Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Anglo-Patois Nanotech AI Cross-cultural Exchange The narrator starts telling us an anansi story about a strong wiry woman with skin like cocoa tea, arms hard with muscle, and long black naughty of locks hair: “She name Tan-Tan, and New Half-Way Tree was she planet.” The only thing soft about her was “she big, molasses-brown eyes that could look on you, and your heart would start to beat time boobaloops with every flutter of she long eyelashes. One look at she eyes and you fall for she already.” Indeed, “From Garvey-prime to Douglass sector, from Toussaint through the dimension veils to New Half-Way Tree, she leave a trail of sad, lonely men—and women, too, oui?—who would weep for days if you only make the mistake and say the words ‘brown eyes.’” From the start we appreciate ‘the narrator’s distinctive style, an “Anglo patois,” a Caribbean kind of African-French-English fusion, poetic and demotic and, oui, savory and catchy. From the start, author Nalo Hopkinson is infusing black history into Midnight Robber (2000), with famous figures like Garvey, Douglass, Toussaint, Marley, and Tubman having their names given to planets, bands, people, and the like. I really liked the language and style of the narration, the repeated adjectives (e.g., "She heard her feet landing, quiet quiet, like lovers whispering to each other”), the different use of pronouns (e.g., “She sins come to haunt she”), the colorful similes (e.g., "Slow, the way molasses does run down the side of a bowl”), and, oui, the frequent use of “oui.” The narrator (maybe we’ll find out who or what she is in the last lines of the novel?) then introduces Tan-Tan’s world New Half-Way Tree, where all the drifters and thieves and murderers are sent from the mirror planet Toussaint (“where I living”). Toussaint received colonists of African, Asian, Indian, and European races along with the “Marryshow corporation sinking earth engine number 127 down into it like God entering he woman; plunging into the womb of soil to impregnate the planet with the seed of Granny Nanny” (nanotech sentient AI type things), while New Half-Way Tree is deprived of (or free from?) Granny Nanny, leaving its criminal exiles “head blind without the sixth sense” they had on Toussaint. Anyway, Tan-Tan’s story starts with her parents’ adulteries leading to her father, the self-important Mayor Antonio, getting exiled with seven-year-old Tan Tan to the prison planet New Half-Way Tree. There they must survive by fitting in with their fellow-human exiles from Toussaint and the indigenous “little people,” a bird-lizard-looking species who’ve learned human language while trading with humans and keeping most of their own culture secret. (The story is partly an sf rendering of earth colonization history.) The novel then details how Tan-Tan grows up into the legendary Robber Queen of New Half-Way Tree. It features a monstrous father who is all too human, a harpy stepmother, a sweet and homely youth, plenty of exotic and formidable local flora and fauna, a fascinating “alien” culture (of course right at home living on their own world, no thanks to all these human criminals being dumped into their backyards). And some awful, incestuous rape scenes. And a lot of great folk tales about Tan-Tan. And everything recounted by that savory narrator and perfectly and engagingly read by the audiobook reader Robin Miles. (She reads the spicy dialect so engagingly that I found myself imitating her!) I thought that Hopkinson sometimes has characters do things I couldn’t quite believe they’d do and I wished Tan-Tan would get in Robber Queen mode a bit sooner and more consistently, but I enjoyed listening to this novel a lot. “Wire bend, story end.” View all my reviews
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