Even Amos Tutuola's earlier books have not given me so strong a sensation [as does The Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town] of being nine or ten again and hearing, for the first time, passages read from Pilgrim's Progress….

The Yoruba equivalent of the Christian morality of Pilgrim's Progress lies in the hero's mental and spiritual equipment: which (and one thinks how science and folklore increasingly appear to echo each other) resembles that of an astronaut. He has first and second minds, the one on the left being less reliable but more imaginative, the one on the right extremely reliable. There's a third partner, "memory", and a fourth, "Supreme Second", which is totally invisible but occupies, as it were, the ultimate fall-back position among computers.

In short, Tutuola's hero is bizarrely steered: but as at every encounter his aides chip in with good or bad, bold or trembling...