Fish and Fowl: Categorizing the Genre-Bending Novel

I am a native-born Scot with a Nigerian surname, a US passport and an English accent.  If some librarian of humanity were to place me on the shelf beside my brothers and sisters, where, I wonder, would I be filed?  In the fiction section, perhaps.  Possibly under cryptids.

When it comes to categories, I’m a bit of a nightmare.  And yet it’s a fundamental of human nature that everything must be sorted, catalogued and put into boxes.  A nice, compact label to sum up the entirety of a thing in all its nuanced glory.  Even something as ostensibly descriptive as blonde or brunette is freighted with sub-text.  It is highly unlikely, for instance, that the persons generated in your mind by the previous sentence were male.

Categories are fundamental to who we are for a reason.  We need shortcuts to get us through the day, otherwise the one-and-a-half kilos of fat sheltering behind our eyeballs would cook itself into render.  Imagine going through life treating every pedestrian crossing you come across as something you’ve never seen before; or wondering if the unaccompanied two-year old bawling their eyes out in the park is a lost and frightened child, or merely some very tiny, very upset grown-up.  Life would very quickly grind to a halt.

Publishers, shocking as it may seem, are human too.  When it comes to books, they like to categorise them.  They need to categorise them.  If the reader is looking for a fast-paced thriller, they do not want to wade through historical textbooks on the Serene Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire in order to find one.  That would be . . . not efficient.  So, publishers make it easy.  We have thrillers, and sci-fi, and cosy crime, and romance, and paranormal romance and the list goes on.  Pick your category and start browsing.  Job done.

But the list is not endless.  What if someone has written something that is two or more of these things?  What then?  What bookshelf could possibly be home for a mutant creation like that?

I’m asking for a friend.

This friend likes to write stories.  If he has a great idea for a story, he’ll write it.  But the deluded fool never bothers to think about the type of story he’s writing.  It’s enough for him that it’s a cool story.  He wrote a sci-fi adventure called Braking Day, then a murder mystery called A Quiet Teacher, and a follow-up called Two Times Murder.  And then . . . then he wrote Esperance, a police procedural that turns weird.  About a cop who’s in way over his head, wondering how someone can drown in seawater on the 20^th floor of a Chicago apartment block hundreds of miles from the ocean.  About a woman who materialises out of nowhere in Bristol, England asking questions about a ship that set sail in 1791.  About how each, unknown to the other, has set out on a path where human justice and inhuman crimes will crash into each other with dire consequences.  How does one label a book like that?  On what shelf does it fit?  It is part crime novel, part thriller, part sci-fi, with a dash of historical fiction thrown in for good measure.  Exactly the sort of hot, buttery mess that might be written by a native-born Scot with a Nigerian surname, a US passport and an English accent.

Not that I did, of course.  I’m asking for a friend, remember?

My friend’s publishers have decided to run with “speculative fiction”, by which I think they mean a novel set in the “real” world with science-fiction (“speculative”) elements.  On the other hand, Library Journal in the US described Esperance as “recommended for readers who love intricately blended genre stories that ask big questions”.  And if one were to open up the programme for this year’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, one would find said friend described as, you guessed it, a “crime writer”.  You pays your money and takes your choice, I guess.

Which kind of brings me back to the question we started out with.  On what shelf does one put a native-born Scot with a Nigerian surname, a US passport and an English accent?

So, here’s the thing.  I am not Scottish or Nigerian or American or English.  I am all of these things.  At the same time.  I know, right!  But now we can answer the question.  My librarian of humanity should keep me on all of those shelves.  Everywhere all at once, so to speak.  That way, I’m easy to find and always where I belong.  Similarly, whether the reader happens upon Esperance as speculative fiction, or sci-fi, or crime, or thriller, or anything else, I hope they’ll give it a try, regardless.  It’s a cool story.

Not that I care, really.

I’m only asking for a friend.

Esperance by Adam Oyebanji (Quercus Books) Out now.

An impossible death: Detective Ethan Krol has been called to the scene of a baffling murder: a man and his son, who appear to have been drowned in sea-water. But the nearest ocean is a thousand miles away. An improbable story: Hollie Rogers doesn't want to ask too many questions of her new friend, Abi Eniola. Abi claims to be an ordinary woman from Nigeria, but her high-tech gadgets and extraordinary physical abilities suggest she's not telling the whole truth. An incredible quest: As Ethan's investigation begins to point towards Abi, Hollie's fears mount. For Abi is very much not who she seems. And it won't be long before Ethan and Hollie find themselves playing a part in a story that spans cultures, continents . . . and centuries.

More information about the author and be found on his website.