The Deep: Where Is The Heart of This Book?

The premise of fantasy novella The Deep by Rivers Solomon is so intriguing that I was sold on it immediately.   The descendants of pregnant African women that were thrown overboard by slavers during the Middle Passage became mermaids and established an undersea society.  I requested it from Net Galley and was thrilled when I was approved just before the release of this publication.  I couldn't wait to read it.   I prioritized it as my first read of November and this is my honest review.

                             

I discovered that the premise of The Deep wasn't the original creation of Rivers Solomon.  The men's names listed on the cover are the members of Clipping who wrote a song  inspired by the work of Drexciya , and developed it into an Afro-Futurist story line that goes well beyond Solomon's novella. I'd love to see Clipping's entire plot played out in a full length novel.   If you want to know more about  Clipping's song "The Deep"  go to the web page that I've hyperlinked.                   

Readers will also need to know that they will not be seeing the first hand accounts of kidnapped African women who experienced the horrors of the Middle Passage in Solomon's version.

The protagonist of this novella is Yetu who is the historian of this underwater culture.  This doesn't mean that she's written books about their history.  She carries their entire history within her mind.  Yetu tells us repeatedly about the pain of these memories.  I can imagine that they would be painful, but it's difficult for me to fully identify with Yetu if we aren't allowed to experience any of these historical memories in the course of the narrative.  We are told about them in some sort of chaotic montage.   Since Yetu's difficulty with enduring her people's history is supposed to be the central conflict of Solomon's The Deep, I think it's really crucial that we feel some part of it with her.

 I don't claim that this novella is a complete failure.  We are shown part of Yetu's life before she became a historian and what happened to her later in the narrative.   I felt that these aspects of the novella were stronger and more emotionally resonant.   Some might argue that these do represent the heart of the novella.  It's been called a re-telling of Hans Christian Anderson's tale, "The Little Mermaid".  I do see that a radically revisionist retelling is part of what Solomon is trying to accomplish here, but I don't perceive it as central.

I think Solomon was attempting to write about history, its transmission and its importance to society as a whole.  These weighty themes somehow got lost in the telling.  The message got submerged in the ocean's depths.  From an intellectual standpoint, I can see that Solomon intended to include these ideas.  Yet she didn't do any more than touch on them before they sank, and disappeared from view.  This reviewer is not a deep sea diver.  So I cannot retrieve them.  I can only tell you that it seems to me that the heart of Rivers Solomon's The Deep is missing.