SOURCE: "The Spirit Who Came to Stay," in The New York Times Book Review, October 10, 1993, p. 24.

Gorra is an educator. In the following unfavorable review of Songs of Enchantment, he faults the novel's focus and structure.

I had looked forward to reading the Nigerian writer Ben Okri's novel The Famished Road. It had won England's Booker Prize for the best novel of 1991, people I respect had admired it, and reviewers had compared Mr. Okri to other writers I enjoyed.

So when I was asked to look at its sequel, I happily sat down with both books, ready to follow the adventures of its child narrator, Azaro, a boy who can step into the realm of the spirits, into "the mesmeric dreams of hidden gods … susurrant marketplaces of the unborn … alabaster landscapes of the recently dead." For Azaro is an abiku, a child who, in the cosmology of Nigeria's...