Creatures of Passage by Morowa Yejidé
Posted in Fantasy, Reading Reviewed at 12:00 on 4 December 2024
Jacaranda, 2021, 310 p, including 2 p Map.
I was attracted to this by its cover which reminded me of the Trylon and Perisphere at the New York World’s Fair of 1939-40 but having now read it there’s nothing in the book which links to that at all.
It is set in 1977 in a fantasy area called Anacostia whose geography actually corresponds to part of Washington DC. Many of the references are to contemporaneous places in our world to which in most respects Anacostia corresponds. However, it is surrounded by the various Kingdoms of Delaware, Maryland and Virginia so clearly not our world.
Nephthys Kinwell drives a Plymouth round town as a kind of taxi service where she just seems to turn up where- and whenever she is needed. Every so often the text mentions the white girl in the boot (Yejidé uses the term trunk) thumping on the tyre or otherwise making a noise. The girl is a ghost. A pointer to the fact that strange happenings are in store is that Nephthys’s domestic life is plagued by the mysterious moving of bottles and other objects.
Nephthys was a conjoined twin and where they were separated she and her brother Osiris both have/had a half finger which sometimes glows but Osiris died in the local river some while ago; thought to have been killed by a shark due to the teeth marks on his body.
His daughter Amber is the author of the lottery, a newspaper column which predicts odd deaths and other occurrences. On his sojourns to the river Amber’s son Dash sees and converses with someone he calls the River Man. A schoolmate witnessed him there apparently talking to no-one and goads him about it. His response gets him in trouble.
Dash also is concerned by an act of molestation he thinks he saw committed by his school caretaker, Mercy Ratchet, on a girl in his class. Ratchet of course has a long history of such acts including on Rosetta, another viewpoint character, whose life’s trajectory he precipitated, as his was by his own experiences at the hands of a priest.
Osiris exists in the book’s main timeline as a ghost, though flashbacks show how he actually died. His travels in the realm of the dead, his name and that of Nephthys reflect ancient Egyptian mythology and the book’s five sections are titled according to the five ways creatures of passage die: moving through spaces; staying in one place; resigning life to another; surrendering one’s life; entering the void.
The writing style is fluid but often non-standard, frequently omitting commas in lists, “Where signs omens bones transpired in infinite ways and indefinite outcomes …… Each hour was a day year decade,” the continued (over?)use of the phrase “Many years later” perhaps meant to invoke Gabriel García Márquez. A flavour of the novel’s interests lies in the invocation of the Conundrum of Three, where the mind sought the memory of a body long gone, and the body withdrew from the mind and the spirit, and the spirit chased the echo of the other two.
There is a lot going on here, some of which I may have missed as my knowledge of Egyptian myth is sketchy but Yejidé brings all the strands together. Creatures of Passage‘s portrayal of the humans involved, their flaws and dilemmas is convincing. Though it looks at life from an odd angle it is one that illuminates.
Pedant’s corner:- “boys hung in jail cells” (hanged,) “found a remnant of indigo cloth that their mother had made in her closet” (to avoid ambiguity this is better phrased as ‘found in her closet a remnant of indigo cloth that their mother had made’,)
Plus points for areolae and for the subscripts in C16H14N2O.
Tags: Creatures of Passage, Creatures of Passage by Morowa Yejidé, Egyptian Mythology, Fantasy, Morowa Yejidé