Review: Trouble the Saints, by Alaya Dawn Johnson
by Rich Horton
The novel is told in three sections, each from the POV of a different character. It opens with Phyllis Le Blanc, a black woman who can pass for white, talking with her white lover, a dentist. It seems her -- boss, I suppose, a mobster named Russian Vic, wants her to do another job for him -- and we realize that Phyllis is a hitwoman for Vic, his Angel of Death -- and that this is related to her preternatural skill with knives, a skill she believes is "Saint's Hands", a supernatural gift that has come to occasional people in her family (and, we later learn, people in other black families.) The woman she is supposed to kill actually shows up at her door the next morning -- but Phyllis, or Pea, is still hoping she can avoid do this job, as she has declined Vic's requests for months.
The rest of this section reads largely as noir: we are submerged in Russian Vic's world, which includes the dentist; and Tamara the Snake Dancer, and Pea's old lover Dev, a mixed race man with an English mother and a dead Indian (from India) father; and Vic's top assistant, Walter Finch, called Red Man. We learn that Vic is obsessed with "Saint's Hands", and has tried to acquire as many as he can, by killing their owners; and the Pea's belief that Vic will only assign her hits of people who really deserve it is absurdly naive; and that Pea's job has estranged her, to a degree, from her sister and her niece and nephew; and that a war is coming -- the book is set in 1941/1942. The noir aspect seems to point to a confrontation between Pea and Russian Vic, but that comes suddenly, and early, with somewhat shocking results.
So the second part is told by Dev, after he and Pea get back together, and leave the city, to a house Dev owns in upstate New York. Both are trying to stay separate from their criminal past (though Dev, it should be noted, was actually a policeman informing on Russian Vic, though at the same time protecting some of his friends.) But the outside world intrudes -- Dev is drafted, and (as a pacifist, despite his involvement in many murders, which tortures his conscience) he doesn't feel he can serve -- but the only ways to solve that problem involve asking for help from either the police or his criminal associates. Pea is also fighting her guilt over her killings, her feeling that her "hands" are angry with her, and, eventually, a difficult pregnancy. The toll of America's racist system hangs heavy as well, embodied here by the corrupt family that has ruled this small town for decades, and their treatment of their maid, and her son, who has Saint's hands as well. This part too ends with a bang.
The final section is told by Tamara, as Dev (and also Tamara's actor boyfriend) are off at war, and Tamara is staying with Pea. Here (and, really, throughout the book) we learn about the past of all three characters, and we learn more about how racism, in both the South and North, has driven their lives. Pea's pregnancy is fraught, the men at war are constantly in danger, and Tamara is taken up with her own guilt, both about her past association with a criminal organization, that she tried to rationalize away, and her present failure -- maybe? -- to fully help Dev and Pea and their coming child. Again, the ending is shocking, though in a different way, as a racist system is exposed even more fully, even while there are hopeful hints that Dev and Pea's child, Durga, is fated to be involved in the future battles against oppression.
My description, I feel, scants the real power of the book. Yes, there is (in section one) a noirish atmosphere, and criminal violence, and there is intrigue in the other parts as well. There is also jazz, and dancing, and descriptions of the black theater scene in the segregated South. (The North, theoretically less segregated, is shown as effectively as bad.) But the real heart is interior -- as each character battles with their past, their conscience, their present struggles, their supernatural powers. The characters are wholly believable, and the prose is strong. The other characters are well depicted, too, particularly Walter Finch, Vic's sidekick and eventual successor, truly a violent criminal but also, at heart, a moral man (who knows he sins) and a great friend. It's a very powerful novel, angry, deeply, wrenchingly sad, with a seed of hope.
I will confess that I thought another novel that year would win the World Fantasy Award -- Susanna Clarke's Piranesi. (And I will admit that I would still have chosen Piranesi, even now.) But it seems to me comparing those two novels reveals the fundamental issue behind all awards: there is no absolute scale on which we can rate art. These are two novels, published in the same year, and each indubitably Fantasy. But there are as different to each other as could be -- in setting, theme, tone. Piranesi's greatest strength is beauty and mystery. Trouble the Saints is darker (though Piranesi is dark enough it its way) and far angrier, and it presents real (and wretched) history far more directly and convincingly. There is no reason to choose one or the other -- read them both!
I'll add one more note -- I have both the Kindle version, and, for my recent read, the audiobook. And the audio version is outstanding -- it's read by Shayna Small and Neil Shah, and both narrators capture the multiple voices (and accents) beautifully.
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