BookBrowse Reviews Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted by Ben Okri

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A public servant decides to hold a festival for people betrayed by love, only to discover intimate truths about herself and those closest to her.

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On the twentieth anniversary of the day her first husband left her, Viv, a spirited Londoner and member of the House of Lords, attends a party and makes small talk with a stranger about heartbreak. "There are organizations for people who grieve, for alcoholics and other kinds of addicts," she muses. "But if you've been devastated by the love of your life walking out on you, where the hell do you go?" The answer, she thinks, is to make a place: a festival for brokenhearted people, held somewhere glamorous and attended in costume, so no one would be able to recognize each other.

After the party, Viv can't help bringing the idea to those closest to her. Her second husband, Alan, barely sees it as an interesting business opportunity. Her good friend, Beatrice, thinks it's "a bit mad" but wants to support Viv in her passions, while Beatrice's husband, Stephen, is sure that Viv is merely trying to get Alan's attention. It might have remained yet another of Viv's outlandish ideas, if not for her meeting with the infamous Madame Sosostris, inspired by the clairvoyant in T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (see Beyond the Book) and, in Okri's novel, the rumored advisor to five successful prime ministers. Thanks to Madame Sosostris' counsel, the festival starts to become reality.

Six months later, Viv, Alan, Beatrice, and Stephen are headed to the sacred woodlands of La Fôret Sacrée in the south of France, with their costumes packed and plans for the one-night-only festival well in hand, including a special guest appearance by Madame Sosostris herself to advise those who have lost love. While each of the two London couples have their own hesitations about the festival, what ensues is an evening of roundabout-yet-truthful conversation, mistaken identities, confrontations with the ghosts of past wrongs, and getting lost in the forest.

Dreamy and mysterious in a way reminiscent of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted invites readers to consider the many, sometimes painful, paths to happiness. In their individual journeys, the characters have often confronted betrayal, romantic or otherwise, and their trip to the forest becomes a catalyst for discussing the nuances that lead a person to make life-altering choices.

The novel's dialogue holds a lot of weight, not just in comparison with the number of descriptive passages, but also in how its characters constantly circle certain thought-provoking motifs. Masks, for example, are frequently discussed and take on multiple meanings. Literal masks are required in order to attend Viv's festival, so people cannot recognize each other: "Wouldn't it be fun if no one recognised anybody else, even the people they came with, their partners or boyfriends? What mischief!" Figurative masks are also discussed at length in regards to public personas and hidden agendas, particularly between Viv and Alan. While Viv accuses Alan of working for a "faceless company," Alan finds that Viv's face has begun to look like "a public building" after beginning her work with the House of Lords. These interpretations of masks seem to cue reflection about the different roles they play in people's lives.

Other significant themes include betrayal as a death of the self, as well as an obsession with both past and future choices. During the festival, attendees look forward to Madame Sosostris' advice for how they should shape their futures, all the while being haunted in La Fôret Sacrée by ghastly visions of people they've betrayed in the past. Within the quartet of main characters, there is a divide between the women and men. Alan and Stephen, who seem insecure in their choices regarding their careers and love lives, do not want to interact with Madame Sosostris at all, while Beatrice and Viv believe in the clairvoyant's powers. But even they seem to understand the misery of having to make choices concerning the future. "You're looking at someone who has literally risen from the grave," Beatrice tells Viv after revealing a sordid past with an ex.

While it's fascinating to see these themes play out through Okri's beguiling, poignant dialogue, I did find it difficult to latch onto a single character's journey. It is obvious that each character has their own unhappiness at the beginning of the novel, and on a surface level, it's easy to understand individual motivations: Viv and Beatrice lament their struggles with love and try to keep the festival going when things go wrong, while Alan and Stephen compare and contrast their lives with those of the women, who have been hurt in past relationships. There are many different perspectives on the themes of masks, choice, and love, but often, the conversations meander, making it hard to know what a specific character thinks about something at any given time.

On the whole, Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted is highly enjoyable. If you love parsing historical and cultural references and considering the philosophical pains of everyday life with a bit of mischief thrown in, this novel is one to savor.

This review first ran in the March 12, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.