Rosewater, not revisited

In which I struggle with this bold and engrossing sci-fi story

Love is for pussies; real lovers get pussy.

This is one of the many pearls of wisdom served up by Kaaro, the narrator of Rosewater, a sorta-psychic who finds himself in the unique position of having to defend Nigeria and the world from an alien invasion.

“Kaaro can be a valuable asset. That said, he is sexist, materialistic, greedy, intolerant and amoral,” writes his supervisor in a review.

Oh thank God, I thought, when I read that line. So the author knows what’s up.

It’s imperative to know that the author is at least aware of how irritating Kaaro is, because Kaaro sizes up every female who wanders into his path for her sexual charms, for example, the second wife of one of his enemies: “His second wife is enormously fat. She literally looks like a monument to greed. Beautiful face, though.”

At other times, Tade Thompson’s story shies with a deep and nuanced awareness of history:

There is detritus of the nation’s communal consciousness that I have to navigate. The blood and sweat of slaves in a stew of their own anguish at being removed from their motherland, the guilt of slavers, the prolonged pain of colonisation, the riots, the CIA interference, the civil war, the genocide of the Igbos, the tribal pogroms, the terrorism, the killing of innocents, the bloody coups, the rampant avarice, the oil, the dark blood of the country, the rapes, the exodus of the educated class…If I were untrained, this would bog me down.

Sentences like these establish that Kaaro comes from somewhere, he’s grounded in a context that assaults him daily, especially as a psychic. The story weaves between influences and reference points: it begins with Kaaro reading from Plato’s Republic. Much like the alien organisms that enable telepathic communication in his world, Kaaro’s multi-voiced history exists in the water and the air, invisibly and visibly. Rosewater is not bogged down by ideology. At times the story is a mystery about Kaaro’s powers, at other times a thriller in which he barely evades his enemies. Fittingly for someone who journeys into others’ minds for a living, Kaaro’s journey is partly internal, triggered in part when he meets a woman who challenges his own notion of his solitary destiny.

The world he lives in has been seeded by xenoforms, mysterious organisms that allow some people to communicate telepathically, and that can also heal people’s many illnesses. No one understands where the xenoforms came from or why they’re there. Kaaro lives in Rosewater, a town formed around an upraised dome that houses an alien entity. The government really wants to know what goes on inside the dome, why is why they need Kaaro.

It’s hard to write a novel about first contact that doesn’t feel cliche, but with the xenoforms — and the internal/external conflict they create —Thompson manages it pretty handily. Thompson’s world-building is great, although he skips back and forth in Kaaro’s narrative in a way that ultimately becomes deeply confusing. Despite this piecemeal storytelling, revelation arrives all at once; Kaaro understands the mystery near the end of the book, when the alien reveals its plans to him in their entirety. I wished for a slower and more earned pace of discovery, but perhaps Thomspon was too busy showing us the contours of his world. This book is, after all, the first in a trilogy. I would have liked more exploration, this far into 2020, of what it means to be an alien at all. Thompson’s is a sophisticated narrative; perhaps that nuance is coming in later books.

That said, I leave it to you whether reading a heavily action-inflected sci-fi story told from the point of view of an avowed sexist is refreshing. After all, we come from somewhere, too. There are times when Kaaro’s attitudes become both tedious and harmful; his crimes against women are ones of neglect, cruelty and incomprehension. At many times, they turned my gut.

Ultimately, much like Kaaro’s many girlfriends, this story impressed and engrossed me but left no emotional imprint; perhaps because the character’s attitudes and motivations didn’t speak to me. I felt no connection to the conclusion, even when it laid out profoundly high stakes for the future relationship between the alien and humankind. Your mileage may vary.