On Ben Okri

Disappearing Snow in watercolor, Margaret Hutton

At some point when I’m reading a story for the first time, a brilliant story, neurons leap across old pathways in unique ways, my blood quickens, I pause for a moment, savoring, and think, yes, this is why I read, for this feeling. Or to quote from Ben Okri’s “The Third Law of Magic,” my “heart jumps with delight.” In his story, the narrator is describing that moment when one steps outside into the morning wonderland created by snowfall. Such a moment has gone rare this season in certain parts of the country used to its preponderance. Just last week, I lamented with a Bostonian about the sparseness of snow, and how unlikely we are to witness any in the weeks ahead with the unseasonably warm forecast.

The earth’s warming—or to phrase it more accurately, the warming of the earth caused by humans—isn’t mentioned in Okri’s story. But the possibility of snow’s eventual disappearance is felt acutely reading this tale. That we need a story like this to convey the same news we glean from headlines daily is a testament both to the stubborn passivity of human will, and to the power of art.

In my reading, that electrifying moment comes about a dozen paragraphs in, on the story’s second full page in The Atlantic magazine. So many ideas are packed, snowball tight, in that first mention of snow. “He went for a walk and saw the city… under a spell—of whiteness…What if snow were black? He thought. …It would create a different mythology… The sidewalks were under sheets of snow. Winter kept us warm. He watched children in a nearby field throwing snowballs at one another.” My condensing of this paragraph can’t convey the slow recognition of ideas that I’ve had—many of us have had—as I read. Why is snow white? Isn’t white the reflection of all wavelengths of light, all color, and black the opposite, the absorption of all wavelengths of light? A snowflake is crystal clear until there are innumerable ones together, scattering light. And doesn’t snow democratize everything in the most beautiful way—just as the blackness of night does? Before I can resolve any of this, I’m in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” an elegy to lost culture: “Winter kept us warm…Covering Earth in forgetful snow.” But I’m also in a new elegy, Okri’s homage to snow and its ephemerality. “What complexity is contained in it—commerce, class, race, design, spirituality, fragility, tenderness, childhood, nature, surprise, wonder.”

The same might be said of “The Third Law of Magic.”

This third law in the title brings to mind the Third Law of Thermodynamics, which relates to closed systems and entropy. Sounds like an apt analogy to our awareness and inaction on climate change. In the story, however, the laws of magic operate this way: first comes erasure; then comes memory—"You have to get people to know that something once happened… before you can make them know it ... is lost in time forever”; and next is art, or reality “resurrected in myth, or rumor, or stories.” Art that may even exceed reality.

Several of the pleasures of this story are its allusions to art, such as Eliot’s poem, references to Moby Dick, Shakespeare, and other greats in danger of being forgotten, including jazz composed by Ornette Coleman, the life and novels of Chester Himes, and even the bygone conceit of a sea shanty. The story reimagines the Bliz-aard Ball Sale, a piece of performance art by David Hammons in 1983. But as Okri tells Katherine Hu of The Atlantic, and my comments suggest, his story is less a reenactment than “a dream woven around it.…”

The story’s other pleasures are grounded in great character and dialogue. The scene between the mother wheeling her son in a stroller and the snow trader is a finely etched, subtly rendered exchange, reflective of class and race. Every character’s interior is revealed, if only by a few spoken words, as in the case of the trader’s wife, who never appears on the page.

The trader offers his merchandise, a snowball, “on the house” to the boy who cries out in joy when he sees it. That transaction is at the heart of this story, exposing the clash between capitalism and intangibles that can’t be purchased—the encroaching commodification of everything, and the devastating price we are in danger of paying. Okri’s lens pans across it all: nature, property, news, and material goods, even blue-glass eyes. The wonders he lays bare mimic the fractal beauty found in nature. This story is as good as art gets.

For another of Okri’s wonders, listen to him analyze four short fiction pieces by Franz Kafka.