Midnight Robber

Nalo Hopkinson
Completed 7/17/2021, Reviewed 7/18/2021
5 stars

It’s been way too long since I read a book by Hopkinson.  I decided to read a few of hers this year because she was named a Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master.  It’s an award given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the SFWA.  This is the third book of hers I’ve read now and it’s terrific.  The other two I read, The Salt Roads and Brown Girl in the Ring were also outstanding.  With outstanding prose written in pidgin English and tackling issues like incest and sexual abuse, she crafted an amazing novel.  It’s based on Caribbean folklore and traditions and it’s set on a planet in the future.  And she pulls it off spectacularly.  This book was nominated for multiple awards including the Hugo and Nebula about twenty years ago.  

Tan-Tan is a young girl who lives on the planet Toussaint, inhabited by Caribbean descent peoples.  When her father the mayor accidently kills her mother’s lover, he exiles himself to another dimension that is filled with people who have been exiled from Toussaint.  And he takes Tan-Tan with him.  He loves her dearly; they had been practically inseparable since she was an infant.  Once in the other dimension of New Half-Way Tree they are met by an indigenous sentient creature called a douen who takes them to the nearest human village.  On the way, Chichibud shows them how to survive, particularly against the dangerous indigenous non-sentient creatures.  Once around other humans, instead of their lives settling down, they get worse.  Dealing with physical and emotional trauma, she splits into three parts of herself:  Good Tan-Tan, Bad Tan-Tan, and the Robber Queen.  They are not exactly distinct personalities, but they help her cope with the trauma.  

Tan-Tan is a beautifully constructed character, we meet her at age eight or nine, and follow her up to her sixteenth birthday.  Her favorite role playing is as the Robber Queen, a female version she created of the Midnight Robber which is a Carnival character where people pretend to hold up others and sing to them until the listeners leave or toss coins to them.  So when she actually splits into the three parts, it’s only natural that one of them would be the Robber Queen.  Tan-Tan was a child of privilege, but once she goes into exile with her father, she has to learn how to live on wits and skill alone.  When she runs away to live with the douen, she learns about understanding other cultures.  And the one thing that gets engrained in her is that when you take one life, you must give back two.  This leads to her life as the Robber Queen, helping people get out of bad situations.  And it is only through this part of her that she learns to accept the truth about what happened to her.

The prose is beautiful, albeit a little hard to read.  It is mostly in pidgin English which takes some getting used to, not unlike Brown Girl in the Ring.  At first I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to follow because it not only uses a Caribbean dialect, but also has a pretty strange sentence structure.  The most difficult to get used to was the use of he or she for him/his or her.  But once I got it, the book went pretty smoothly.  

The world-building is also phenomenal, both Toussaint and New Half-Way Tree.  Hopkinson doesn’t do long descriptions of the worlds, but rather integrates it into the story.  So after a while, you realize you know all about the worlds without having to endure heavy exposition.  As for the aliens, the douen were fascinating, particularly the breakdown of the males and females.  That’s something I won’t go into detail about because it would be too much of a spoiler.  Suffice it to say, it was surprising and interesting.

I give this book five stars out of five.  Hopkinson creates a fantastic, non-white-based culture that is a joy to discover.  And integrating gut-wrenching issues as if it were non-genre fiction, while keeping within the genre was masterful.  I loved Tan-Tan and empathized with her deeply.  I felt like I inhabited her psyche, particularly bad Tan-Tan which was full of negativity that many of us hear in our own heads.    I’m going to read one to three more books by Hopkinson (for the Hopkinson reading challenge on Worlds Without End).  She’s not a prolific novelist, but what she puts out is just marvelous.