The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord (review)

My friend Thomas Armstrong used to talk about the emotion of a work. He was a writer, and he valued the role of emotion in the creative process: putting down words, considering their ability to move the reader, yes; but the need also for the writer to feel those words as he or she writes them. I mention Tom, who passed away very early in 2013 at the age of sixty, in context. Tom was a Canadian-Barbadian author. Karen Lord, a Barbadian whose second novel, The Best of All Possible Worlds, came out a few months after Tom died, knew him, too. She interviewed Tom about his novel Of Water and Rock for her blog, A Grain of Pure Salt. Lord writes speculative fiction from a non-traditional perspective; one thing this has meant is that she is deceptively Caribbean in her work and its underlying outlook. Tom was an immensely knowledgeable fan of speculative fiction, particularly its intersections with Caribbean literature. He would have had much to say, to Lord and to me, about the feelings her words conjure in her new book.

The language of The Best of All Possible Worlds is lush when it has to be, sturdy at other times. As with her award-winning debut novel, Redemption in Indigo (2010), it is at all times clear and controlled, with strips of beautiful imagery. The description of the opening chapter’s planetary retreat makes the place sound near-tropical: “The atmosphere was the cloudy blueish-lavender of a recently bioformed planet and the sun was scorching bright” (1–2). Lord could learn a little from the late, great Elmore Leonard about the narrative benefits of simply tagging dialogue with “he said” or “she said” instead of clever variants; but she understands emotion. When the famed pilot Naraldi arrives in his mindship—a spacecraft that is part of him—to tell an eminent civil servant named Dllenahkh of the destruction of Sadira, their home world, he can barely find the words: “Your mother, and my mother, and … everyone. Our home is no more. Our world is—” (4).

The Best of All Possible Worlds is a story that grapples with a “roil of emotions” (166). The reserve and discipline Dllenahkh exhibits are hardwired traits of his people. Nevertheless, the Sadiri are enquiring, inquisitive, and curious about other cultures. Required to reach out to former settlements and colonies, those called taSadiri, to re-establish links that will preserve their race, they probably have never been more so. The truth is they do not seem superior or standoffish, merely proud, and preoccupied with the pursuit of what makes a being whole rather than with material wealth. Dllenahkh would not and does not classify love strictly as an emotion, stating it is “one of the drives”: it is no different, to him, from “hunger, or wanting to procreate, or the desire to protect one’s offspring” (311). He is not the only Sadiri to feel this way.

The voice of the novel’s principal narrator, Grace Delarua (“second assistant to the Chief Biotechnician of Tlaxce Province”), is more difficult to like or love in the beginning. There is a bit of the headless rooster to her approach to life that not even her cheery and chatty Ntshune heritage can entirely explain. For all her mature otherworldliness, Delarua sounds deliberately like an all-American teenage girl: feisty and bright, smart and sexy (but not too), irrepressible and cracking wise … until she declares (as soon as she says “galore,” actually) she has an interest in and ease with languages (9). She’s a polyglot but one trying to find her own true voice. That voice may be interpreted to be the voice of her people, the Terrans of Cygnus Beta, a voice questioning its own sound: where it comes from and what its purpose might be.

Both Delarua and Dllenahkh are in the right place to sort themselves out. Cygnus Beta is a first-class frontier planet, if there is such...