Past glories prove elusive

Despite many allusions to Virgil and a diligent summary of various interpretations of Poussin’s ‘Les Bergers d’Arcadie’, Ben Okri’s main sense of Arcadia, with its ‘star-dust magic’, seems to be derived from pop music lite. ‘We are stardust, golden’, sang Eva Cassidy in Woodstock, ‘and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.’ Anyone who has been tempted to replace this with ‘We’ve got to get back to the weedin’ ‘ will know what’s missing from Okri’s view of nature. Realism apart, In Arcadia has no narrative tension and the characters are ciphers. The long philosophical-cum- cultural-historical rants which it mainly consists of, with their outbreaks of uncontrolled Latinity (‘the invidious irritability that specialists in psychosomatic creativity identify as preceding unusual irradiations of perceptivity’), are shapeless, repetitious and trite.