Ben Okri is admiring a bottle of mineral water. 'Isn't it a beautiful colour?' he says, holding the sapphire-blue glass up to the light. He asks the waiter for another bottle and a bag to carry them home. 'Shhh,' he whispers over the expensive water in London's ritzy Langham hotel.
'I don't want to be seen carrying these drinks. I don't want them to become too popular. I collect them.'
It's not surprising that a bottle should fascinate Okri. In the alternate realities of his novels, everyday objects assume talismanic qualities, auguring fertility and famine, birth and annihilation.
His 1991 Booker Prize-winning novel The Famished Road followed the spirit-child Azaro, who flits between the human and spiritual realms against the backdrop of a west African civil war. Since then, he has written 10 more books, fusing a broadly African aesthetic with New Age spirituality and the magic realist techniques popularised by Latin American writers.
Critics are divided about Okri's oracular style, but he enjoys a devoted following among fans of the highbrow self-help genre; Bridget Jones vowed to finish The Famished Road as part of her self-improvement regime.
Okri has the intentional naivety of a man who has kept modern sophistications at bay, who doesn't drive, own a computer, or use a mobile phone. He's bewildered when I take out two voice-recorders. I explain that it's because I share his technophobia that I double up, but Okri seems not to have heard. 'I'll show you something,' he says, taking out a pen and paper and writing silently, leaving a 30-second break on the tape. 'A computer can't pick that up, can it?' he says. 'Silence is the highest action.'
He sees himself as an artist of silence who is frustrated by having to use words. 'The text of experience is extremely rich and mysterious, but the text of prose is so visible. Another genre is inside me trying to express itself through this medium.' In his new novel, Starbook - A Magical Tale of Love and Regeneration, Okri gives silence a voice, writing: 'There was a long silence as the silence spoke.'