'No-Place' Like Home: Utopia and Dystopia in 'The Eye, the Ear, and the Arm'
and boys gather to listen to the elders tell stories, and the process is rarely one-sided:
"Gariyaki said: Once there was a man.
The audience responded: Go on.
Gariyaki: That man was a king.
Audience: Go on.
Gariyaki: He had a daughter.
Audience: Go on.
Gariyaki: As beautiful as the sun.
Audience: Go on."
When Tendai must tell a story to prove his mettle, he relates his adventures in the Vlei. Tendai discovers that he has a shave (a spirit that possesses a person) for storytelling. Because he is a gifted storyteller, with a real ndoro around his neck, he is thought to be a spirit medium in the making. This knowledge explains why his martial arts instructor says that Tendai "'feels the other person's pain...a bad trait in a soldier'". Tendai's empathetic and spiritual side parallels Arm, who becomes increasingly psychic while searching for the children.
With Trashman, the children escape Resthaven to live with the mother of the Mellower, one Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham. Her habits parody a middle-class desire for material gain. Living in a run-down suburb of Borrowdale, she complains about her impoverished lifestyle. She tells the children their parents are too busy to take them home, when she is in fact holding out for a large ransom. A member of Borrowdale's Animal Fanciers' Society, she is kinder to her pets than people. She puts Kuda in a metal cage called a Kiddie Koop when he is sick, and she forces Rita and Tendai to cook for her guests and clean her house. Despite her greed and dishonesty, the children admit that Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham still bathed, housed, and fed them. Even her cruel aspects, such as her verbal abuse of Trashman and the use of the Kiddie Koop, are presented as class attitudes.
As if travelling from one inadequate home to another isn't bad enough, the children have Masks to contend with when She Elephant catches up to them. The Masks intend to sacrifice Tendai in a gruesome ritual meant to appease the Gondawannan gods--the more pain the victim feels, the better the sacrifice. At a crucial moment, Tendai is possessed by a mhondoro, a lion spirit, and it is revealed that the ndoro Tendai wears belonged to a legendary fifteenth-century leader. A confrontation near the Gondwannan Embassy in the city has Tendai, Arm, the General (and many waiters!) defeating the Masks. Arm dies, but Tendai uses his ndoro to resurrect him.
Some have argued that The Ear, The Eye,
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