... a multilayered allegorical narrative that cuts to the heart of our current political and cultural malaise, while maintaining a mythical, mesmeric flavour that makes the reader feel these are stories they have always known ... The pared-back style often feels closest in tone to the Fictions of Borges. Character takes second place to symbolism; few of them are named, and those who are embody representative qualities, like figures from myth. It is often repetitive, in a way that reflects the historic cycle of hope and disillusion, as the people flock to rumours of warrior heroes and Messiah figures who might save them ... It is possible to read particular instances of current affairs or recent history into The Freedom Artist, but this is not a book that is so easily pinned down. It’s savagely political, disturbing and fiercely optimistic, the deeply felt work of a writer who refuses to stop asking the hardest questions.
... isn't a simple, direct comment on our present era; instead, it's a questioning book, one that puts its faith not in any particular social justice movements but rather in a collective, existential desire for freedom and a plurality of stories and myths ... acts as a series of fables that interlock and lead to what is a pretty clear moral, but one that has to be deeply felt, and truly believed, because it's not actionable in any immediate way ... Another way to look at it is as a set of richly symbolic and evocative dreams that explore themes of storytelling and what humanity as a whole loses when stories told for the sake of forging connection are replaced with stories spurred by a desire for money, social cache, or power. In other words, it's a complex book to talk about. And yet, it's a deceptively simple read, written in a style that manages to convey certain rhythms of oral storytelling despite being a printed text ... an unsettling read — its tone lulled me, as if I were a child reading a fairy tale, into a sense of comfort, only to yank me to attention when it reminded me this wasn't the Disney version, as it were, but the one with all the blood and injustice left in — but it is not hopeless. Hope is everywhere in it, because its very form — storytelling — is a slap in the face to the terror looming over it.
... fantastically ghoulish and satirical ... Towards the end, however, 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 ... This is not a novel for strict realists or fantasy-phobes. If you find David Mitchell too much, steer clear. The Freedom Artist is an adventure story and an intense trip through the most esoteric corners of the human mind. It’s also a beautiful and timely appeal for the importance of books, subversive stories and love.
... 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.
... here [Okri] seems bent on writing a tale, or interwoven network of tales, that serves as a kind of philosophical and aesthetic primer to the previous books ... It is a curious book, as much tract as fiction, and sometimes written with the same heedless banality one found in Hermann Hesse, subject of an important recent biography ... Christianity, the second magical tradition to transform African life – technology followed – is dealt with gently but dismissively. One also needs some familiarity with a long tradition of dystopian and anti-totalitarian literature ... Okri has said that the book is written in three languages, those of fable, of truth and of our secret predicament. I’d say that in his case the first two are so completely subsumed under the third that any questioning of his literal background is suspended ... These ideas are virtuosically juggled in a series of short, enigmatic chapters that often have the discrete-but-connected feel of Nigerian composer Akin Euba’s piano pieces Scenes From Traditional Life. It’s a further valid parallel, not just because of the Nigerian provenance, but because Okri writes with a similarly limited palette, no fear whatever of repetition and with the sense that every tiny anecdote or descriptive detail generates its own significant form ... As such, it is a difficult book to write about meaningfully in narrative terms. The story does not so much unfold as become manifest. If there are moments when it seems in danger of turning into a libertarian manifesto, it swerves away into another episode of beautiful strangeness. Hand on heart, I would still be happier to re-read Starbook, but The Freedom Artist has a compelling power and energy that won’t let the reader go. Or fall by the wayside.
As a critique of totalitarianism, The Freedom Artist is unimpressive, but it stands out for its philosophical dimensions. It can be read as a kind of revision of Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which art, rather than offering distracting illusions, can tap into foundational truths and help us free ourselves from the prison of existence. The concise, declarative prose and the parable-like architecture of the stories resemble ancient forms of wisdom literature ... strange and rousing.
These parallel internal and external journeys explore threats to freedom when truth is commodified. Man Booker–winner Okri’s modern allegory specifies and beautifully renders the impact on the human spirit when people are deprived of history and truth. Written with a striking simplicity that belies the significance of its message, Okri’s tale is especially resonant in our current post-truth environment.
... in striving for profundity Okri often over-reaches. His desire to mix and match creation myths and parables from across the world leads to a nebulous mush of New-Agey concepts such as the infinite light that connects all things ... The novel’s heightened, fable-like quality also means that Okri’s world never feels grounded or real. I’m sure this is deliberate, after all The Freedom Artist is an allegory, but it does mean I struggled to care about the characters ... And yet, I couldn’t help but be entertained by The Freedom Artist. It has all the naïve boldness of a debut novel, an author throwing a kitchen sink of ideas at the page to see which ones will stick. Some are bizarre, such as the novel’s dizzying lurch toward horror as the Hierarchy, out of desperation, unleash a special force of cannibals wearing jackal masks (yes, you read that correctly) to gobble down any dissidents. But when the ideas do land, they are tremendous ... 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.
Okri employs simple sentences and brief chapters to invoke an alarming and complex parable of a world on the edge, where up is down and down is up. But readers shouldn’t fool themselves into believing that this is another dystopian tale of the future; it feels all too current. Like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, we have complacently accepted its bland existence, unable to remember that there was once, and could be again, another reality where words deliver freedom rather than condemnation ... 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.
Satirical and carnivalesque elements entertain as one searches into the novel’s obscurities. Okri’s treatment of mass hysteria is inventive ... character and setting lack specificity. [Okri] claims that this novel is 'written in three languages: the language of fable ... of truth ... and of our secret predicament'. This lofty and nebulous claim is made by a magus-novelist who exults in a kind of totalising of enigma and riddle, practising 'the conjuring power of the word'. I confess that I often longed for the rationality of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, the wit of Voltaire’s Candide.
The silver lining of being part of such a complex historical and cultural landscape is that Okri’s writings are imbued with two vast ambitions...One, to salvage portions from the ocean-like vastness of African, and Nigerian, storytelling traditions. And second, to repurpose these findings for the world, not as a didactic bore or a moralising scold, but as an individual artist, a sculptor of worlds with porous boundaries between our all-too-real world and the many unseen ones human societies carry within ... a sombre allegory by an author in his 60s about a society quivering under the jackboot of authoritarianism ... strikes one as force-fitted, far-fetched and even indulgent in its loopiness. Yet, as I write this, we learn of popular uprisings in places like Sudan where military grade weapons spray death onto protests led by young women who seek to break free from encrustations of official truths ... This, of course, should not be surprising, for great artistic sensibilities are far-seeing, unbound by the heaviness of facts. Yet, one can’t escape feeling that Okri’s allegory is neither subversive nor unknown. In fact, there is a certain harmlessness to it — it speaks the truth, but it speaks softly and without bite ... The book has a gentleness of a poetic sensibility that other contemporary works that have resorted to allegories in order to critique don’t have ... precisely because Okri’s allegory is denuded of cultural specificity, it has a timelessness to it, no different from Kafka’s parables or Borges’ fiction ... As long as tyranny views the written word as potentially subversive, Okri’s The Freedom Artist will have offered us a sketch of how individuals and societies sometimes break free to bathe once again in the 'river of light'.
... haunting and inspiring ... 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.
Okri’s somber, fablelike novel is a call to rally against oppressive institutions and for broader social consciousness ... the story is sparer, with only the barest scaffold of characterization and plot ... 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.
