DANGEROUS LOVE, by Ben Okri
We live in a universe of “ancient, unyielding” forces, Ben Okri suggests in his novel “Dangerous Love.” Okri is famous for bringing together many forms of storytelling to show such forces at work in the present reality of Nigeria, as he did in “The Famished Road,” which won the Booker Prize in 1991. “Dangerous Love” is a revised and reissued version of a 1981 novel called “The Landscapes Within,” and it shows Okri writing in a deliberately realist mode, the mythic underpinnings almost invisible much of the time, in favor of a Chekhovian intimacy.
The book’s hero, Omovo, is an office worker and artist who lives with his father and his father’s second wife in a slum compound in 1970s Lagos. It’s just after the civil war that followed Nigeria’s independence, and like many of the young people he knows, Omovo is overprepared for a society that has no place for his talent. He falls in love with Ifeyiwa, an educated young woman from a village where the war still continues, who is trapped in an arranged marriage to a petty, violent man named Takpo. “Dangerous Love” is exactly what its title says, a direct engagement with danger and love and how much the passion of individuals can matter in a world that destroys people indiscriminately.
“As soon as he set out after her the wind blew hard,” Okri writes of an afternoon when Omovo and Ifeyiwa finally find a way to meet in private. “Sand and dust were whipped up in the air. Dead leaves circled the street. The wind blew him backward and he lowered his head, for the sand was blinding him.”
In the distance, he sees Ifeyiwa’s yellow dress, her white shoes and white belt, “as if she had stepped out of a bright magazine. She looked both beautiful and a little awkward, as if she had borrowed someone else’s clothes.”
A passing cement truck blocks Omovo’s way, jerking back and forth in the clogged intersection until it gets stuck, the driver cursing, blasting his horn, raising more dust. We think, yes, this is how the world works — romance baffled by frustration, in Lagos as in any place. But because we know Takpo’s nature, we also suspect, just as Omovo and Ifeyiwa do, that their meeting will have devastating consequences. Her yellow dress, white shoes and belt take on a pathos beyond irony, like that of a photograph of a vanished loved one.
A prevailing metaphor is a painting Omovo makes of a scum pool in the middle of his compound. It’s powerful, but can’t contain the full truth of his world: his family, the war’s effect on his friends, a femicide he comes across in the woods, the hellish commute to his job, the terrible reckoning between Ifeyiwa and her husband. Neither can it contain the beauty that Omovo keeps seeing in spite of all this:
“He watched the play of light and darkness on the glinting metallic surface of the streamlet. As he watched he noticed the distorted shapes of trees, clouds, birds and people. He pondered the surrealism of distorted reflections, and how unique the perceived world became if familiar images were reordered into freshly juxtaposed fragments by a disinterested vision.”
Omovo, Ifeyiwa, Takpo and even the minor characters in “Dangerous Love” are fully realized — you know them intimately and are drawn to them with an intensity that has nothing to do with virtues or flaws but with the specific beauty and ugliness of individual souls inside bodies. Like an alchemist, Okri has channeled the “ancient, unyielding” forces through a reordering of “familiar images,” creating something universal at a time when the idea of the universal has long been thought impossible.
Zachary Lazar’s most recent novel is “The Apartment on Calle Uruguay.”
DANGEROUS LOVE | By Ben Okri | 503 pp. | Other Press | Paperback, $18.99
