Nalo Hopkinson: The Chaos

The Chaos, Nalo Hopkinson's first YA novel, is at its heart a book about identity and self-discovery - but it is also a full-tilt boogie through chaotic transformations worthy of a serious dose of magic mushrooms, and the myths and folklore of more places and peoples than I could count, with special attention given to classic tricksters and ambiguous entities from Anansi to Br'er Rabbit to Baba Yaga.

Scotch, the protagonist, is 16 and feels she doesn't really fit in anywhere. Her father is a white Jamaican, her mother a black American; Scotch is light-skinned enough to pass but refuses to, while her brother, much darker in skin tone, faces all the racial pre-conceptions assigned to young black men in North America. Scotch's middleclass parents are strict; her father in particular has very clear ideas about what it means to be a good girl. So far, this could be any YA novel about learning to balance expectations while finding and expressing yourself. But Scotch has been seeing things lately, things that no one else can see, and she's developed a mysterious skin condition that is slowly covering her with sticky black spots.

And then one night, the world goes mad. A volcano erupts in Lake Ontario; her brother is sucked inside a strange shiny bubble; people, animals, plants and inanimate objects are transformed into surreal creatures; dinosaurs and sasquatches and creatures out of folklore and legend roam the streets of Toronto (a few brief references to places as disparate as London and Karachi indicate that the chaos is happening on a world-wide scale). Scotch sets out into this nightmarish world to find and save her brother.

Along the way, she encounters and survives a number of chaos-born dangers; she also makes some crucial discoveries about who she is, and can become - as a person, a young woman on the edge of adulthood, a sister, a daughter, a lover, a friend.

In a book that draws so much on myth and folklore, it's not surprising that I kept thinking about all the folktales about the sister searching for her brothers who have been taken from home, usually by some magic that they have ignored, or misinterpreted. In all these tales, the sister is tested in numerous ways, finds help in unexpected places, and grows throughout the search. I can't help but see some common thread between these tales and this book.

One thing that delighted me about this book was the marvellous multiculturalism of it - from the characters to the mythologies. I also appreciated that Hopkinson dealt head-on with the sometimes uncomfortable truth that people who are on the receiving end of one kind of prejudice, such as racism, and who can see it clearly and call other out on it, may be blind to their own prejudices in other areas, such as homophobia or ablism.

We never learn what caused the Chaos - though various people in the book speculate that something happened to literalise the fears, anxieties, and inner lives of people around the world, to make the symbols of their unconscious worlds real. And that's something else I like about the book. There are no neat endings in real life, either.