Ben Okri: 'Great art tries to get us to the place of true enchantment'

Ben Okri's latest novel-of-ideas goes in search of Arcadia: the place that gives life meaning. Judith Palmer joins the shaman of modern British fiction for a magical mystery tour

"Let me serve you," Ben Okri offers chivalrously, every time there's a question he wishes to evade. A spoonful of crispy seaweed here, a sizzling prawn there. You wish to know things about Ben Okri, dear reader? Have a spoonful of rice instead.

"Let me serve you." Just like Mephistopheles said to Faust. Give me your soul and I'll serve you. He's a very charming devil. All compliments and solicitousness. My hair suits me. Likewise my nail varnish. What does my father do? What am I reading? He likes to answer questions with questions, mellifluously pre-empting my enquiries with his own. He listens intently, remembers details, enjoys being enchanting. He's big on enchantment.

Does he see writing as a shamanistic activity? "Writing and reading," he nods. "Reading is one of the most magical things we do, and also one of the most difficult. There's an art of reading just as much as there's an art of writing. Reading is not just passing one's eye over a page, it's an intense inhabiting of what you're reading. Reading a text is allied to how we read one another. The world is as much a text as a book is, it's just that the alphabet is different."

"Have you had that pen long?" he asks. The pen is new, but the notebook has been knocking around a while I tell him, scenting necromancy. Okri takes it, turns it over, holds it in silence, concentrates, eyes shut, and drinks it in. I haven't used this notebook for a year, is it dormant? Okri shakes his head. "I'm listening for something else."

Okri's new novel In Arcadia (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99) is all about listening out for the "something else". It's a kind of literary Celestine Prophecy – a riddling quest for enlightenment, via the secret messages the universe drops before us. "The fundamental questions and quests of any given person's life are few," says Okri. "You have your own particular quest – something inside that needs to be sorted and understood, which goes round in a spiralling evolutionary way. You find better ways of asking that question, knowing full well that you're never going to answer it completely."

What are Okri's own quests and questions? After a silence, he finally answers emphatically. "What is 'real' is big with me. Real not in terms of tables and chairs and vegetables – because this passes away ... If you want to put your anchor on something enduring, this won't do," he says, sweeping his hand around the room. "If your anchor is founded on that which changes and dissolves and turns into what we call death, then you're stuck ... Fiction, painting, music all the great forms are trying to get us to that place of true enchantment – the true reality – and once we touch that place, we are soothed, and we can cope."

In Arcadia is an exploration of that "place of true enchantment", a poetic meditation on notions of earthly paradise. It is deeply engaging, yet the characters seem impalpable. When I ask why he felt the need to fix his meditations in the framework of a novel, he bristles. Fiction, it seems, is sacred. "It's a novel about the Arcadian mystery, and the whole shape of the book is designed to bring the reader to that state. I felt only fiction could examine all the inner dimensions and possibilities and create the right tensions ... It's like cooking something – in the first part I apply the heat, and then the pressure changes and the flavour begins to come out," he says.

I think of Bridget Jones and her hopeless quest for self-improvement – her continual striving to lose weight, cut down on smoking, and finish The Famished Road. I ask Okri about a couple of phrases from In Arcadia: "I don't mind failure; it's something to get past on the way to greatness", and "Never write a man off till you have heard his last song." "You notice a lot of things," he replies gnomically. "The fact that you have noticed it, underlines it. You cannot formulate a question without answering it. The echo is contained in the sound." I can't help thinking that "you notice a lot of things" also contains the phrase "you miss much".

"There are two things about the books I write – one is in the reading of them and the other is what happens after you've read them," says Okri. "I write for the 'after-you've-read-them'. That's why if you look at the early reviews of the books and what the reviewers tend to say many years after ... they have been surprised at what they saw and felt and wrote at the time. I deliberately write for the 'after' because it's not about the book, it's about the spirit. Books develop an organic relationship with the air. They can give rise to things you would never connect with them."

The idea of Arcadia has been inhabiting Okri for a long time. In 1996 he presented a film in the BBC's Great Train Journeys series, in which he made the trip from London to Arcadia in the Peloponnese, the rural paradise written about by Virgil in the Eclogues. En route, he visited the farmyard idyll at Versailles where Marie Antoinette played at being shepherdess; and stopped off at the Louvre, to survey Poussin's enigmatic The Arcadian Shepherds – where shepherds gather in a pastoral landscape to point out the inscription on a tomb, "Et In Arcadia Ego" ("I too am in Arcadia"; there is death in paradise).

Although the novel follows the same path as the film, and uses a film crew as its characters, Okri insists that film and book are only distantly related. "The book inhabits a real journey to say something quite parallel, in the same way that a dream is parallel to a life, and all the possibilities of our lives run parallel to one another. We inhabit a middle track we call our lives, but on either side Arcadia and Death are also running concurrently, and we are never far away from either plane. The book tries to encompass all these three layers.

"There is a relationship between what one's Arcadia is and how one finds some form of transcendence in this life. In a way, it's the magic amulet or talisman that transfigures life and makes it bearable – possibly even beautiful." And what are Okri's own Arcadias? "I couldn't tell you," he shrugs. "It would be like giving away the combination of my safe, where I keep my stash of goodies. It's taken me a long time to reveal the Poussin – I feel bereft ... It's like having to give away a great story my mother told me when I was young – something that was just your own thing and now other people have it. It always hurts to give it away, but after a while one must."

Suddenly, Okri reluctantly passes out a scant personal talisman: Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Then a scattering more. "Sometimes an Arcadia is what you'd die for," he adds. "For my father it was a photograph of my grandmother. For Citizen Kane it was Rosebud. For my mother, it was a house. Peoples have Arcadias too. What do you think it is for the English? Empire?" Before I can look post-colonially uncomfortable, he leaps in. "I mean Empire in an unloaded sense," he says. "The whole thing about this book is the desire to set sail from old selves, old assumptions, old negativities, old cramped reactions, towards being more free.

"I think it would be obvious for me to say writing is an Arcadia for me, but it's not the act of writing – it's what writing can yield up. In himself or in the reader? "More in the reader. It's an act of service."

Biography

Ben Okri was born in Nigeria in 1959. He spent his early years in Peckham, south London, when his father came to England to study law, and he returned to Nigeria with his family aged seven. As a teenager, he started work in a paint store, and began publishing stories in women's magazines. By the time he was 18 he had finished his first novel, Flowers and Shadows. In 1978 he started studying Comparative Literature at Essex University but the Nigerian scholarship he had been awarded failed to pay up, and he left due to lack of funds without completing his degree. His first major break for his writing came when Peter Ackroyd selected one of his stories for the PEN New Fiction contest in 1984. He then published two books of short stories, Incidents at the Shrine and Stars of the New Curfew. In 1991 he won the Booker Prize with The Famished Road, and in 2001 he received an OBE. He has published 15 books, among them the essays in Birds of Heaven and A Way of Being Free; and Mental Fight, an epic poem for the Millennium. His novels include Songs of Enchantment, Astonishing the Gods, Dangerous Love, and Infinite Riches. In Arcadia is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on 19 September. Ben Okri lives in London, and is vice-president of the writers' organisation PEN UK.