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review: Rosewater
Apr. 23rd, 2019 09:37 pmTade Thompson's novel Rosewater is named after a city that has grown up around an alien edifice somewhere in Nigeria. Scenes before the edifice grew are intermingled with scenes that come after. The viewpoint character, Kaaro, is an interesting sort of antihero. Maybe I should say he's straight-up aheroic. He dislikes violence and avoids carrying a gun, but he is also inclined to shirk responsibility in small and large ways. His stealing in the earlier timeline seems like the kind of awful teenage choice people I care about have made. Some of the choices Kaaro makes in the alien-mediated psychic realm were harder for me to handle. This isn't a book that minds making readers ill-at-ease, though. If you weren't ever disconcerted, maybe it would have failed you.
The later-timeline Kaaro struck me as deeply, quietly depressed. I wondered for a long time whether he would align with the aliens, or with one of the groups trying to exploit or control them. In the end, Kaaro doesn't choose either option. He simply decides that he wants to be alive, and to be engaged with the world. This is mediated mostly through the woman he's in love with, and it's hard to say whether this resolve will stick once the new-relationship glow wears off. Maybe? They have compatible levels of weird secrets.
All of the women in Rosewater are intense, strong-minded, ambitious people. They know what they want, in a way that Kaaro often doesn't. I liked them very much; I particularly enjoyed a conversation Kaaro has with the brilliant engineer Oyin Da about what fraction of her has become alien and what fraction of her has turned into a robot. I wondered about the pattern, though, where the man gets to be feckless and uncertain, while the women are all strong. I've noticed it often before in comic novels--Pratchett in particular tends this way--and though I like all the tough complicated interesting women as individuals, in aggregate I sometimes wonder what this authorial choice says about who gets to be ordinary. It's a trickier pattern to criticize because fecklessness does have different costs, depending on who you are. That's why Kaaro's relentless refusal to play the hero matters, in the first place.
(Review based on a NetGalley copy.)
The later-timeline Kaaro struck me as deeply, quietly depressed. I wondered for a long time whether he would align with the aliens, or with one of the groups trying to exploit or control them. In the end, Kaaro doesn't choose either option. He simply decides that he wants to be alive, and to be engaged with the world. This is mediated mostly through the woman he's in love with, and it's hard to say whether this resolve will stick once the new-relationship glow wears off. Maybe? They have compatible levels of weird secrets.
All of the women in Rosewater are intense, strong-minded, ambitious people. They know what they want, in a way that Kaaro often doesn't. I liked them very much; I particularly enjoyed a conversation Kaaro has with the brilliant engineer Oyin Da about what fraction of her has become alien and what fraction of her has turned into a robot. I wondered about the pattern, though, where the man gets to be feckless and uncertain, while the women are all strong. I've noticed it often before in comic novels--Pratchett in particular tends this way--and though I like all the tough complicated interesting women as individuals, in aggregate I sometimes wonder what this authorial choice says about who gets to be ordinary. It's a trickier pattern to criticize because fecklessness does have different costs, depending on who you are. That's why Kaaro's relentless refusal to play the hero matters, in the first place.
(Review based on a NetGalley copy.)
