SOURCE: "Out of the Earth," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4042, September 19, 1980, p. 1047.

In the following favorable review, Bryce discusses the themes, characters, and setting of Flowers and Shadows.

Flowers and Shadows is a first novel by a young Nigerian of nineteen. A striking feature of the book is its sureness of touch, the self-confidence with which the author handles both characterization and events. Above all, the language reflects a keen ear for the cadences of speech, whether pidgin or standard English.

Some aspects of the setting are familiar from such novels as Violence, by another young Nigerian author, Festus Iyayi: squalor, filth and poverty reduce the inhabitants of Lagos's poorer quarters to despair, yet ultimately refine them. Okri spares us no detail of the smells, the jostling for buses, the excreta in the gutters, the clamour of the maimed, begging for coins. These details emerge as the...