet, a study of Picasso’s Minotaur, a paean to human freedom in honour of Salman Rushdie, and an appraisal of fellow-Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. Lyrically imaginative and provocative, A Way of Being Free confirms Okri’s place as one of the most inspiring of contemporary writers.
A Way of Being Free is available here.
Other Fiction
Flowers and Shadows
The Landscapes Within
Incidents at the Shrine
Stars of the New Curfew
The Famished Road
Songs of Enchantment
Infinite Riches
Starbook
Tales of Freedom
The Age of Magic
Other essays
Birds of Heaven
A Time for New Dreams
Poetry
An African Elegy
Mental Fight
Wild
A Letter from the Publisher
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HeadofZeusBooks
The story starts here.
First published in the UK in 2002 by Phoenix House.
This eBook edition first published in the UK in 2014 by Head of Zeus Ltd.
Copyright © Ben Okri, 2002
Jacket design: Leo Nickolls
The moral right of Ben Okri to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (PB) 9781784082574
ISBN (E) 9781784081850
Head of Zeus Ltd
Clerkenwell House
45-47 Clerkenwell Green
London EC1R 0HT
www.headofzeus.com
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Dedication
Introduction to the new edition
Epigraph
Part 1
Book 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Book 2
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part 2
Book 3
Chapter 1
; Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Book 4
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Book 5
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part 3
Book 6
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
