Note: I received a free copy to independently review.
Hausa Blue (2021) is set from 1917 to 2017, and from Germany to India, England, and Africa, with flashbacks to the 1800s. Mostly, it is set in London.
Starting in the passive voice is disappointing, as 15-year-old Greta and her mother Hildegard hunt an arachnid species in the heathlands of northern Germany after the First World War.
A hundred years later in 2017, the reader is taken to London, with Dipa Cameron, a dressmaker’s daughter. At the same time, the reader is also taken to Bangladesh. Dipa is ‘transitional’ – ‘Yes ! I’m transitional, in between, neither one thing or the other … I was a child, and a seamstress with Mum, and a nurse, and a lady’s maid and a villasitter Yangan and a Queen all irry and geedy.’ [Irry means imitation, and geedy means authentic.]
Fashion takes over the mystifying themes of this novel to bring visual references and insight to readers. Dipa Cameron is wearing a Hausa Blue check crinoline (a reference to the royal tartan from the House of Hanover-Hausa, and the Hausa Kingdoms of West Africa). She doesn’t like red.
The story dips in and out of worlds in time, tenses, space, and suspension of beliefs – and somewhere between Revolution and Liberty, Critical Mass, and Akashic Records and Greta’s world (where ‘racial superiority or inferiority eventually died across the globe’). Instead of the British catch-phrase Calm Down and Carry On, I advise readers to Calm Down and Concentrate! – because reading this book is not a walk-in-the park exercise. ‘Let’s crack on.’
The story is an alternative reality; an alternative history. It is the time of the New Management in the British Empire – and the HyperTyper form of communication, and Krito-Krito automatons. Europe is now called Carte Blanche. If readers know anything about British politics, they can relate to this weird ‘Alice-in-Wonderland’ world, otherwise they will be lost between the author’s world and reality. However, the intrusive narrator explains all when readers get lost in the confusing maze of realities (i.e. ‘the infinite permutations of our planet in the multiverse’).
As Liberty, the lawyer, says to Dipa, ‘I know it’s confusing Dipa, you’ve missed a baban busy time out there in the world. But it will all make more sense when you’re free and you can participate in society.’ The story’s end location is a nod to another future.
I prefered the author’s first novel Changing the Subject (2019). This second novel is a long, lowbrow blend of books like the 1922 communist and feminist utopian novel Red Star, the 1973 fantasy novel Red Shift, and the 2014 dystopian science fiction novel Red Rising, combined with a unique (con)fusion of covid and contaminated Brexit-transitional, royally multi-racial, multi-lingual, (counter)revolutionary, parallel worlds. The book is probably best for Brits who love the fantastical, intimate intricacies of British politics.
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MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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