Amina al-Sirafi Q4: Characters

NeilNjae

Amina is the main character here, but there are a lot of others with strong personalities. The variety of backgrounds seems true to what I know of the period and place.

Do you think these people are all interesting and well-drawn characters? Are they more than one-dimensional stand-ins? Do you have favourites?

Is Falco a believable villain?

One observation is the parallel between Jamal/Dunya and Marjana. Both childredn have strong, protective (grand-)mothers, both are kept secluded from the world, and both have identities different from their assigned role (trans man and half-djinn). Both are strong drivers of the plot. How do you think these characters are similar or different, and how do you think their trajectories will differ?

Raksh is the only non-human with a lot of "screen" time. Does he come across as something other from the human characters? Do his motivations both make sense and are believably alien?

clash_bowley

Everyone in this book is a person. I firmly believe that. The rest sounds analytical.

Apocryphal

I guess my first though was that many of these characters are cliches. But maybe ‘archetypes’ is a better (and more charitable) word. Falco, for sure, did not seem like any real person to me. His only real reason for existence is to be an antagonist. Dalilah and the sea captain also felt like archetypes to me. And I guess, so do the two mothers, representing different aspects of motherhood, and the difficulty of motherhood in that society expects a mother to give up her freedoms to properly fulfil that role. (I note that Dalilah is not a mother in this book? One mother too many?). The fathers in the book don’t face that same pressure. This is an interesting thing to explore, though I can think of media that have done a much better job of it (like Happy Valley, for example).

Anyway, I guess I come down to thinking there’s a mix of interesting character elements here, but a lot of it is archetypical.

RichardAbbott

Yes, I wasn't sure about Falco - his European origins seemed kind of forced to me, and didn't really make much difference to his conduct or beliefs. He could just as easily have been a powerful-but-malign vizier, or a magician, or a half-djinn without it making any difference to him!

With the others, I kept wondering if there was an earlier book about the same characters that I should have read first. I don't think that's the case - it just seems to be part of Shannon Chakraborty's writing style that she tosses an enigmatic character at you, and you then subsequently learn of the back-story and prior relationships with Amina over the next few chapters. But for the first half of the book I kept thinking "am I supposed to already know who person X is?"

I suppose I enjoyed the ship crew and their interactions more than the fight-the-baddy plot overlaid onto this, and I would probably have been just as happy with the book if they hadn't had to fight Falco but instead just went exploring around their oceanic world. The rather protracted fight seemed kind of boring and forced to me, as though a published had said "hm, this is all OK but we need some action scenes in it".

NeilNjae

I agree Falco was a paper-thin caricature, not a decent villain. He was just an excuse for the rest of the action. If he'd been toned down a bit, it would have made a better novel. There could have been some questions about whether he was right, or if Amina could have helped Falco to free herself from Salima. But none of that happened.

I agree with @Apocryphal that most of the characters are archetypal, but this is a pulpy adventure novel so I'm not too worried. The characters are sufficiently well-drawn to keep me interested, given that context.

@RichardAbbott I agree: Chakraborty's more interested in the characters than the action. The fight scene at the end could have been more interesting if she's drawn out some more character moments from it. As it was, it was mostly action-action-action. Saying that, I liked that Amina freeing the marid was instrumental in her victory.

RichardAbbott

@NeilNjae said:
@RichardAbbott I agree: Chakraborty's more interested in the characters than the action. The fight scene at the end could have been more interesting if she's drawn out some more character moments from it. As it was, it was mostly action-action-action. Saying that, I liked that Amina freeing the marid was instrumental in her victory.

The only mystery was why Amina took so much longer than (I suspect) pretty much every reader to work out that the agonised Pari was simply trying to tell her to free the marid and reap the benefits

clash_bowley

Two words: Player Character.

They see everything you don't want them to see, and nothing you want them to see....

Apocryphal

Ha! True.