Tuesday, August 24, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Dark of the Sea by Imam Baksh

 





The Dark of the Sea is a young adult novel by Guyanese author Imam Baksh, which won a 2018 award for best Young Adult Caribbean novel.  It's a really short novel, with the paperback edition I borrowed via inter-library loan being exactly 200 pages, so it won't take long for even a young adult to read.  But that short length doesn't prevent it from having a lot of impact.

The Dark of the Sea is a dark YA fantasy novel following a 15 year old boy from a poor town in Guyana, riddled with alcoholism, drug-usage, and suicide, as the poverty makes it incredibly hard for anyone to eek out a living.  And while the main foe of the story is a chthulu-esque horror, whom the protagonist has to fight with aid from a city of merfolk along with a number of other mythological figures, the real focus of the story is on the difficulties such people and kids face, as they are left behind without help, and begin to feel hopeless as a result.  It's notably a story willing to show that staying in a terrible school might not be the answer, with the important thing being to find the courage to keep living anyway.  

More specifics after the jump:

Trigger Warning: Suicide.  

---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
15 year old Danesh knows he's only a few months from dropping out of his poor school in Guyana, where the teachers are less interested in helping Danesh with his dyslexia and illiteracy than beating him for making them look bad - especially after his best friend already dropped out upon turning the legal age of 16.  But there isn't much else for Danesh out there in life, and he finds himself haunted by the tale of his uncle sacrificing a child years ago, as well as the time he ruined a man's life helping his grandfather steal bicycles.  

But when Danesh was young, he found himself seemingly able to breathe and see unnaturally underwater, a moment he can never forget.  And after an encounter with a mermaid named Medusa, Danesh finds himself realizing that moment was real - and taken to an underwater city, whose denizens are preparing for the return of a monstrous horror.  And Danesh may be the only hope for both his poor village and Medusa's underwater city....if he can prove himself worthy by passing the tests given to him by the strange underwater society.  

But what may be the biggest challenge for Danesh may not be the coming horror or the underwater trials, but mustering up the strength to push through the pains of living without much hope, where death seems like such an easy alternative.....
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The Dark of the Sea is a fascinating if depressing read because it pulls no punches about the unfairness of life in a situation like Danesh's in a poor town on the Essequibo river in Guyana and doesn't try to provide its hero with a way out of that life.  Danesh is absolutely a person who in another world, or even another story, would be able to have a very successful, happy, and well-off life: he's smart and excellent at puzzle solving, loving stories, and bright enough to be particularly good at working with computers, a fact that gets him a part-time job of sorts (not really) at the local library.  But he comes from a poor family in a poor village, and has dyslexia, which has led to him being unable to keep up in school and being functionally illiterate, despite his brightness.  In another wealthier town, Danesh would receive special attention in school to helping him with his learning disability, and would thrive, but Danesh's poor school not only doesn't have the resources for that, but is staffed by a bunch of teachers who would rather physically punish him for making them look bad.*

*In one notably dark moment, the teachers tell the kids that a doctor is coming from the government to give a speech about the high local suicide rate, and the teacher tells them that they better pay attention to the doctor or the teacher will beat them.* 

Baksh does not try to hide any of this, and in fact, the biggest struggle for Danesh in the story is to deal with it all and to keep finding reasons to stay living - and not his dealing with the mermaids under the sea or the lovecraftian monster coming for them all.  In fact, honestly those things - monster aside - are the rare peaceful part of his life, with the stories of the mermaids, taken from a mix of various cultures (Chinese, Greek, Indian, just like Guyanese society is a mix of various cultures) really keeping Danesh utterly riveted and driven.  It's when real life intervenes, such as a tragedy involving one of Danesh's friends or revelations about horrible things that Danesh's loved ones might have done, that Danesh finds himself paralyzed and afraid to go forward.  

The result is a story that works really well with these strong themes, and makes the case to its audience of young adults, many of whom will be in similarly hopeless-looking poverty-stricken atmospheres, that the brave thing to do is to stick it out and brave the pain of life, and hope to find something joyous in the end.  The Dark of the Sea isn't particularly optimistic even in the end on that front, and its message that suicide is a cowardly way out is something I'm not sure is the best anti-suicide message. Yet it all fits the story really well, as Baksh weaves together these real life themes with mermaids, stories of Greek and Indian myth, and Lovecraftian horrors all together pretty seamlessly.  

This is just really impressive YA with how it uses the fantasy elements to deal with such serious themes and to provide a message to its audience that never talks down or patronizes them, or even provides any sort of false hope.  It's easy to see how this book won an award and its message could seriously be used in a lot of communities around the world, unfortunately enough.  

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