The Age of Magic by Ben Okri
The week passed tortuously for Omovo. Evening after evening, when going out to ‘take fresh air’ he would lock his room door. The other loss still rankled. On Thursday evening he stood at the house-front playing with the children when the chief assistant deputy bachelor sidled up to him. That was what they called him because he was the oldest bachelor in the compound. He was a gaunt, dry-chested, hatchet-faced Igbo man in his early forties, who owned a small shop in the city centre where he sold all kinds of provisions.
‘Painter boy, how now?’
Omovo was swinging around a scruffy little child and when he saw the chief assistant deputy bachelor he dropped the boy, touched him on the head and told him to go and play with the other kids.
‘My name is not painter boy, you know.’
‘Okay now, okay. Anyway, how your body?’
‘Fine. What about you?’
‘Managing. What else can a man do?’
Omovo saw him jerk the wrapper round his waist and rearrange it.
‘See-o, see-o,’ he whispered, nudging Omovo. ‘Those two girls near the tank think they can see my prick when I arrenge my wrapper jus now!’ He laughed and then shouted: ‘Hey, what are you lookin’ at, eh?’
The two girls self-consciously turned their heads away, picked up their buckets of water, and staggered into the street. Omovo wanted to be left alone. He yawned. The yawn accomplished nothing.
‘Why are you yawning? Tired, eh? You young people. What is it that can make a young man just starting life tired? What’s making you tired? Is it work, is it too much fuck, is it woman palaver, or what? When I was your age I did all these things from morning till night and I was never tired.’
Omovo grunted. Two women from the compound chatted past, carrying stools, and paused near the chemist’s shop. They were going to have their hair plaited. One of the kids ran behind Omovo, and another chased after him. They scurried behind the old bachelor, pulling at his wrapper, hiding underneath it, and then they ran off again. The old bachelor seethed mockingly.
‘These children sef. They want to pull off my prick, eh!’
Both of them laughed. Another compound man came outside and, seeing the chief assistant deputy bachelor, went towards him. They both became involved in a never-ending argument.
Omovo moved away, relieved. A light wind blew over the scumpool. His head tingled. The sky was strewn with clouds. The light about Alaba darkened. A few grown-up boys rode bicycles round and round the street, and jingled their bells, and chased after pariah dogs. Little girls made mock food over mock fires. They had baby dolls tied to their backs. Someone waved. Omovo straightened. It was a stocky man draped in an agbada. It was Dr Okocha. He had some signboards under his arm. Omovo went to meet him.
‘I have got you a ticket.’
‘Thank you, Dr Okocha. Thanks a lot.’
‘It’s okay. I told them that you were a good artist and people might be interested in your work.’
‘Thanks again...’
‘Anyway, the manager of the gallery wants to see your painting. So take it to him, say, tomorrow. If he doesn’t find a place on the first day maybe he will later when other works have been bought or something. Anyway, I am in a hurry. I’ve got many signboards to paint. I will see your new work at the showing, eh?’
Omovo felt the keen edge of a thrill. A joyful feeling deepened within him, then began to fill up and to expand. He felt wonderful. It was the same lightness he felt when he saw Ifi. He walked down the thronged street with the old painter. He could hear the older man’s breathing and the rustle of the threadbare agbada and the footsteps and a thousand other sounds. But they all seemed out there. He could hear other sounds within him: keen, fine, soundless sounds.
The older man began to speak. His voice quivered slightly. Omovo thought he sensed now the reason for the older man’s anxiety.
‘My son is not well. I just took him to the hospital.’
‘Sorry-o. What’s the matter with him?’
‘I don’t know. His body was like fire yesterday night. The boy is very lean, his eyes... you know... deep. So deep.’
They went on. Nothing was said for a long moment. Life bustled about them. They passed the hotel where Dr Okocha had painted the frolicsome murals.
‘So how is the wife?’
‘Well, she is fine. You know, she is pregnant and is worried about Obioco. She’s a good wife.’
The older man’s face darkened. The wrinkles deepened on his forehead. The skin of his face seemed to shrink and the flesh bulged under it. He looked strange. The evening darkened as if regulated by his sadness. Omovo felt that the dome of the sky repeated and oppressed the dome of his own head.
‘I hope Obioco will be well soon.’
‘Amen.’
