The Age of Magic

Introduction to The Age of Magic

It began with discerning myth in everyday life. Then it was seeing how lived events revealed the hidden terrain, contours of the soul. One looked at the surface for signs of the depths. Then one treated the signs that daily life revealed as guides or codes on the journey, which when heeded opens the true destiny. There was the belief that life is not accidental, that it was a matter of how to read it.
To read the world like a text unveils something wondrous beneath the ordinary. In this way it is not an era referred to in the title, but something constant underneath, if one can orientate oneself correctly, if one can but see right.
The characters in this novel continue a quest not really to a place, but to a mythic, a magical, state of being. Everything has to be concrete before it can be symbolic or metaphysical. The journey is concrete, the places are real though disguised, and the people are real though transformed. Into the mold of the real, the unreal has been poured, or is it the other way round?
It was in this novel that I first used the injunction Read slowly. It was in this novel that I first discovered that the destination of a piece of writing is not the end of the work but each moment of its existence, each phase of its rhythm. Ideally this book can be read as a poem or a novel. At any
moment Arcadia can be revealed to you. Arcadia, or the necklace of arcadias, is what the novel makes possible for each reader. May you find the Arcadia that is right for you in this book. Many of them have been planted in the text, ready to germinate in the awaiting consciousness.
Sometimes a narrative is an excuse for the soul to dream, for the heart to rest. Sometimes a narrative is an excuse for an unknown myth to be incarnated. There are three ways to read this book. You can read the narrative on the surface, a journey by eight characters to Arcadia, with challenges and halts along the way. You can read what is below

Ben Okri

Praise for Ben Okri:

[Okri s] writing takes on the great riddles of existence freedom and consciousness, truth and illusion, suffering and transcendence spinning them into shimmering, allegorical texts at a time of deep reckoning and crisis his work feel[s] all the more prescient.   New York Times

Fiction s master of enchantments stares down a real horror, and without blinking or flinching, produces a work of beauty, grace, and uncommon power.   Marlon James

Ben Okri is that rare thing, a literary and social visionary, a writer for whom all three literature, culture, and vision are profoundly interwoven.   Ali Smith