>>REVIEW
A NEW MOON’S ARMS
Nalo Hopkinson
Warner Books, 336 pp.
A crotchety old woman’s panties are bunched up around her ankles, another woman of a certain age ducks behind her father’s pressboard coffin to conceal her giggling. Later that day the woman of a certain age, Calamity Lambkin, is making the beast with two backs with a man she doesn’t know, and isn’t terribly attracted to, in what he explains is typical "funeral sex." So far so good for Nalo Hopkinson’s The New Moon’s Arms.
Her new moon rises over the fictional Caribbean nation of Cayaba, a string of tropical islands struggling to boost its economy with salt mills and tourist strips. Everybody knows each other, gossip and old grudges hang around their necks, and few people have time to indulge in the African mojo magic the region’s culture was founded on.
Calamity is always nearby. She’s a licentious librarian who, in a fit of self-pity, changed her name from Chastity. Abandoned by one parent, rejected by another when she became pregnant at 15 and always chasing the wrong man, Calamity has earned her self-pity. Now the doctor says she’s hit menopause.
With the change of life, the magical powers she possessed in childhood have returned to her. They lead her, after a night of boozing solo, to find a toddler washed up on the beach near her home. With no friends and dwindling admirers, Calamity insists on fostering the little boy, who has otherworldly charms of his own.
Hopkinson is one of Canada’s best writers. Her lyrical prose echoes that of Toni Morrison and James Triptree, and the patois between her characters fixes them, especially to Canadian ears, in an enchanted world. The Caribbean fog permanently carries a threat of zombies. There is hope in this place where the slave ships sank, its cargo transformed into seals that swam away. Her world has always been a dark and blood-rich place to read.
The New Moon’s Arms is Hopkinson’s fourth novel. Her first was the acclaimed Brown Girl in the Ring, published in 1998. This latest piece is good, but Hopkinson is capable of better. Her lyricism is captivating, but here, she’s pushing it. The characters are irritating and unlikable. It’s easy to enjoy a well constructed cad, but these people, even with their hot flashes, bitterness and bisexuality, feel half finished and wholly tiresome.
The book corkscrews so aimlessly through the plot that it’s difficult to know for sure whether a story is told at all. It sputters through Calamity’s fights with lovers who reject her, with her flaky daughter who never forgave her carousing, her childhood memories and hot flashes. Calamity kicks and swears and cries and screws, but why should we care? Stylish prose is too easily used in place of meaningful writing. At the last minute, almost as if Hopkinson remembers there should be a point somewhere along the line, Calamity discovers she was right about something, faces a dramatic scene at sea and walks into the sunset. |
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