Despite the many and various festivals on offer across the modern world, it occurs to Viv, the principal actor in Ben Okri’s first new work of fiction since 2019’s The Freedom Artist, that there is a significant demand yet to be satisfied: a gathering to meet the needs of those “smashed up by love”.
If anyone is up to the task of staging such an event, with all its potential for chaos and hysterics, it is Viv, to whom the idea arrives on the 20th anniversary of her own “smash-up”. A member of the House of Lords, with half her life dedicated to good works, Viv is a mistress of organisation. And when she recruits her best friend Beatrice, retired “juggler of portfolios” with a seat on the board of numberless charities, they’re off. The women’s husbands, both clubbable pillars of society – Stephen, magazine editor, is married to Beatrice; Alan, financier and self-made man, to Viv – are wary, not to say sceptical. “It sounds like a candidate for the most morose evening of the year,” opines Alan in his velvet dressing gown, glass of whisky at his elbow. Yet whether it is through Beatrice’s suggestion that they appeal to the husbands’ self-interest and the potential for monetisation, or by a mysterious change in the air, the men fall into line. The deal is sealed when Viv encounters “world-renowned clairvoyant” Madame Sosostris at an event in the Lords. Not only does she immediately read Viv’s mind, she decides that the festival should be a masked costume ball, offers herself as the biggest draw and even proposes a venue: a chateau in an enchanted wood in the south of France. She also mentions, by the by, that Viv’s “fate is already written. You are the only one who cannot read it.” But Viv skates over the portent, the chateau is booked, the festival is set in motion – and the broken-hearted begin to make their way to the enchanted wood, masks and costumes in their luggage.
From the outset, the venture is clearly precarious: Alan is even reading Howards End, the gold-standard cautionary tale for the charitably intentioned middle classes. The novel’s prime movers dwell in the bubble of privilege, blind to their own limitations. Viv’s assertion that the greatest obstacle to human happiness is the failure of love, rather than climate change or poverty – “Some of the happiest people I know are the poorest,” she asserts, without, one assumes, knowing any poor people at all – is not unpacked with any seriousness, but then this is a narrative that leaves a great deal suspended in the sparkling air of its sacred wood.
Liberally allusive, the narrative’s touchstones are A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its themes of transformation and self-delusion, and, most significantly, TS Eliot. Madame Sosostris has her most famous incarnation in The Waste Land, as a fraudulent mystic lifted by Eliot from a Huxley novel. Literary references come thick and fast, including quotes from Homer and a great deal of archly, gnomically aphoristic dialogue that perhaps echoes Eliot’s women who come and go but can also test the reader’s patience.
Whether hearts will mend, true selves be revealed, futures told – and whether Madame Sosostris will materialise at all – is the thread by which this novella hangs, and it is a gossamer one. If subtle characterisation is perhaps a big ask for a slender fable, magic is essential, and Okri can spin it. But both love and fiction can collapse as abruptly as Madame Sosostris’s gimcrack pavilion of smoke and mirrors: they both depend, as Tinkerbell can tell you as well as Eliot, on whether or not you’re prepared to believe.
• Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-Hearted by Ben Okri is published by Apollo (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