Not long afterwards Omovo told the old painter that he was going back. The old painter nodded and trudged on towards his workshed. Omovo turned and picked his way back home through the debris, the thronging passers-by, and through the falling darkness.
Omovo walked away from the house, towards the fetid-green scumpool. He had felt good in his room. The room had been in a mess. He hoped nobody would steal his painting and toyed with the idea of insuring it. He thought: ‘There is nothing like having an idea and seeing it through to its manifestation.’ He was filled with the simple wonder that he had created something on the canvas that wasn’t there before. The shock and surprise still enthralled him. He thought: ‘If your own work can surprise you then you have started something worthwhile.’
He wondered if he could remember to write this down in his notebook. He doubted it. He wondered also if in completing the painting he hadn’t disturbed or dislocated something else. He had read about the dangers of this somewhere. When he couldn’t expand the thought he abandoned it.
He had passed the scumpool when a group of wild-looking men marched towards him as if they were going to pounce on him. He waited, tense. He could see himself being flung into the filthy water. But nothing happened. The men marched fiercely past as if they had a constant mission of terror to accomplish.
He recalled what Ifeyiwa had said in the backyard, near the well, when he had told her that the drawing had been lost, stolen. She stared at a bird that flew past overhead, and said: ‘Omovo, something has been stolen from all of us.’
Omovo felt that she had uttered something unintentionally profound.
‘You know, I didn’t understand the drawing,’ she said after a while.
‘It was simple. But neither did I.’ Then Omovo said: ‘Were you the person who sat outside...?’
‘Yes. I knew it was you. It was dark, and he came out to get me.’
He remembered, and then he tried to forget. Then he remembered something else. She had gasped when he had shown her the new painting. She then stared at him, and said nothing.
When he left the room he had searched the painting for a portent, an intimation of the future. He tried to read life through it. But his mind could not get beyond the images, the sickly, vibrant colours.
But through Ifeyiwa’s silence he had intuited a form, a morass, a corruption, something flowing outwards viciously, changing and being changed. He sensed then, vaguely, that the future was contained somewhere in his mind.
He stopped in his wanderings, and suddenly decided to go back home.
Available now
About this Book
‘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 seein
Reviews
The Famished Road
‘Overwhelming – just buy it for its beauty.’
New Statesman
‘A brilliant read, unlike anything you have ever read before.’
The Times
Dangerous Love
“Had me enchanted from the first page to the last.”
Sunday Telegraph
“Poetic writing of a very high order. Tender, nightmarish, wise and soulful.”
Daily Telegraph
In Arcadia
“Profound and enchanting.”
The Times
“The journey has inspired writers from Homer and Chaucer onwards. Ben Okri gives it an ultra modern twist.”
Daily Mail
“Delightfully lyrical. A truly fascinating work and a hugely ambitious one.”
Scotland on Sunday
Astonishing the Gods
“A modern-day classic.”
Evening Standard
“Beautiful. A new creation myth.”
Daily Telegraph
“Amazing. I think this is as close as you can get to reliving the experience of a bedtime story.”
Guardian
A Way of Being Free
“There can be no mistaking Okri’s passion and intelligence. A powerful piece of work.”
Sunday Telegraph
“Imbues these essays with a writer’s insight about the importance of writing. Rhapsodic.”
Independent on Sunday
“Thoughtful, concise, cultivated and clear.”
Scotland on Sunday
About the Author
BEN OKRI won the Booker prize in 1991 for The Famished Road. He has published ten novels, three volumes of short stories, two books of essays, and three collections of poems. His work has been translated into more than 26 languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been awarded the OBE as well as numerous international prizes and honorary doctorates. Born in Nigeria, he lives in London.
www.benokri.co.uk
Twitter: @benokri
Facebook: Ben Okri
Also by this Author
Fiction
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.
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.
In Arcadia
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.
In Arcadia 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
We hope you enjoyed this book. We are an independent publisher dedicated to discovering brilliant books, new authors and great storytelling. Please join us at www.headofzeus.com and become part of our community of book-lovers.
We will keep you up to date with our latest books, author blogs, special previews, tempting offers, chances to win signed editions and much more.
If you have any questions, feedback or just want to say hi, please drop us a line on [email protected]
@HoZ_Books
HeadofZeusBooks
The story starts here.
Ben Okri, The Age of Magic