Book review: The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is the first novel by Ta-Nehisi Coates, although he has already enjoyed remarkable and sometimes troubling success as a journalist, a memoirist and as the writer for Marvel Comics’ Black Panther (his father was a Black Panther, and a noted publisher of forgotten African-American texts) and Captain America. His work has analysed race in America, and it has not been uncontroversial. We Were Eight Years In Power, his study of the Obama regime, its title derived from a Southern, 19th century congressman, looked at the legacy of radicalism and whether or not Obama’s presidency was the culmination of a trend going back to more radical figures such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, or a capitulation to the structures of power. So it is of little surprise that his first novel deals with slavery.