The Oyster Thief
Page 41
At present, though, it looked more like a makeshift clinic than anyone’s home, for all surfaces were littered with urns of algae, the size of vases. The urns were from Coralline’s former workplace, The Irregular Remedy, and she would take them to her future workplace, The Irregular Remedy, as soon as she found a place to rent as a clinic. (Coralline had bundled all the urns carefully in fabric, loaded them in immense sacks, and strapped the cargo all to Pavonis, who had not complained once as he’d led Coralline and Izar south from Urchin Grove to Blue Bottle.)
Izar cleared some space on one settee, and nestled there with Coralline, her head coming to rest on his shoulder. Their first day living together had been busy but enjoyable.
They’d visited four homes, belonging to: Izar’s mother in Velvet Horn (they’d all reminisced about Rhodomela); Venant Veritate, who had recovered fully from his flu; Limpet and Linatella Laminaria, who had apologized for having chased them away and had invited them for supper tomorrow evening (an invitation Coralline and Izar had gladly accepted); and Sage Dahlia Delaisi. Coralline had not spoken a word, but Sage Dahlia had taken one look at Izar and pronounced, as though in response to an unasked question, “Yes, he is your love.” Izar had not understood the remark, but Coralline had giggled.
“You know, although we’ve just arrived in Blue Bottle,” Coralline said, “I feel as though we already belong here. Don’t you?”
“I do.”
Izar’s gaze fell on Coralline’s tray of vials and flasks in one corner of the living room. It reminded him of the flasks of combustible chemicals in his own Invention Chamber. He wished he hadn’t shied away from burning Ocean Dominion to the ground when he’d had the chance. He’d come to regret the decision every day since he’d returned to the ocean; at this very moment, Saiph was likely constructing an army of Castors.
“What’s the matter?” Coralline asked.
“Nothing.”
Izar had not told her about Saiph, and he did not plan to tell her. He had invented his way into his particular problems, and he would have to invent ways out.
Acknowledgments
When people ask me about writing, I tell them it’s a labor of love. But it’s not just the author’s love—the people who love you most often end up laboring a lot along the way as well.
My husband, Aamer Hasham, encouraged me to write and accompanied me to book events. My twin sister, Sofia Faruqi, listened to me talk about The Oyster Thief for hours on end. Her patient questions helped me untangle plot intricacies, and her thoughts helped me devise new angles. My brother, Salman Faruqi, contributed tremendous big-picture thinking. An avid reader of fiction, he provided ideas to create more characters and enhance conflict.
Beta readers played a crucial role in the development of The Oyster Thief. In addition to my husband, brother, and sister, the team included: Stacey Gordon Sterling, who paid thorough attention to detail, Kristyn Nanlal Khetia, who delved into pace and emotion, and Lauren Friedwald, who focused on clarity and feeling. Without the commitment of the team of beta readers, The Oyster Thief would not be the same.
Sarah Krejci, Celia Kujala, Lucas Melbye, and Monisha Rahemtulla also provided feedback on early chapters, and Autumn Ladouceur and Ashley Ryan read very early iterations of the book.
My editor, Jessica Case, at Pegasus Books provided perceptive edits, contagious enthusiasm, and ambitious thinking. She was a delight to work with. Maria Fernandez provided interior design and typesetting, and Charles Brock from Faceout Studio designed a lovely cover.
Randall Abate, Jonathan Balcombe, Louisa Gilder, Lorraine Johnson, Rob Laidlaw, Nina Munteanu, and Misagh Parsa mentored and guided me in my writing career.
Friends offered a warm listening ear, including Monica Jain, Ismat Khatri, Barbi Lazarus, and Wei Su. Also, Nandita Bajaj, Barbara Center, Neel Desai, Mike Farley, Berna Ozunal, Bruce Poole, and Andrew Scorer supplied imaginative ideas for book promotion. Catherine Houle created a beautiful animated website at www.soniafaruqi.com.
