Blackheart Man (2024) was released in just the last month or so. Jamaican/Canadian woman Nalo Hopkinson (1960- ) is my new favourite author (you’d already worked that out?) so I got stuck into it just as soon as Audible put it on my phone.
And I loved it! It is almost as good as Midnight Robber (2000) which is saying something. Now I just have to work out the nomination process for the Ursula K Le Guin Prize 2025 to do my bit to get it on the shortlist.
Over the past month I have been listening to Blackheart Man and reading the fourth in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, for which I hope to publish a review next week (and I have the latest Sally Rooney waiting to go. Life is good!). I have been focusing as I read on how I might discuss what I think the author is aiming to achieve, while at the same time not giving away more than the bare outlines of the plot, especially for new releases.
Hopkinson’s first ambition, I think, is to make a place for Jamaican-American speech, ways of thinking, approaches to life, in English Lit. I’m not up on American writing, so I have no idea who else might be doing the same, but I am very much enjoying my excursions into non-Anglo writing.
In this novel her ambition seems to be to discuss ideas about Jamaican spirituality (again); to look at the distribution of power within a society; forms of government; forms of social organisation; marriage; and the raising of children. But to do this she must tell an engrossing story that is fun to read. And she succeeds. I don’t think there is any point in writing a novel of ideas which doesn’t have a story to carry them forward.
The background to the plot is that on a (presumably Caribbean) island, Chynchin, there is a self-supporting, pre-industrial society. Government is by a council of elders, whose sessions all, including children, may attend and contribute to. Goods and services are created and distributed on the principle ‘from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs’ – those are not the words Hopkinson uses. Tourists sometimes insist on paying with coins or gold for which the locals have no use. Marriage is between one woman and two men. Women seem to have the upper hand economically; men still seem to take the lead in romance, but that was my impression rather than anything specific Hopkinson wrote. As far as I can tell without the book, she uses neutral personal pronouns throughout.
Two hundred years earlier, white colonizers, the Ymisen, had attempted to occupy Chynchin and had been beaten off after three witches, according to legend, devised a plan where a road was constructed over a lake of pitch (‘piche’), the invading army rode/marched across the road, and sank to their deaths in the pitch.
Now the army may be coming back to life. And the Ymisen have returned, in 15 galleons, re-asserting their right to rule the island.
The protagonist, Veycosi is a student at the ‘colloquium’. When he graduates he will be married to his best mate and to Thandy, who is mother to 12 year old Kairo who has been born by ‘twinning’, that is, without a father and is therefore next in line for the role of witch/priestess.
Veycosi makes many tragi-comic attempts to influence events. After the failure of the first, the elders strip him of his privileges as a student and assign him the task of collecting all known folk stories about the earlier defeat of the Ymisen. For this he is given the assistance of another, female, student, giving rise of course, to the possibility of an affair.
Ursula Le Guin set her alternative societies on other worlds, as did Hopkinson in Midnight Robber. But here she choses to set Chynchin in an alternative reality, making it more Fantasy than SF, but still within the same tradition – and possibly more like Le Guin’s Earthsea series, which I haven’t read.
It becomes clear over the course of the story that Chynchin society is divided racially, but that the original inhabitants are largely oblivious. The lower class, the Mirmeki, though also Black, were originally slave soldiers of the Ymisen and are routinely called ‘Deserters’ which, it seems, they hate.
I find it interesting that for all the witchery and spirit lives in Hopkinson’s writing, younger protagonists – Veycosi here, and Ti-Jeanne in Brown Girl in the Ring – are largely non-believers. Veycosi goes to a lot of trouble to construct non-magical reasoning for the stories he gathers; though I think Hopkinson generally lets just a little bit of magic have the last word.
We have been discussing during Bron’s Orwell project this year, the failure of communism – both the failure of communist societies to thrive and their usual descent into totalitarianism. One of the reasons for these failures is the determined opposition of American oligarchs and their client governments, expressed through sanctions and blockades.
Hopkinson, like Le Guin, posits the possibility of utopian society. Here, she shows that a pacifist and not centrally governed society must always be at risk from malign external actors. I have on my shelves Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice, Hugo Adam Bedou ed.. I’m not sure that it includes witchcraft, but Hopkinson and Bedou would seem to share similar ideas.
This is a wonderful novel, full of ideas and lyrical writing and with a rollicking good story to carry them along. Read it.
If you were wondering, the Blackheart Man is a witch who steals children’s hearts.
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Nalo Hopkinson, Blackheart Man, Saga Press (Speculative fiction imprint of Simon & Schuster), 2024. 384pp. Audible version read by Ron Butler. 12 hours.