There was a time, fifty-plus years ago, when fantasy fiction was the pathetic ragged stepsister of science fiction, a scrawny little genre, beloved only by a special few. Publishing fantasy was a sure way to lose money, and those magazines that specialized in it, notably John W. Campbell’s Unknown Worlds, had tiny circulations and quickly became sought-after collector’s items.

All that changed once J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy became a campus craze in the 1960s. Tolkien paperbacks sold by the zillions, and in their wake came the vast hordes of Tolkien imitations, invariably trilogies (though often the first three in a set led to three sequels, and three more after that) that obediently followed the Tolkien formulas: the Disinherited Prince, the Jolly Sidekick, the Dark Lord, the Slithery Secondary Villain, the Virginal Guardian Angel, the not-so-Virginal Wizardess, the Quest for the Talisman of Power, the climactic struggle between Good and Evil, and all the rest. By now one could fill a whole library with the many fat volumes that endlessly rehearse the tropes of commercial fantasy, and still they come, pretty much the same stuff over and over, so far as I am able to tell, but obviously meeting the needs of an ever-enthusiastic audience.

I would not wish to deprive anyone of any sort of reading pleasure. Reading is a private thing; tastes differ. Go thou, if so you wish, and read trilogy after trilogy, and may you have much joy of it. But I do have a book to recommend to those fantasy readers who might yearn for a less formulaic example of the genre: a novel by an African writer that dips deep into the infinite well of the unconscious and offers a remarkable exercise of the free play of imagination: an extraordinarily rich journey through a fantastic realm that owes nothing at all to the ritualized formulas of modern post-Tolkien trilogistic fiction.

The book is My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, by Amos Tutuola, first published in 1954, and still in print. Tutuola (1920-1977) was a Nigerian, the son of cocoa farmers who belonged to the Yoruba tribe but had converted to Christianity. After six years of education at a Salvation Army school, he became a blacksmith, then worked at an assortment of menial jobs, and suddenly, in 1946, despite the skimpiness of his education, produced a full-length novel, The Palm-Wine Drink-ard. It drew on the folk traditions of the Yoruba tribe for its material and was written in a simple, odd, somewhat naïve but quite literate sort of English. Somehow it found its way into print in England in 1952 and it was widely praised by such people as Dylan Thomas, who called it “grisly and bewitching.” It was followed shortly by My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which also attracted much attention among sophisticated readers, and several other books. Tutuola, now one of Africa’s most famous literary figures, ultimately became affiliated with a Nigerian university and then became an associate of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Technically this astonishing writer has to be classed as a “primitive,” along with such other self-educated artists as Grandma Moses and Henri Rousseau. But “primitive” in that context does not mean unskilled or inept. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a potent work of art and, I think, a truer venture into the fantastic than any ten-foot stack of formula trilogies.

A look at some of the chapter headings quickly provides the flavor of the work:
My Life in the 7th Town of Ghosts
At a Ghost Mother’s Birthday Function
The Short Ghosts and their Flash-eyed Mother
In the Nameless-town
Lost or Gain Valley
Invisible Magnetic Missive sent to Me from Home
Television-Handed Ghostess
The Future-Sign Tree

The story is the first-person narrative of a seven-year-old boy who, fleeing slave traders that burst into his village, manages to slip into a nearby supernatural realm known as the Bush of Ghosts, which is forbidden to mortal beings, but which he enters because he is too young to know better. (Some definitions: “bush,” in the African sense, is a zone of impenetrable jungle. A “ghost,” in the Tutuolan sense, is not the spirit of some departed mortal, but simply one of the supernatural beings that inhabit this strange other realm.)

The narrator’s sojourn in the Bush of Ghosts lasts twenty-four years, during which time he marries twice, is transformed on occasions into a horse, a cow, and some things much more bizarre, briefly becomes a god, studies how to be dead, and has many other curious adventures, all described in straightforward though idiosyncratic prose derived from the spoken idiom of West Africa. In style it is like nothing ever written by anyone else, and yet it is always intelligible and compelling.