I read lots of research in writing The Oyster Thief, but I particularly appreciated Josie Iselin’s photographic books, An Ocean Garden and Seashells.
I’m indebted to my parents, Shaista and Amin Faruqi, for their love and support. I’m also grateful to my parents-in-law, Shamim and Nazir Hasham; my siblings-in-law, Erik Desrosiers and Maha Hasnain; and my extended family, including and especially Zia Aleem, Javed Aleem, Perveen Matloob, Sultana Ali, and Shireen Begum.
Reading Guide
This guide is intended for book club and classroom discussions. Please note that it contains spoilers.
What animal would you choose if you could have a muse?
Rhodomela says: “In order to heal others, you have to first heal yourself. . . . Success is an outcome not of imitation but of authenticity—of not abiding by the rules but changing them. The questions are more important than the answers.” What do you think?
Do you think Coralline makes the right decision between Izar and Ecklon?
What if merpeople existed? How do you think our relationship with them would be? And how do you think their lives would be similar to and different from the depiction in The Oyster Thief?
Why do you think Abalone views and treats Coralline as she does?
Izar expects his discovery of underwater fire to make him rich, even as merpeople go extinct. If one person or company profits at the expense of everyone else, should it be permitted to continue?
“Infidelity is not an act but a feeling,” Altair says. What’s your opinion?
If there were an elixir that could save the life of someone you love, but if it were accompanied by a curse, would you try to find it?
Abalone says that the biggest mistake of Rhodomela’s life is her refusal to settle. “She could have married someone else, even if not the love of her life, and she could have built a pleasant enough life with him. But she had an all-or-nothing approach—and so nothing is what she got.” What do you think of an all-or-nothing approach to love and life?
How would you compare the merpeople relationship with the natural world to the human relationship with the natural world?
A Beautiful World
This section provides a behind-the-scenes look at the writing process for The Oyster Thief. Please note that it contains spoilers.
The idea of an underwater world fell into my mind on January 1, 2015. It was a freezing-cold morning in Canada, and I wished I could escape into tropical waters. But it was too expensive to book a last-minute flight, so I decided to escape in my mind. With a cup of tea in hand, I started inventing an underwater world.
As Izar’s underwater-fire invention required several steps for completion, so did my underwater world. I describe the steps here in the hope that they are helpful to those working on their own creative pursuits.
A Discovered Culture
I pretended that merpeople already existed and that I, like an anthropologist, was simply “discovering” them.
Given that they already existed, they, like all other life on earth, would exist in accordance with the laws of science and nature. For one, merpeople would be a kind of fish, just as humans are a kind of mammal. The traits they would share with fish would include gills, scales, and a cold-blooded, streamlined body.
I would have liked for skin color to range widely in the water, as it does on land—Coralline, as I originally envisioned her, was dark-skinned—but, if merpeople did exist, they would not have dark skin. Skin color varies among humans because of melanin, a pigment that acts as a protective biological shield against ultraviolet radiation. People from the southern hemisphere tend to have dark skin because they require more melanin to protect against intense sunlight. People from the northern hemisphere, meanwhile, tend to have light skin because vitamin D is a greater concern than ultraviolet radiation, and melanin can prevent them from producing enough vitamin D. Due to a lack of direct exposure to sunlight, merpeople would lack melanin, and so they would have pale, fine, almost translucent skin.
As for merpeople clothing, I leaned originally toward flowing gowns and robes, but I came to the obvious conclusion that such clothing would be cumbersome—the fabric would tangle constantly with tails. I opted for corsets and waistcoats; they would end at the hip, and their fitted design would ensure the fabric did not fly up while swimming.
I decided on shells for currency and jewelry because some cultures on land have historically also used shells as such. The phrase “shelling out money” originates from such use.
A Scientific Setting
Over the course of snorkeling, diving, and swimming with sharks, I’ve been fortunate to see lots of marine animals in their natural environments. But in addition to relying on my firsthand experiences, I read books and hundreds of articles relating to the ocean, homing in specifically on algae, animals, and plot-specific topics like oil spills.
