2014 read #68: Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson.

Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson
330 pages
Published 2000
Read from July 16 to July 18
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

While reading Brown Girl in the Ring, I found myself wishing the whole book had been written in the lovely, alluring Jamaican patois Hopkinson put in the mouth of her central characters. Here in her second book, I get my wish. Sometimes I think the most beautiful and indelible music of the English language comes from its creoles and patois; over the last couple days I find my brain trying to hitch on and emulate the singy-singy rhythms and dialect of Hopkinson's narration.

That narration is this novel's primary strength. The basic plot is workmanlike, though it provides a welcome twist on the tired old "human exile welcomed into noble savage alien village" hokum (spoilers): Rather than saving the birdlike douen, Tan-Tan merely gets their village-tree attacked, and she's left to her own devices after the douen dismantle their home and scatter, hunter-gatherer style, to other villages. And as seems to be a thing with Hopkinson, Tan-Tan's survival is complicated by pregnancy.

That pregnancy, I hate to say, was probably my main complaint about Midnight Robber. I feel uncomfortable with the idea of a child born of incestuous rape, a pregnancy the central character spends half the book desperately wishing to abort, becoming an interdimensional savior. It's a complicated topic, so I'll shift over to my main problem, how the pregnancy defined the structure of the last half of the book. Throughout the novel, the narrator weaves in charming folktales about the exploits of Tan-Tan the Robber Queen -- a corpus of legends, we learn at the end, that has sprung up in a manner of seven months, the result of a few speeches and a handful of petty criminals getting chastened in out of the way settlements. The legends suggest something, well, legendary. To have it all be so banal in the end, so ordinary and so totally not legendary, feels like a cheat. Maybe that's the idea, deconstructing the idea of legend and epic narrative in modern sci-fi, or something. Or maybe it's a case of my expectations not matching the story the author wanted to tell. I wanted to follow the tale of a young woman growing into the role of Robber Queen over the course of decades in the fierce wilds of New Half-Way Tree, not a handful of months as a young woman grows to love her rapist's baby.

I dunno. I think it's the legends that soured me on the ending. If the legends had been circulating years later, it'd be a different story, but maybe I'm putting too much thought into this.