How to read Ben Okri’s “StarBook”

Title: Starbook

Author: Ben Okri

Publisher: Farafina, Lagos

No. of Pages: 422

ISBN: 978-978-079946

Year: 2007

Get a spliff. Not Loud, not SK, a normal day-to-day, harmless, run-off-the-mill… weed. Get a glass, no strike that, a bottle, of McDowells and a glass full of ice.

You’re going to need it.

Having read Ben Okri’s award winning novel, The Famished Road, in one sitting, standing and lying down, I was really looking forward to reading this much publicized novel, Starbook. There’s no doubt that Okri is a story-teller, a good story-teller, but … sigh.

Starbook is a tale of how love always triumphs, with a lot of otherworldliness thrown in.

An artistic and spiritual prince meets an artistic and spiritual maiden, a not-so artistic and spiritual man vies for the hand of the maiden, and did his darnedest best to throw sand-sand into their garri.

You catch my drift.

This simple and often heart-wrenchingly dull story was written with over 80,000 words and spread on 422 pages.

The first thing that hits you are the stereotypes, there were several scenes of Mammy-Wata dancing on a river with a bunch of maidens and they are all in white. Birds flew in and out of the pages almost as casually as Okri trotted out the usual tropes of suffering and overwrought emotions that would have put Shakespeare to shame.

Caricatures of the deep and spiritual African, danced to the deep rhythm of the drums beaten in the deep dark forests, even the ants were deep, dark and spiritual.

Read this in Pete Edochie’s voice;

“…One such year was the year the maiden’s father wooed and won her mother. The suitors were numerous, for the maiden’s mother was of exceptional beauty and grace. She came from the family of one of the great chiefs of the tribe, one of the true masters…”

Most frustrating were the threads of stories that were left dangling in favour of chapters full of esoteric wisdom.

But, beyond the convoluted prose are several layers of meaning, particularly concerning colonialism, slavery and the betrayals that led to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade… and it is in order to discern all these gems that you need to get high before even opening the first page.