“We want you to find us a viable human heart, fast.”
With that command, the novel commences. And the story of finding that viable human heart and why it is such a big deal is the driving engine behind the story. Finding the heart is urgent because the recipient will be the Premier of Ontario, Catherine Uttley. Under any other circumstances, the transplanted heart would be easily procured via the Porcine Organ Harvest Program. This program is the result of revolutionary advancements in pig-to-human organ transplants. But these are not usual circumstances, this is the political head of the city. What’s more, underlings with vested interests have been encouraging the Premier to question the ethics of the whole program. The story is driven, then, not by any actual physical or medical rationale for finding a viable human. As is usually the case, it is all about politics.
“Brother, you nah business with none of that. You just going to have to improve the odds, seen? Find somebody the right size, the same blood type, healthy, and arrange for them to be in a condition to donate their heart. You get me?
Appalled, Tony could only stare. Rudy was asking him to commit murder."
Catherine Uttley may be the political head of state for the city of Toronto, but in this futuristic dystopic version of the city, everything is really run by Rudy Sheldon, the criminal overlord. Tony is one of the many soldiers in Rudy’s army that makes everything run smoothly. That Rudy is essentially ordering Tony to murder someone in order to find that viable human heart, fast, is a little unexpected since Rudy’s attitude toward Toronto’s political leaders is that they are irrelevant. He is utterly confident that he runs things. This, of course, raises the question of why he is willing to become involved at all. As for Rudy, his hopes of leaving his life of crime behind and starting fresh with his son and the baby’s mother seem to have been completely dashed right before his eyes.
“What’s that crazy old woman doing over there in Riverdale Farm, eh, Ti-Jeanne? Obeah? Nobody believes in that duppy business anymore!”
What seems to be heading toward a fairly straightforward crime story within the context of a political thriller encased inside a dystopic vision of the future takes an unexpectedly weird turn around this whole duppy business. The realistic story situated at the beginning of the novel veers into the category of magical realism with the introduction of Obeah. That is the name of a ritualistic tradition originating along the northwest coastal region of Africa and brought to the New World as the result of slave trafficking. Complicated in its details, for purposes of simplicity it is somewhat comparable to voodoo. Duppy refers to a spirit that can be summoned to do the summoner’s bidding. Ti-Jeanne is the woman with whom Tony dreams of building a better life away from the criminal underworld. The crazy old woman who believes in all that duppy stuff is Ti-Jeanne’s grandmother. The duppy will turn out to be a woman caught in the middle, but it is Rudy who is the summoner.
