SOURCE: "From Ghetto to Badland," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4349, August 8, 1986, p. 863.

In the following highly laudatory review, Melmoth briefly describes the plots and themes of some of the short stories contained in Incidents at the Shrine, concluding that Okri's Lagos stories are his best.

Reversing the more usual course of events, Ben Okri has followed the two novels he wrote while in his teens—Flowers and Shadows and The Landscapes Within—with a collection of short stories [entitled Incidents at the Shrine]. Whereas the novels could be regarded as juvenilia, the stories are terse, poised, poetic. Flowers and Shadows was oddly reminiscent of Lawrence's The White Peacock; the stories owe more to Joyce and Chekhov and, less to their advantage, to Hemingway. With them Okri has found a voice and established a style of his own.

Not only is Okri working in a different medium, he...