Researching the ocean is not like researching things on land, I quickly realized. Of the millions of species thought to live in the ocean, the majority are unknown to us. Even those that we know of, we don’t know well—for instance, we don’t know the life spans or social habits of whale sharks.
Our knowledge about the ocean is also biased toward life close to shore, because it’s more accessible, of course. If we take algae as an example, what this means is that the algae we know best (including some of those mentioned in The Oyster Thief) grow in fairly shallow waters.
I sought to create cultural uses for algae that were in keeping with our knowledge of them. Buttonweed, dulse, pepper dulse, ulva, and undaria are eaten in certain parts of the world, so I figured they could also be eaten by merpeople. Devil’s apron is a sugar kelp, so I imagined it as a dessert. Desmarestia is an acid kelp known to be poisonous, so I retained it as a poison. Sea oak has a wide variety of medicinal uses on land, so I treated it as a remedial algae. And, just as there are plants on land without any specific uses, there are algae in The Oyster Thief without any specific uses—like the oyster thief itself.
Several sorts of stones are found underwater—among them, shale, slate, limestone, sandstone, and olivine.
As for light, bioluminescence is common in the ocean. The compound luciferin, found in many marine organisms, including bacteria, generates light in the presence of oxygen.
I decided on the Atlantic Ocean as the setting for The Oyster Thief because it’s the second-largest ocean in the world and is the ocean geographically closest to me. I made the decision lightly, but it meant a hefty extra layer of research—I had to ensure that every animal and algae mentioned in The Oyster Thief can be found in the Atlantic. (Another option would have been to set the story in a fictional ocean and to thus be able to mention any kind of algae or animal that exists.)
In addition to the setting, the story of The Oyster Thief is also as scientifically accurate as I could make it, where relevant. For instance, when Izar holds the scroll under tap water and it starts to lose form, that is a common phenomenon with salt water algae, due to osmosis.
A Cast of Characters
I envision Izar and Coralline as representing two polarities of the world—land and water, human and nonhuman, male and female.
I decided to have animal characters in addition to people, because animals add joy and beauty to our world.
I decided on a shark character, Pavonis, because sharks are among the most misunderstood and mistreated animals on the planet. Most people are terrified of them, but sharks kill less than ten people a year (generally mistaking them for other prey like seals), while people kill tens of millions of them a year. Sharks are often a by-catch of fishing and are also hunted for their fins, which are eaten in the form of shark fin soup.
I decided on a seahorse, Altair, because of the bizarre uniqueness of seahorses, from their appearance—they are a fish whose face resembles a horse’s—to their romance—not only are they monogamous, but lined seahorses dance every morning with their partners—to their reproduction—it is the male who bears the young.
I based animal appearances on their species, from Pavonis’s cavernous mouth and lack of eyelids to Altair’s color changes and tail coiled around a strand of grass.
During my readings about the ocean, I kept a running list of any words I liked that I could use as names. I decided that the names of most oceanic characters should relate to the ocean, though some could also relate to the universe, and the names of all land characters should relate to the universe.
I selected the name Coralline because coralline algae play a disproportionately important role in marine ecology, cementing coral reefs together. In addition to being rosy and beautiful, their strata are strong and powerful. I chose the name Coralline also because coralline algae can be considered symbolic of the human effect on the ocean—tens of thousands of tons of these precious calcified structures are dredged out of the oceans every year. Crushed to form a powder, they are used as agricultural fertilizer.
The name Izar, meanwhile, refers to a binary star. To the naked eye, it appears to be a single point of light, but it is actually two different stars close to each other (about two hundred light-years away from us and five hundred times brighter than the sun). Giving Izar’s background, I found it appropriate to name him after a binary star.
Other character names were also chosen with deliberation.
