Title: Starbook
Author: Ben Okri
Publication year: 2007
Rating: ★★★½
Synopsis (via Goodreads): Starbook tells the tale of a prince and a maiden in a mythical land where a golden age is ending. Their fragile story considers the important questions we all face, exploring creativity, wisdom, suffering and transcendence in a time when imagination still ruled the world.
I want to say right off the bat that Starbook is not something that I would recommend to everyone. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend this book to most people, despite the fact that I have an overall positive opinion of it. The problem with recommendations is that they create expectation in the mind of the reader, and if you go into Starbook with expectations—no matter what they are—you will almost certainly be disappointed. Part of the beauty for a book like this is going into it blind, as I did, and just letting it sweep you up and take you wherever it wants to go. Even though Starbook has its flaws, I ultimately had a great experience with this book that can be largely attributed to the fact that it was an impulse buy I knew almost nothing about before I picked it up.
Starbook tells the story of two young people, a prince and a maiden, whose lives intertwine one day in a chance encounter that finds both forever changed in its aftermath, despite never actually meeting face-to-face. It’s a difficult story to describe beyond that because while the prince and the maiden’s meeting takes place in the very beginning of the book, much of the story is spent hovering around that event: from the prince’s side, we get the immediate emotional ramifications that the meeting has on him and his outlook on the world around him; and for the maiden, we spend a significant amount of time looking at her life before the prince even enters it.
The best thing about Starbook is, by far, Ben Okri’s masterful and deeply lyrical prose; the man has a background in poetry, and it certainly shows here. As I’m sure Okri intended, Starbook reads like a fable. This style of writing not only develops a genuinely charming mood but also helps to elevate one’s suspension of disbelief: because of the whimsical manner in which this story was written, I knew that this was a fictitious story, a fairy tale of sorts, which made it that much easier to accept things that I may have found ludicrous otherwise.
The writing also aids the world-building, which, while definitely strong in some parts, definitely benefits in its weaker points from the sense of atmosphere that Okri’s fable-like storytelling provides. I absolutely adored the tribe of artists from which the maiden originates. I wanted to be part of a world that cares so deeply for the arts and injects the spirit of creativity into every facet of their lives, but equally appreciated that they are not perfect. The tribe of artists do not always stick to their values: they cast judgements and seek to fit things into their framework and understanding without being as open-minded to other perspectives as their philosophy and worldview says they should. This multi-faceted portrayal of such an initially idolised group added a great deal of nuance to the book. Unfortunately, the prince’s kingdom was not as well developed. Perhaps this is because the prince himself does not see the flaws of his society until after meeting the maiden, but even then his world always seems significantly more generic and shallow than what we were to get from the tribe of artists.
Almost as shallow as the prince’s kingdom are Starbook‘s characters, but this is not a flaw of the book. The vague, undefined nature of many of the characters fits right in with its fairy tale aesthetic. That being said, one character—one of the story’s antagonists, the Mamba—truly comes alive and stands out from the rest. The Mamba is a character within the tribe of artists who is always reaching for acclaim but can never quite cross the line from great to legendary, no matter how hard he tries. At some point, the book says something to the effect of the Mamba being too loud in his presence and too quiet in his absence, so that the tribe doesn’t really care for him, in spite of all his achievements, when he is not around. This aspect of his character is thrown into the story with the Mamba’s introduction and expanded upon wonderfully to aid the story’s climax. I only wish he was in the book more.
My biggest gripe with Starbook, however, is connected to the plot. Quite frankly, it doesn’t do much. The story kicks off with the prince and the maiden’s chance encounter one day and is driven by their desire to find a way back to one another. While it was fascinating to see the impact they had on each other’s lives at first, the second part of the book, which focuses on the maiden, spends too long providing backstory on her life, killing a lot of the story’s potential momentum. A similar pacing issue pops up later in the book as the prince comes closer to meeting this maiden, a part of the book that dragged on for far too long. As a result of these sluggish bits, the end of the book reads far too quickly. This harms antagonist like the Mamba, who definitely deserved more screen time to unravel in front of the reader, and the kingdom’s elders, led by Chief Okadu, whose looming threat to the prince and his kingdom is unfortunately shoved into the background, robbed of the emotional impact it could have had on the reader. Towards the end of the book, there are also many allusions to the Transatlantic Slave Trade; while beautiful in their own, small way, these ideas could have been examined more and to great effect had Okri not kept the prince and the maiden apart for an unnecessarily long portion of the book.
Overall, however, Starbook was a delightful read. If you pick it up, I urge you to just run with it. Let Ben Okri take you wherever he wants to go, and don’t ask too many questions that demand solid answers, as doing that will only harm your reading experience. Starbook is certainly not for everyone, but I, for one, don’t regret trusting my gut in buying it.
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