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.

The story, what there is of one, concerns a TV crew making a programme about different versions of Arcadia. The presenter is an arrogant, garrulous, paranoid misanthrope called Lao. Together with Lao’s all-tolerating girlfriend, Mistletoe, the late adolescent bunch set off on Eurostar for Paris. They interview their train driver about his garden in the suburbs and then film other versions of pastoral at Versailles and in the Louvre. The next stop is not Greece but Switzerland. On the way there, the book, which reads as if it is not only set in, but was written on, a train journey, abruptly though none too soon ends. In the course of their perfunctory travels, Lao and the others, but mainly Lao, have harangued each other on Arcadian notions, their own and other people’s, but also on wider questions such as new technology, crime, poverty and ‘Where does it all lead?’ Meanwhile, a threat has hung over them in the form of sinister messages delivered by an evil supernatural being named Malasso.