The Mystery Feast
by Ben Okri
(Clairview Books £3.99)

This is a most idiosyncratic book on many levels — its length (under 40 pages), its page size (think of the Mr Men books), its mixture of different literary forms and the paradox of its premise, the importance of storytelling being conveyed in a written medium.

The Mystery Feast comprises a poem, an essay with hints and tips to storytellers and, yes, a story — a short one or a “stoku.”

For Ben Okri storytelling is far more than the entertainment appropriated by inauthentic middle-class white folks who declaim the Mahabharata in a tiresomely staged way.

The author of The Famished Road, in his trademark simple but elegant language, establishes that stories, how we tell them and to whom we tell them are central to how we understand the world, its injustices and its demands.

He claims that “no civilisation ever became great on knowledge alone” and draws mainly on classical European references such as ancient Greece and ancient Rome to illustrate the incredible importance of stories in consolidating how a people explain themselves to themselves and others.

He accords an almost gnostic or mystical quality to stories and storytelling in offering us the deepest insights possible, calmly summed up in the last stanza of the poem called All We Do: “We yield time/Our story-making sense/In this portion of eternity,/Awake and in dreams,/We live myths./It’s what makes us immense.”

And so in his idealised reveries, Okri at times overstates his case. In his notes he asserts that “direct things bore us.”

Really? As socialists we have the duty and the tools of analysis to really understand why society is as it is and offer prescriptions to cure these maladies. That is the job of the socialist novelist, artist and musician.

Surely good storytelling captures our imagination because it reflects and distils our knowledge of the material world and not in spite of that understanding?

That said, Okri usefully reminds us — if we really need reminding — of the terrible power of “bad” collective stories that seek to demonise the outsider or a particular minority group in society.

Of course, Okri doesn’t frame his argument in terms of the class struggle. Such vulgar materialism is of little interest to him here. But reading this short collection of his thoughts confirmed in my own mind the importance of working-class stories. Not those imposed on us by billionaire media owners or degrading establishment programmes such as The Jeremy Kyle Show or Benefits Street.

Rather those that we tell ourselves, in our conversations, in our music and in our art that demonstrate our class’s real achievements, setbacks and battles won and lost. It’s what makes us immense.

Review by Paul Simon