Harare Review of Books

290 pages. Published July 23, 2024 by Meerkat Press. Fiction.

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Very rarely, you’ll come across a novel that feels like perfection, that gives you all the feels. I am moved by the immense beauty of this novel. And by its beautiful weirdness. Isn’t that the miracle of language? That we can take a finite set of words, and make art? That’s what Joel Dane has done here: woven familiar words into a web of rare beauty—rather like Ysmany in the novel.

It’s after the end of the world—for humans, that is, but nature is healing. “Modern civilisation” has broken down, people have retreated to villages again; they live in small communities that they created after the end, little enclaves of mutual aid and co-operation. But there are other not-quite-people who roam the land with different motives, and The RagPicker is one of them.

The Ragpicker falls in with a young girl, Ysmany, who’s on a mission to rescue a tiny boy and restore him to his people. Their journey across the ravaged world/healing, lush landscape is the source of most of the beauty of this novel. The rest is from its weirdness, partly imparted by its fragmentary nature: The Ragpicker with his many voices and remnants of information or data, Ysmany’s collections, and the tattered wisps of the world that was. The Ragpicker is malfunctioning; the world isn’t the world we know today, and is something post- a hyperconnected world; Ysmany is a new kind of human; and all of those things are happening together on the page. It’s transcendent, and Dane pulls it all together with a deft and light touch (—a weaver!).

But don’t take my word for it. It’s by far my favourite novel this year; I don’t think anything else I read will be as sublime, or ineffable. I’ve read Dane’s SF before—he has a very nice trilogy, Cry Pilot—but this is something completely different. I’ll say one more time just how much I love how different. Is eco-weird a genre? I don’t know, but it definitely should be by now.

Many thanks to Meerkat Press and to Edelweiss for making early DRCs available.