The Water Dancer

This is at least 3 books. It is a rousing adventure story with well developed characters, it is a polemic about the evils of slavery, and it is a fantasy novel. Coates is a skilled writer and I spent the first third of the book admiring his use of language. At some point I became immersed in it, and stopped remarking on the cleverness. I was listening to the audiobook, and there are definitely places where call-response spoken word and snatches of song enriched that immersion. The fantasy element is relatively small, if important as a plot device / metaphor. Probably nobody reading this needs to be convinced of the general notion that slavery was (and is) evil, but at least for me, reading this helped me internalize some of the specifics. The hero is "owned" by his white father, the same father who sold his mother into even more brutal conditions further south. This shocking family situation is actually rather commonplace for the people in the book. I doubt that inhumanity is invented.

I don't feel qualified to properly review this book in my position, so I'll keep this short. I thought this was a beautiful book about a terrible subject. It made the characters real to me in a way I wasn't expecting, and while the cast does get a bit large and unwieldy later in the book, I still enjoyed what was shown to me. The story is simple -- a boy growing up in slavery, grown into a man who rescues others in slavery -- and also complex as he considers how he fits into the larger picture and experiences the stories that his fellow Underground compatriots tell.

While the added layer of magical realism added to the beauty of the storytelling, tonally I'm not sure adding it to such a heavy subject worked all the time. Mood whiplash was a thing I experienced, where the beauty of the magical realism would be bookended with terrible things. Maybe that was by design, I'm not sure.

Much like [b:Between the World and Me|25489625|Between the World and Me|Ta-Nehisi Coates|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1451435027l/25489625.SY75.jpg|44848425], I think this would make for some good required reading. There's lots to unpack here, both in the words and in the history of the topic.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a beautiful debut novel, conveying the emotional toll and outrageous wrongs suffered by people who were forced into slavery in the American South. The story emphasises the importance of memory. Without memory, there is no life story, no collective knowledge, no culture. For a group of people who have no rights at all, who can be sold away from their family members and traditions, memory is tantamount to a sense of identity.

In this novel, Coates refers to slaves as The Tasked, while the plantation owners are Quality. The main character is Hiram Walker, the Tasked son of a plantation owner, who was brutally separated from his mother when his father sold her away. Hiram becomes the servant of Maynard, his Quality half-brother, and they are perfect foils; Maynard is a coarse, slow witted boor whose character makes the word "quality" suitably sarcastic. In contrast, it is obvious from the beginning that Hiram is gifted in many ways, including a phenomenal memory.

Hiram eventually becomes involved with The Underground Railroad, and leads people to freedom with a skill called conduction. This is magical, and involves oral story telling on the part of the conductor. As Harriet Tubman tells Hiram, "Memory is the chariot and memory is the way." This seems spiritual, a way to acknowledge the world while rising above it.

This is a thought provoking novel with well written characters, and I recommend it highly.

Slavery is about trauma. Trauma is about events too emotionally overwhelming to be integrated into one's understanding. These are the kind of events that clinically result in repressed or altered memories. Reality has to surrender so that the personality can survive. And sometimes it still doesn't survive.

In treatment, the patient has to be helped to tolerate what was once intolerable. In part this is done by reframing it--say, by making it into a story. This isn't science, but art. Only powerful art will allow the inexpressible to be expressed, allowing the trauma to heal.

The result is an alteration of time and space. In the novel, this is symbolized by a literal alteration--a superpower that transcends physical boundaries. Like all superpowers, it has limits and comes at great cost to the possessor.

But this isn't a genre novel or a tale of good guys versus badguys. It's about what we can allow ourselves to understand as individuals and as a society. It turns out that those who don't suffer understand the least of all.

I am a Ta-Nehisi Coates fan. If there were a t-shirt, I would wear it. So this novel was disappointing to me.

It started out very well. The prose was crisp and the characters seemed to be heading in an interesting direction. Unfortunately, the story fizzled out and though there were a lot of really wonderful ideas I didn't think they cohered. Perhaps I am deficient, but halfway through this novel I felt bored. I had to really push through to the end and even then I never felt a sense of satisfaction. The magical realism was wonderful but it felt undeveloped. The characters suffered but I never felt I knew them.

Slave narratives are rough reads. The kind of pain and suffering one wades into is no small exchange for a reader. So if I'm going to open up to that I need more in return and while some of the ideas in this novel had interesting intellectual implications the force of narrative fell far too flat for me to engage with them.