Tag: nalo hopkinson

The Gremlin’s Library: Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson

August 20th, 2020

The first few pages of Midnight Robber feel like being dropped into a brand new language – and realistically, you are. If you know the language. you’re fine. It takes a little readjustment, sure, but only the same amount of adjustment that a speaker of Received Pronounciation British English needs to do for the terms in Lord of the Rings. If you don’t… it takes a little longer.

That’s a good thing, though. The language that Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber is written in is a blend of Trinidadian and Jamaican Creole – two Caribbean English dialects, with a few others sprinkled in. For me, somebody who’s never spoken or read Creole, it took a chapter or two to really get the hang of it. I jotted down words I wasn’t sure about, googled them if the context didn’t give it away… And after a while, I didn’t have to anymore. The greatest trick of language, after all, is that it teaches itself to you. And Hopkinson is more than just a writer in this way; she’s a storyteller, and the storytelling uses the language and its rhythm to give you the context of everything without so much as pausing for breath.

Midnight Robber is a science-fiction tale, set on a distant planet called Toussaint (after Haiti’s revolutionary hero) and following – initially – the marital troubles of Antonio and Ione, an upper-class couple in Jonkanoo. After Ione cheats on him, Antonio challenges her lover to a duel and kills him with a poisoned machete blade; after realizing he is going to be sentenced to a life sentence on the prison planet New Half-Way Tree, Antonio escapes to run there on his own, taking his daughter Tan-Tan with him. And ultimately, this is Tan-Tan’s story, not Antonio’s – stolen from her mother and a life of relative privilege, away from a world with AI nannies and eyes everywhere to the “uncivilized” forest of New Half-Way Tree.

Hopkinson’s worldbuilding of Toussaint versus New Half-Way Tree is fascinating. Toussaint is a planet colonized by Afro-Caribbean people instead of White European, and so all of the technology has West African and Caribbean names instead of Greek or English ones; Granny Nanny, and my personal favourite; the AIs that inhabit and run dwellings, as well as living in the minds of its inhabitants, are called eshus. Eshu is the name of a Yoruba trickster deity, and as Nalo Hopkinson says in an interview, he “can be in all places at once… is the ghost in the machine.” By contrast, New Half-Way Tree is Toussaint before it was colonized – a thick jungle, full of creatures beyond Tan-Tan’s ken and all sorts of strange plants. Chichibud is a douen, the indigenous people of New Half-Way Tree and he takes a particular liking to Tan-Tan and a disliking to Antonio, in large part because Tan-Tan is willing to listen to his expertise about his own planet, and Antonio is an arrogant dipshit who doesn’t want to. (Oh gosh, this isn’t commentary at all. Relevantly, I adore Chichibud.) The worldbuilding is so detailed and – this made me laugh – gross at times. At one point, Tan-Tan goes to live with the douens for a while and she can’t digest their food or use their toilet properly! I always get a kick out of worldbuilding that accounts for these things.

Character-wise, I found the first part of the book less enthralling – I was there for the worldbuilding and sheer curiosity. Antonio sucks, and I wish he wasn’t the focus for the first few chapters! But Tan-Tan is a joy – she’s got a strong sense of justice, and her identification with the Midnight Robber mixes that justice with a childlike wonder that she never quite loses. Hopkinson mixes Caribbean folklore with science fiction invention and created fable to make something that sits between cyberpunk and fairytale, with a dark edge.

MINOR SPOILERS AND TRIGGER WARNINGS:

Some of it occurs far enough into the book that it is unfortunately a de facto spoiler, but: This book HEAVILY features:

-Child sexual assault/rape
-Teenage pregnancy
-Victim-blaming
-Kidnapping
-Murder
-Anti-indigeneity (unpacked and very much making a Point)
-Minor body horror

If you like my reviews, please consider subscribing to my Patreon or leaving a tip on my Ko-Fi!
Review: Sister Mine by Nalo Hopkinson

August 8th, 2018

I intended to do another first-chapter review for this one, and then my internet was out and I couldn’t put it down!!

Sister Mine by Nalo Hopkinson is urban mythic fantasy, very much in the same genre as Charles de Lint’s Newford series and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods but still wildly different. Instead of the standard Irish, Greek and Germanic faeries and gods that tend to stroll the streets, Hopkinson’s book follows the celestial mischief and family bickering of a pantheon reimagined from the Orishas of Southwest Africa. The book follows Makeda and Abby, conjoined twins born from the coupling of a mortal woman and divine man. The surgery that separated them left Abby with a permanent limp, Makeda on anti-rejection meds, and Makeda without any mojo – the magic that marks the celestials from the claypicken.

As a (mostly) white and Western reader, the Orisha (Orishas? unsure of the pluralization) are completely new to me. However, the care taken in their portrayal and the richness of their mythology shows through in Hopkinson’s writing, and it doesn’t take long to settle into the world and accept it as it comes. I’m unsure how much of the terminology is Hopkinson’s creation and how much is Caribbean patois I’m just unfamiliar with; ‘claypicken’ to mean ‘mortal’, for example, was one that took me a few pages.

As a story, and a mythical one at that, Sister Mine, is fantastic. Makeda is rightfully angry, if a little bit petty, balancing on the edge between the mystic and the mundane. The prose does the same, dancing effortlessly between musings on why her father is entertained by tentacle porn and mindbreaking passages of pure synesthesia. However, as a novel, Sister Mine leaves a lot of loose ends, and balances possibly too many plotlines at once. I would have loved to see the novel be perhaps 50-100 pages longer, to give all of the characters a little more room to breathe. Some stories do well at breakneck speeds; Sister Mine is a story that should take its time in the telling. Additionally, some of the plot twists in the last third of the book come a little out of the blue, taking an already-strange book into the realm of disbelief. (Of course, magical realism and urban fantasy always tread that line to begin with.)

Favourite character: Makeda is a standout, but I have to say, the living embodiment of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar is a favourite. Not just because of who he is, but because he’s so damn nice.

Overall, I’m giving Sister Mine a 3.5/5!

Tag: nalo hopkinson

The Gremlin’s Library: Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson

Review: Sister Mine by Nalo Hopkinson