Nancy Farmer
Penguin Putnam Inc.
ISBN: 0140376410
1994
The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm (1994) is a dystopian novel set in Harare, a city in Zimbabwe in the year 2194. In the late twenty-first century, the northern part of Africa forms Gondwanna, a warring nation with dark secrets and bloody rituals threatening even the citizens of Zimbabwe. Tendai, Rita, and Kuda, the children of powerful and wealthy General Matsika, are protected from the outside world by stifling restrictions. When they are kidnapped, the city's best and strangest detectives are hired to work on the case. Meanwhile, the children discover that there are many worlds outside the one they always knew--some are products of a technologised state, some are refuges from it. Others still exist precariously within the technocratic republic of Zimbabwe--but they all are products of utopian ideals that aren't necessarily practicable. *
Tendai, Rita, and Kuda dress, eat, and study by a regimented schedule devised and enforced by their father. Tendai accepts the dullness of his childhood, since he has neither the skill nor the aptitude to follow his father's footsteps; Rita's passionate wilfulness manifests in her acerbic tongue and flashes of temper. Four-year-old Kuda is exempt from some duties, but he longs to play and explore outside. While their parents work, the children are not allowed to leave the house or even open the windows. They are kept in check by various automated servants, instructors, and tutors. Then there is the Mellower, a therapist and chaperone who uses the traditional practice of 'Praise Singing' to flatter and inspire listeners. The Mellower, though an adult, is more like a child than Tendai or Rita; he is kind-hearted, but morally weak and irresponsible. The children leave home when, enlisting the Mellower's special skills, they dare to sneak out of suburban Mazoe for a trip to the city.
In the city, the genetically engineered, talking Blue Monkey lures the children into the clutches of kidnappers from Dead Man's Vlei. The Vlei is an area named thus because many years ago a power plant accident turned it into a toxic wasteland. Many Vlei people are disfigured, and all of them live in poverty. Like the Masks, a Gondwannan gang of fearsome-looking men, the Vlei people are reviled and feared by the privileged classes of Harare. Ironically, the detectives hired by Mother--Ear, Eye, and Arm--are mutants whose mothers drank plutonium-tainted water. The detectives' names are apt descriptions of their physical appearances and abilities: Eye blinks very slowly and can see "'a flea clinging to a hawk's feathers'", Ear has very large ears and can "'hear an ant creeping up on the sugar bowl.'" Arm is long-limbed and strong, with an uncanny gift for hunches. Thus the perils of technologised society go beyond dysfunctional house robots and computers that can be (and are) reprogrammed easily by a child. A fully automated household, with robots to dictate doctors' and teachers' orders, computer games, and microchip birdsongs, could not prevent the children from longing for more. Fittingly, the children's escape is facilitated by a practice predating technology; the Mellower's Praise Singing on the fateful morning is so compelling that General and Mother are hypnotised into leaving their Pass Cards and bus fare for the children.
