After reading Midnight Robber last year, I decided to use one of my Audible.com credits to pick up Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring. Brown Girl is Hopkinson’s debut novel, the winner of a new voice in fiction
contest that publisher Warner Books held in the 90s.
While interesting, I wasn’t as enamored of this book as I was of Midnight Robber. For one, I expected science fiction. But it’s really a horror novel set in the near future using Caribbean folk religion as the base. Too much voodoo
ritual and too much blood for me. Voodoo in quotes not because it’s bad or scary but because I don’t know what the name for the religious tradition is for the kinds of things Hopkinson uses. If you’re into that sort of thing, this will be a great book. I don’t mean that facetiously either. The writing was really quite good. I’m just not into religious themed horror.
Ti-Jeanne lives in near future Toronto, an ungoverned zone abandoned by the Canadian government and ringed with roadblocks to prevent the lawlessness inside from touching the still extant normal
society in the rest of Ontario. Kind of like I imagine lots of people want to do to Detroit right now. Her mother left a decade prior to the story, and she lives with her grandmother Gro-Jeanne, who serves both as a medical doctor of sorts as well to the masses and as a Caribbean witch doctor to those who believe. Ti-Jeanne has newborn, not even named just yet. The father is Tony, a low-level runner for the Posse, the drug gang that controls most of Toronto. Ti-Jeanne left Tony to move back in with Gro-Jeanne because he couldn’t straighten himself out and Tony doesn’t know the child is his. She still carries a torch for him though, which is why she talks Gro-Jeanne (who doesn’t like Tony) into helping him escape from Toronto to the burbs. Outside, he’ll straighten up, find work, and send for Ti-Jeanne.
The Posse’s boss Rudy knows Tony is shiftless, but that he has some medic training. They give him a job to find
a donor human heart for which the Posse will receive a generous fee from a hospital outside lawless Toronto. He doesn’t want to do this. Tony doesn’t seem so much unwilling to kill, as scared.
Here’s where the religious horror comes into play. To get Ti-Jeanne and Tony out of Toronto, Gro-Jeanne calls on the spirits to hide the two. But then it becomes apparent that Rudy himself has a Caribbean duppy (human soul) under his control. The duppy can do most anything, including track Tony. This starts an escalating war of spirits, which doesn’t end bloodlessly. Really, lots and lots of blood.
Gro-Jeanne, Ti-Jeanne and Tony are great characters. Rudy is more of a caricature, but he’s still pretty enjoyable. The Caribbean flavor to the characters is somewhat interesting as well. Surprisingly, there’s very little unique to Toronto in the story. The Posse’s headquarters is in the CN Tower, and Hopkinson makes liberal use of Toronto’s street names and neighborhoods. But the culture seems to be Caribbean focused. Then again, Toronto isn’t known (at least to me) for it’s distinctive culture.
Unlike Metatropolis, I really enjoyed the narration in Brown Girl in the Ring. Peter Jay Fernandez was the narrator for the book. He did distinct voice characterizations for everyone. Best was the women got female sounding voices, without Fernandez using weird falsettos or anything like that. I won’t shy away from anything he’s reading in the future.
Title: Brown Girl in the Ring
Author: Nalo Hopkinson
Narrator: Peter Jay Fernandez
Imprint / publisher: Recorded Books
Format: Audiobook
Length:
Publication date: 1999
ISBN-13: 978-1-4361-7966-9
Subject: Inner cities — Fiction
Subject: Obeah (Cult) — Fiction
Subject: Future in popular culture — Fiction
Subject: Toronto (Ont.) — Fiction
LC classification: PR9199.3.H5927 B76 1998