In addition to referring to a star, the name Zaurak originally derives from the Arabic word for “boat”—relevant, given Zaurak’s workplace. Castor is among the brightest stars in the night sky; the name sounded right for a source of underwater fire. Antares is a supergiant star that’s red in color; I found the name fitting for a character with giant ambition. Saiph is a star whose name derives from the Arabic term saif al jabbar, which means sword of the giant; the name seemed suitable for a character with a desire to kill. (The names of several characters in The Oyster Thief have Arabic origins because the names of many stars do.)
On the water side, the name Ecklon relates to Ecklonia maxima, or sea bamboo, a kind of kelp that’s strong and steady. Rhodomela comes from Rhodomela confervoides, or straggly bush; the hard pronunciation of the scientific name, accompanied by the unpleasant common name, sounded right to me for a character who appears harsh on the outside. Naiadum derives from Smithora naiadum, a delicate kind of red algae; the fragility of the algae made it a suitable name for someone ill. The name Abalone refers to the abalone snail whose inner shell consists of shimmering, iridescent nacre. I envision the character Abalone as possessing a pearlescent beauty; appropriately, her muse is a snail named Nacre. (Pearls form when abalones and other mollusks coat irritating particles, such as grains of sand, with layers of nacre.) The name Trochid refers to a large family of snails; I chose it because it complemented the name Abalone.
Although The Oyster Thief is set in the Atlantic, a few character names derive from oceans other than the Atlantic, just as some human names can be found across cultures. The names of most underwater settlements relate to algae, such as Hog’s Bristle, Purple Claw, Rainbow Wrack, and Velvet Horn. Blue Bottle, meanwhile, refers to a kind of peacock-blue jellyfish.
Concessions to Language
Merpeople, were they to exist, would not speak English. Their communication, in fact, might not involve speaking at all. (Sound does exist in the water, as do the other four senses, but it exists differently—it travels farther and four times faster in water than air, making its location difficult to pinpoint.) I stuck with English in the book for obvious reasons of ease and clarity.
I nonetheless grappled with words as simple as those representing color. Can Coralline descr
ibe something as olive-brown, given that she does not know what olives are? What about the word orange—can that be used, given that the name of the color originates from the fruit, and there are no oranges underwater? I decided to retain our ordinary usage of color, because I could not construe of equivalent terms.
A broader trouble with language when it comes to an underwater world is that our vocabulary is from land. Many ocean organisms have land-associated names. For instance, rose petal tellin, lettered olive shell, butterfly fish, lionfish, eagle ray—these names make reference to rose petals, olives, butterflies, lions, and eagles. Also, some names we’ve given ocean life have negative connotations, like devil’s tongue and devil’s apron. I saw no help for using these terms, but I shunned the word seaweed—because the ocean is not full of weeds.
The Elusive Elixir
The elixir in The Oyster Thief is symbolic. Each of us may have an “elixir” in our own lives, a goal that we’re striving toward. It could be to start one’s own business or to climb a mountain. My goal was to invent an underwater world. My quest toward this goal was enjoyable, but, like Coralline’s and Izar’s quest for the elixir, it was paved with obstacles.
I spent about two thousand hours over a period of two and a half years on the original manuscript for The Oyster Thief, but I decided to throw it all out, finding that I had no more than straddled the surface of my imagination. Over the next year, I ascended up to my home library every day to invent my underwater world, just as Izar descended into his Invention Chamber every night to invent underwater fire.
During this year, I became so immersed in my underwater world, and so absent-minded in my external world, that I sometimes felt as though I was in a trance. In this trance, I lost my passport. I forgot hundreds of dollars in an ATM. I routinely forgot to put detergent in the laundry. I neglected to turn on the lights when it got dark (then I would look about me, mystified by the darkness). I was on land and in the ocean at the same time—both when awake and asleep. Even upon shutting down my computer late at night, I couldn’t shut down my mind. Sleepy but sleepless, I would lie in bed writing notes to myself—a particular thought Coralline might be entertaining, an observation of Izar’s.