Tutuola’s tale is a very peculiar odyssey indeed. When at the outset the narrator blunders into an underground house with a golden portico, he immediately becomes the subject of a quarrel between three ghosts, each of which wants him as a servant. The fuss becomes so intense, we are told, that “all the ghosts and ghostesses of that area” go to the house to settle the dispute. “It was at this time I noticed carefully . . . that many of them had no hands and some had no fingers, some had no feet and arms but jumped instead of walking. Some had heads without eyes and ears, but I was very surprised to see them walking about day and night without missing their way. . . .”
In the end he is carried off by the “smelling-ghost,” a loathsome creature who wears live scorpions on the rings on his fingers, venomous snakes wrapped around his head, and a boa constrictor as a trouser belt. He pops the boy in a bag, intending to take him to the 7th Town of Ghosts, where he lives. An attempt to escape by climbing a “gravity tree” comes to nothing, and in the smelling-ghost’s town the boy is changed into a monkey, a lion, a horse, a camel, a cow, and then a horse again. While briefly back in human form he seizes the juju—the magical talisman—that his master has used to effect these transformations, and bolts off into the forest. “But as any ghost could run faster than any earthly person, so that I became tired before him, and when he was about to catch me or when his hand was touching my head slightly to catch it, then I used the juju which I took from the hidden place that he kept it in before we left the house. And at the same moment that I used it, it changed me to a cow with horns on its head instead of a horse, but I forgot before I used it that I would not be able to change back to the earthly person again. . . .” So it is as a cow that he makes his escape, only to fall into the hands of a tribe of cow-herding ghosts who beat him cruelly in order to induce him to graze on grass, “as I was unable to explain to these cow-men that I am not really a cow.”

Another escape follows. He regains his own form and hides in a dead log that is already inhabited by a snake; the two of them frighten each other. Another capture, another escape, and he comes to the town of the burglar-ghosts, who exchange themselves with human children to gain access to houses and rob them, and makes a friend who takes him to another town where he sees “a very beautiful young ghostess” and arranges to be married to her. (Time is passing; he is growing up.) His marriage first involves him in a baptism in hot water and fire; then, at his new in-laws’ house, comes a frenzied party “where everybody was served with a variety of food and all kinds of ghost-drinks. . . . Also all the terrible-creatures sent their representatives as ‘Skulls,’ ‘Long-white creature,’ ‘Invincible and Invisible Pawn’ or ‘Give and Take’ . . .”

In the course of the party, we learn, “I mistakenly smashed a small ghost to death” while dancing too fiercely. He is put on trial, but acquitted with the help of a kindly ghost-lawyer. After three months of married life he is overcome by yearning to return to his native village in the real world, and sets out on his own, quickly getting himself transformed into a long-necked monster and sequestered in a room guarded by a thousand snakes, and he sees “that the biggest and longest among these snakes which was acting as a director for the rest vomited a kind of coloured lights from his mouth on to the floor of the room.” The snakes disappear and he is imprisoned now in a giant pitcher. He is stolen, pitcher and all, by a different tribe of ghosts who worship him as a god and bring him a sacrificial offering of meat, which he proceeds to eat, surprising them greatly, for none of their other gods were able to eat or breathe.
His life as a god is an enjoyable one, though the sacrificial blood they pour over him attracts too many flies for his comfort. The high priest gives him “a kind of smoking pipe which was about six feet long. . . . This smoking pipe could contain half a ton of tobacco at a time. When [the priest] lit the pipe with fire then the whole of the ghosts and ghostesses were dancing round me set by set. They were singing, clapping hands, ringing bells, and their ancestral drummers were beating the drums in such a way that all the dancers were jumping up with gladness.”

And so it goes. He is buried alive by the spider-ghosts and dug up by a cannibal-ghost; then he is found by a tribe of short ghosts who bring him to their queen, the “flash-eyed mother,” who has “millions of heads which were just like a baby’s head,” each head having “two very short hands which were used to hold their food.” After some years with these ghosts he becomes embroiled in a war involving many kinds of ghosts, during which he is beheaded, and when he and other dead warriors are revived he finds that he has mistakenly been given a ghost’s head instead of his own. “But as every ghost is talkative, so this head was always making various noises both day and night and also smelling badly. . . .”

And so it goes, one free-association nightmare after another. The reader learns of his second marriage and the birth of his half-ghost son, and of the town where mosquitoes are worshipped as gods, and of how he brings Christianity to the ghosts and founds The Meth-odist Church of the Bush of Ghosts, and becomes a policeman and then a judge in a town of dead people, and takes part in a contest of magicians in classic folk-myth style, and so on and so on, until the book comes to its very well handled conclusion. It’s wonderful stuff. By diving down into the mysterious underworld of his people’s mythology, Amos Tutuola was able, in 174 pages, to take his readers on a magical journey through a fantasy-world that seemed to me ever so much more real and powerful than what one would encounter in most of the standard prefabricated fantasy novels that crowd our bookstores today. It’s not going to be to everyone’s taste; but those readers who are looking for something unusual in the way of fantasy will get much delight from it.