One of the novel’s characters describes the invasion in the following terms: “When Wormwood surges into awareness, we are unimpressed, even in our knowledge that it is the most significant event in Earth’s history. Most people don’t know about it the world changed in several imperceptible ways.” In the writer’s words, “ Rosewater is about an extremely slow alien invasion … by microbes. To read other people’s minds, he enters the xenosphere, “a global store of information in the very atmosphere” accessible through a psychic link “made up of strands of alien fungi-like filaments and neurotransmitters”, filaments that “form multiple links with the natural fungi on human skin”. “I do not think the ability is alien – I think it is a mystical thing, spiritual or juju-based,” he explains.
He becomes a “finder”, or someone who searches for objects people have lost. For example, the main character, Kaaro – whose name means “good morning” in Yoruba – is given the power to read other people’s thoughts. ‘Bootleg psychic adult with money’īut the alien presence manifests itself in other ways – not just dramatically grotesque transformations. “A guy”, for instance, ends up with “five left hands and three feet” and “ single, desperate eye”. The opening sometimes “restores” the injured, with random, if not downright monstrous results. This annual miracle also brings some of the dead back to life, creating a cohort of soulless “reanimates” who wander around the streets and have to be killed. No TB, no HIV, no nothing,” one such cured character rejoices. Once a year an opening forms in the imposing structure and sick people are mysteriously healed: “All gone.
The city of Rosewater was built in the wake of the appearance of a strange dome rising “into the sky like a blanket of flesh”. READ MORE Egypt: Al Aswany’s latest novel tackles how dictatorships flourish
Thompson deftly draws on these myriad experiences in Rosewater, a gripping novel set in Nigeria in the near future, after Earth has been colonised by mysterious aliens. Born in London to Yoruba parents from Nigeria, the prolific author – he also writes crime thrillers, most notably Making Wolf – has a day job as a psychiatrist in Portsmouth, England.
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