Publishers Weekly
★ 12/02/2019
This haunting and inspiring novel from Booker winner Okri (The Famished Road) follows a man’s search for a woman who goes missing in a dystopian world. An oppressive and faceless “Hierarchy” dominates the world, in which people move through their days in a state of near-catatonia, sensing but helplessly fearing their subjugation. The citizens are largely numbed, but some, such as young woman Amalantis, dare to speak out. After Amalantis courageously asks, “Who is the prisoner?” she is abruptly arrested for posing a taboo, revolutionary question, and her lover, Karnak, embarks on a quest to find her. He roams the streets seeking answers from whoever dares to speak with him. Karnak watches the populace grow increasingly resistant to the Hierarchy’s oppression, first through ubiquitous screams in the night, and then through an epidemic of nervous breakdowns that occur randomly among the public, which can only be resolved by a transcendental awakening. Karnak’s search is juxtaposed against the spiritual trials of a man named Mirababa, who travels through mystical, otherworldly realms, where he meets beings who offer perplexing guidance on his quest to understand true freedom. In this story of political abuse and existential angst, Okri employs a powerful and rare style reminiscent of free verse and evoking a mythical timbre. This is a vibrantly immediate and penetrating novel of ideas. Agent: Georgina Capel, Georgina Capel Associates. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
"This here is the heart of The Freedom Artist: a deep appreciation of literature, storytelling, and flights of the imagination; a condemnation of the tendency to dumb down great works of art; and the overriding message that true freedom can be found in the pages of a book."
—Locus Magazine
"Like George Orwell and Margaret Atwood before him, the Booker Prize–winning Okri writes a passionate cri de coeur, a clarion call to activists everywhere to resist apathy and recognize that we are all on this beautiful globe together and that it is ours to lose."
—Library Journal
"Okri's somber, fablelike novel is a call to rally against oppressive institutions and for broader social consciousness. In that regard, it's an inheritor of The Handmaid's Tale, Fahrenheit 451, and Things Fall Apart...Okri's writing is sturdy and graceful, fully inhabiting the authoritative tone of mythmaking."
—Kirkus Reviews
"The Freedom Artist is a fable-like allegory set in a dystopian future in which the 'Hierarchy' is dominant, the citizens trapped and muted, except sometimes when they are heard screaming in their sleep. It is through this world that Karnak must travel to find his lover, who has been arrested for asking the question: 'Who is the prisoner?'"
—Literary Hub, one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2020
"A call for rally against oppression, following the arterial vein of The Handmaid’s Tale and Fahrenheit 451...Addictive."
—Bookstr, a Three to Read Hot Pick selection
Selected as Publishers Weekly's Book of the Week
Selected as one of Booklist Reader's Best New Books of the Week
One of BookMarks's Best Reviewed Books of the Week
Included in BookRiot's February 2020 Indie Press Round-Up
Included in Publishers Weekly's Literary Fiction Adult Announcements for Spring 2020; Notable African-American Titles for Fall 2019-Spring 2020; African-American Interest Adult Titles, Fall 2019–Spring 2020; Science Fiction and Fantasy Preview for 2019-2020; and Science Fiction and Fantasy Preview for 2019-2020 (African Diaspora–inspired SFF)!
Included in Locus Magazine's New Book Roundup
"The Freedom Artist reads like a myth written by a scientist and is brilliantly composed...We emerge with a glimmer of light, of hope, and a wake-up call just when we need it most."
—Smoky Mountain News
"Flows with unflinching beauty and profound wisdom and grace."
—Exclusive Magazine
"The Freedom Artist represents a heady jumble of influence and inspiration, a tapestry of biblical reference, mythology, folklore and fable. The lyrical simplicity of Okri's prose, with its short sentences and chapters, only heightens the power of the novel's political message."
—Financial Times
"A multilayered allegorical narrative that cuts to the heart of our current political and cultural malaise, while maintaining a mythical, mesmeric flavor that makes the reader feel these are stories they have always known...It's savagely political, disturbing and fiercely optimistic, the deeply felt work of a writer who refuses to stop asking the hardest questions."
—Guardian (UK)
"Just as you're thinking, 'So this is what Dave Eggers's The Circle would be like if it were written by a poet,' Okri slips you a shot of ayahuasca and things get decidedly freaky and apocalyptic...A beautiful and timely appeal for the importance of books, subversive stories and love."
—The Times (UK)
"A meditation on the threat to freedom represented by the emergence of what is already called 'a post-truth society'...It's a novel for our times."
—Scotsman (UK)
"The book posits the theory that we are all in an inescapable prison...The novel is written in a postmodern style reminiscent of Henry Miller or William Burroughs."
—i
"Okri creates a chilling atmosphere in The Freedom Artist...Okri's rhythmic, folk tale–like prose is beguiling."
—Sunday Times (UK)
"Ben Okri's most significant novel since his Man Booker Prize-winning masterpiece The Famished Road, The Freedom Artist weaves together ancient myth and modern politics for an impassioned story primed for the post-truth age. A story of love and loss, fiercely told and impossible to ignore."
—Waterstones, "The Best Books to Look Out For in 2019"
"The Freedom Artist has a compelling power and energy that won't let the reader go."
—The Herald (UK)
Praise for Ben Okri:
"Ben Okri is that rare thing, a literary and social visionary, a writer for whom all three—literature, culture, and vision—are profoundly interwoven."
—Ali Smith, author of Autumn
"Okri is incapable of writing a boring sentence. As one startling image follows the next, The Famished Road begins to read like an epic poem that happens to touch down just this side of prose...When I finished the book and went outside, it was as if all the trees of South London had angels sitting in them."
—Linda Grant, Independent on Sunday
Kirkus Reviews
2019-11-10
A dystopian allegory about how cultures can become cruelly prisonlike, from the Booker-winning author of The Famished Road (1992).
Okri's somber, fablelike novel is a call to rally against oppressive institutions and for broader social consciousness. In that regard, it's an inheritor of The Handmaid's Tale, Fahrenheit 451, and Things Fall Apart. Unlike those novels, though, the story is sparer, with only the barest scaffold of characterization and plot. In an unnamed city, a young man named Karnak had been neglecting peculiar graffiti springing up reading "Who is the prisoner?" until his lover, Amalantis, is hustled away by authorities. Elsewhere, Mirababa, a boy, is challenged by his grandfather to "find the elixir of freedom, and bring it back to the people." As both go on their journeys, Okri describes a totalitarian state that whips up myth and propaganda to keep society in line, hunts down all critics of its authority, wipes reading from the culture, and renders its populace in a kind of agony, screaming at night while they sleep. The resistance's graffiti changes ("upwake!"), and Okri cycles in more characters like Ruslana, whose father was "the last guardian of the tribe of writers." Okri's writing is sturdy and graceful, fully inhabiting the authoritative tone of mythmaking; the grotesque imagery of institutional savagery in its latter chapters is harrowing. Yet the structure of the book is so simple, and its twists so modest, that the story has trouble sustaining itself at novel length. Okri reiterates the same laments for lost wisdom, and the book's climactic calls for education and self-awareness are so familiar, with bromides about how our social problems start with us, that the novel edges into hectoring, wake-up-sheeple territory.
Okri's fury is plainly visible under his deliberately plainspoken prose but in a story that's more thin than universal.
