Redemption in Indigo, by Karen Lord
‘I’m Giana. What’s your name?’
The djombi thought, shrugged and replied, ‘When I am without a shadow, I may be called Constancy-in-Adversity, though others who see me differently have sometimes named me Senseless-Resignation-to-Suffering. I am a small thing, as you can see, but my mother says I am quite powerful in my own way.’
Giana nodded. The names were too large and the concepts too weighty for her to grasp, but the last she could understand. Mothers tended to say things like that, usually just before sending you to the well to fetch water.
Paama has just left her husband, Ansige, and returned to her home village. She can’t be blamed. Ansige is a foolish glutton. He isn’t a bad man, but he is selfish and silly and his appetite is endless. Paama is a well regarded cook, but Ansige cares more for volume than quality so even that merit of hers is wasted on him.
Ansige and Paama and all humanity’s struggles are watched by the djombi: spirits who are as old as the world itself though not unchanging. Among the djombi is the Indigo Lord, a powerful being that once acted as guide and guardian to mankind but which over the long millennia came to despise us and became our adversary. There are parallels to Lucifer in Western myth.
Now some of the djombi wish to humble the Indigo Lord and to curtail his power, and so they steal from him the Chaos Stick which gives its bearer the ability to control probability itself. They need to find someone who they can trust with such power and who will have the strength of character and the wisdom to wield it safely. They choose Paama.
Ansige is headed to Paama’s village to win her back, accompanied by a caravan full of food and his servants Rahid and Pei. If he gets to Paama too quickly she might not have the space to develop as she needs to for the djombi’s purposes. A trickster spirit in the form of a spider is sent to intervene…
First Rahid bought a drink for them both, and they grew more cheerful. Then Pei bought a drink for them both, and on that they grew indignant, telling tale after tale of the madness that was a man’s life in the service of Ansige. Then a third round arrived, and they did not know who was paying for it but when they looked around, there was a friendly-looking spider of more than average size who raised his glass cheerfully in their direction and indicated with a wave that they should go ahead and drink up on his behalf. Heartened by such a gesture of diplomacy from a representative of the animal kingdom, they toasted him gladly and resumed their tales of woe to each other.
The tale of Ansige the glutton is apparently taken from Senegalese folklore, though it’s only a springboard here for a wider story. The spider-spirit is never named as Anansi, the famous West African character with much in common with Brer Rabbit and Coyote and Bugs Bunny and all those other wonderful mythic tricksters, but it’s clear that’s who he’s based on. Here they mix with a range of other characters mortal and immortal, all of them larger than life and yet all of them still convincingly human (even the ones who aren’t).
What makes it all work is tone. The book is structured like a slightly rambling folk-tale, full of diversions and asides each of which ultimately casts light on the main story. The narrative voice is an opinionated character in its own right and the whole thing is shot through with a warm sense of compassion and humor. At times the narrator addresses the reader (listener?) directly:
I know your complaint already. You are saying, how do two grown men begin to see talking spiders after only three glasses of spice spirit? My answer to that is twofold. First, you have no idea how strong spice spirit is made in that region. Second, you have no idea how talking animals operate. Do you think they would have survived long if they regularly made themselves known? For that matter, do you think an arachnid with mouthparts is capable of articulating the phrase ‘I am a pawnbroker’ in any known human language? Think! These creatures do not truly talk, nor are they truly animals, but they do encounter human folk, and when they do, they carefully take with them all memory of the meeting.
There’s a marvellous mixing here of the ordinary and extraordinary. It’s not quite clear when the novel is set, because it could be set near any-time as befits a semi-fable. There are spirits, but they’re no more fantastic than Ansige and his incredible appetite. The concerns of the villagers are those anyone would have: love; family; what to do with your life.
I grew up to a degree with fantasy and genre fiction, and I’m used to it having a certain sort of protagonist. Young; highly skilled; dangerous to their foes; born to a vital destiny; male. It’s a tedious list. Paama isn’t particularly young, her main skill is her cooking, she has no destiny to speak of and she’s definitely not male. The Indigo Lord threatens her family to convince her to give him back the Chaos Stick and she immediately agrees – why should she endanger her sister’s life for some magical device she never asked for? It’s distinctly unheroic.
The Chaos Lord learns though that there’s a catch. Now Paama has the stick she can only relinquish it to someone she honestly believes deserves it more than she does, and however much she’s threatened she doesn’t believe an ageless demon-lord is a good choice for that kind of power. Reluctantly then he has to take her on a trip showing her why she should give him the stick, and that means for the first time in a very long time he has to get to know a human being. He is pride incarnate, but for once he can’t just demand what he wants and expect to get it.
Here he and Paama find themselves in a cafe, where Paama is surprised to find the Indigo Lord making time for a newspaper and slice of cake by way of a break in their journey.
While she ate, the djombi read from a newspaper and absently snacked on portions of her dessert, ‘just for the taste,’ he said.
…
‘Why do you read that? I thought that you knew everything,’ she asked.
He gave her one of his unfathomable blank looks. ‘I like to read the paper for the same reason that I like the occasional bit of food – to sample human tastes.’
‘I thought you despised us,’ she said quietly.
His hands squirmed on the folded newspaper. ‘Not despise – not all of human taste is abhorrent. There are bits that are enjoyable.’
‘Like chocolate cake and comic-strip humour?’ she murmured, eyes downcast, with mild sarcasm.
‘Are you eating that last piece of cake?’ he asked, unmoved by her criticism.
There’s no great surprise where the story goes, but there needn’t be as the pleasure here is all in the telling. This is a novel packed with vivid and enjoyable characters: Ansige; Paama; the Indigo Lord; the spider-trickster-spirit; later a hunter who can find any quarry and is hired by a convent of magical nuns to track down what’s happened to Paama. It sounds ludicrous, but then so do most myths and fables where gods wander the Earth disguised as shepherds and foxes on the road disguise themselves as the Buddha. Just because it couldn’t happen doesn’t mean it can’t be true.
Now for two incredibly minor and petty criticisms. Firstly, Karen Lord, cats can’t eat chocolate cake! Chocolate is poisonous to cats. Bad author, bad.
That will make no sense to anyone who hasn’t read the book, but there you go.
The second petty criticism is a formatting issue on the kindle version, which has Karen Lord’s (oddly boastful) bio almost immediately following the end with basically just a paragraph break between the two. That sounds like nothing, but what it meant was that I read straight on from the end and suddenly found myself without any warning in an author bio. The contrast jarred and was surprisingly damaging to the mood Lord had created to that point.
It’s curious how such a minor point of formatting can damage a book, but it did. Not seriously and if I were grading this on Amazon it wouldn’t change the score, but it was irritating and it was avoidable. It was the literary equivalent of going to a classical concert and having some boor shout “Bravo!” the very instant the final notes start fading in the air so that you lose the chance of a moment’s reflection.
As I said though, these are petty points and to end on them alone would be unfair to a charming novel. Redemption in Indigo is a delightful book awash with life and with the chaos of a world that even with undying spirits still looks very much like our own.
Other reviews
David of David’s Book World put me on to this. His characteristically fine review is here. I also found online this rather good review from Culturally Disorientated, a blog previously unknown to me, here.
Filed under: Fantasy Fiction, Lord, Karen, Science Fiction Tagged: Karen Lord