Book: AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS
Author: Rivers Solomon
Published by: Westland
Price: Rs 599
In Rivers Solomon’s novel, the action takes place aboard Matilda, a spaceship that has been travelling for a long time in search of a habitable planet. Matilda might have left Earth behind but it has taken racism and violence along. For life on Matilda is governed by the colour of one’s skin: the light-skinned people live on the upper decks and have every facility at their disposal, while the lives of the ones with darker skin on the lower deck are defined by deprivation, forced labour, pain, and punishment.
The book opens with Aster, a low-decker with the knowledge of healing, amputating the foot of a young boy without proper facilities. Things have been worse lately due to constant blackouts in the lower decks. This, along with the fact that the ship’s current ruler has fallen sick, reminds Aster of the time when her mother had died soon after giving birth to her. She tries to find the connection between these two deaths and the malfunctioning of the ship’s power source with the help of Theo, the surgeon-general of the ship, and Giselle, another young girl from her own deck with whom Aster shares a complex relationship.
The systemic and systematic violence that the lower-deck people suffer is closely modelled on the cruelty faced by the slaves in Antebellum South. There exists a strict code of conduct and hierarchy on Matilda which doesn’t leave space for transgression. But then there are characters like Aster and Theo who aren’t limited by the strict binaries of gender. Aster, for instance, is a Tarlander and “Tarlander bodies did not always present as clearly male and female”; Theo, too, is “[a] queer. Not a man or how a man’s supposed to be.” This gender fluidity adds another layer to Solomon’s complex narrative and to the power struggles within.
The book is rich in detail, but the overall mood is one of bleakness. It would also require familiarity with life in the Antebellum South to appreciate the nuances of Solomon’s world-building.
