It’s NOT Magical Realism, OK?!
Sir Ben Okri doesn’t really need a lot of introduction. He won the Booker Prize for The Famished Road, while Astonishing The Gods was named as one of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.
Tim met him at his publisher’s offices in Clerkenwell to wrestle with the rich imagery and many layers of his marvellous new novel, Waking The Warriors, which adroitly marries his command of the magic he finds all around him with sly commentary on the quotidian world. For Sir Ben, writing is one of the primal powers, but we find it everywhere. He points to words on the sides of buses and in newspapers and signboards. and because we deploy them promiscuously, they seem to lose their power. But he can redeem them. He draws on legends and symbols from many cultures to conjure new myths and, as the novel says itself, to spin words “… used as originally intended, to change the atmosphere, to create realities, to raise the vibrations of beings and substances, to link the above and below.”
Ben Okri – Head Of Zeuss – £18:99
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Senator Burton K Wheeler put the question best: If the war in Europe was America’s war, why was she not fighting it? It was the vital question of its day. Should America join the European war or not?
No Man’s Land is already littered with books on the Great War, and there will be many more hurled into the fray, but not many of them will be as original as this thoughtful and engaging treatment by the historian 
