![]() ![]() The Water Dancer is narrated by Hiram Walker, raised as a slave on a Virginia tobacco plantation even though his white father is the plantation owner. I suspect someone’s writing a dissertation on it right now, grumbling that just when the first draft is almost done, here comes Coates with a major novel that’ll require a whole new chapter, because it can’t be ignored. Winters’s Underground Airlines, the literal underground railway in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, etc. Reading it now, after reviewing Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, it seems apparent that Coates’s novel is part of a substantial tradition of drawing on fantasy or horror to illuminate aspects of American slavery – the ghost in Morrison’s Beloved, the magical Allmuseri and their mysterious god in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, the time-slippage in Butler’s Kindred, the main character’s visions of the future in James McBride’s Song Yet Sung, the alternate history of Ben H. ![]() I missed Ta-Nehisi Coates’s first novel The Water Dancer when it appeared last fall to generally glowing reviews, and it didn’t seem to garner much attention from fantasy readers in general, despite a key fantastic trope being central to its plot. The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates ( One World 978-9-7, $28.00, 408pp, hc) September 2019. ![]()
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