tjolims's Full Review: Nalo Hopkinson - Midnight Robber
"Excuse me...do you have the book Brown Girl Inna Ringin stock?"
"Well, let me see...(typing)... Brown...Girl...In...The..."
"No, no...it's inna. Brown Girl Inna Ring..."
"Oh...so it's Brown...Girl...In...A"
"No, it's not spelled in a. Inna, I-N-N-A."
"Is that a word?"
"Never mind. Do you have anything by Nalo Hopkinson in stock?"
"Nalo...uh...how do you spell that?"
~sigh~ "Never mind. I'll just browse the stacks."
So I've got this fabulous short story collection called Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction From the African Diaspora. Within that collection are two short stories by Nalo Hopkinson, entitled Ganger and Greedy Choke Puppy. Ganger is okay, but Greedy Choke Puppy is one of the best things I've ever read.
Now, because I'm literarily obsessive, I immediately set out to read everything by Ms. Hopkinson. After asking the opinion of other speculative fiction readers and writers, I decided that Brown Girl Inna Ring was the place to start.
Or at least, it would have been if anyplace had it in stock. I couldn't even find it in the library. After months of frustration, I decided to go with the second recommendation everyone was giving me--Midnight Robber, Nalo Hopkinson's second novel.
I began reading Midnight Robber expecting to be dissappointed. All of the speculative readers raved about Brown Girl, but when asked about Midnight Robber, the usual reaction was "eh. Well, it's alright."
If this is alright, I'm scared of fantastic. By the second paragraph, Mignight Robber had me hooked.
"It had a woman, you see, a strong, hard-back woman with skin like cocoa-tea. She two foot-them tough from hiking through the diable bush, the devil bush on the prison planet of New Half-Way Tree..."
And so the reader is introduced to Tan-Tan, the heroine of the story. Tan-Tan is an exile, a bandit and an outlaw even to other exiles. She's a neo-Carribean Robin Hood, stealing from the greedy to give to the needy, rescuing the tired, sad and sick, driven by the talismanic chant, "It ain't have no magic in do-feh-do/If you take one, you must give back two." Tan-Tan is rough, tough, and dangerous, but with an admirable sense of justice and fair play created by the hardship she's endured.
But before all of that hardship, Tan-Tan was a little girl.
That is what is really at the heart of Midnight Robber--Tan-Tan's evolution from sweet, precocious and dreadfully unlucky little girl to maurauding mythical figure of a prison planet. Her hard luck begins with her parents, Antonio and Ione, two ratfinks of the first degree. They may love each other, but they certainly have a strange way of showing it, between having affairs and using young Tan-Tan as a weapon in their tempestuous relationship. In fact, it's one of these affairs that spurs the selfish, jealous events that catapult Antonio and Tan-Tan from the comfort of Toussaint planet and the security of the soca-singing nano-intelligence Granny Nanny to the spare, dangerous and technologically untouched prison world New Half-Way Tree.
There, on a planet full of exiles, Antonio and Tan-Tan have to find their way. Tan-Tan is young enough to adjust to the strangeness of the place--mako jumbie birds big as houses and intelligent native creatures called douens(from the Bajan myth) are only a few of the surprises in store for her. Antonio, on the other hand, uses his fall from grace as an excuse to get up to more ratfinkery, and worse.
It's his actions that drive Tan-Tan into the bush of New Half-Way Tree on her sixteenth birthday, where she quickly becomes the Tan-Tan of myth. That isn't the end of the story, of course. Ultimately, Tan-Tan can't run from her past--or her future, and it's only through her friends and her enemies that she's able to face facts.
Midnight Robber's greatest strengths are also it's greatest weaknesses. First of all, it's written in a mild form of Carribean patwa instead of standard English(with no glossary provided), something that might confuse some readers. It confused me at times, and I've heard people speak patwa all my life.
It's an entirely different experience to read something you've only heard spoken before, and I can imagine that people completely unused to the languages of the Carribean islands might have a hard time with it. (Case in point; the bookstore clerk staunchly refused to believe that there was any such word as inna, even after I showed him the spelling on the back cover of Midnight Robber. It's not that difficult a word to wrap your head around, dude.) However, patwa is enormous fun to read once you get into it, and it adds a fresh perspective and cultural reference point to the often overwhelmingly Eurocentric genre of speculative fiction.
Other issues are the "neatness" of the story. There is a lot of foreshadowing that goes into the creation of Tan-Tan the Midnight Robber, but when she finally becomes, it happens a little too quickly and easily for my likings. On the one hand, this is a fantastic way for Ms. Hopkinson to explore the link between myth and reality; but on the other, it's a little too hard to swallow, plot-wise.
Overall, Midnight Robber is an great read. It's definitely something to read if you're looking for something unique, that will broaden or reinforce your cultural perspective and entertain you. Ms Hopkinson is an excellent writer, very worthy of the John W Campbell prize she won for best new writer, and even more worthy of your perusal.
The Caribbean-colonized planet of Toussaint is the setting for this exciting new science fiction novel by the author of the award-winning Brown Girl i...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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