Why Does the Author Ignore Race?

[Ahmad]

I find her treatment of race amnesic and as much as I enjoyed many aspects of the novel, I couldn't help thinking that from the cultural references etc. the main character is a white girl trapped in a black body.

[Ian]

I found the race-aspect intriguing in that, as you say, there was so little of it. I think I had read a lot of the book before I twigged that the main character was black, while I kept thinking of the brother-sister popstars as being like a J-Pop act.

The book is set in South Africa where non-black people are currently only about 25% of the population so maybe it was not necessary to foreground the blackness of characters. But it might just be that she did not want to focus on it.

[Ahmad]

The conclusions that I came to are less kind (but then again, I was reading Coetzee's Disgrace at the same time).
I think her treatment of race is amnesic, that her approach is let's forget about race and just focus on a cool, hip cyber-punk story...I think this is also part of the reason why she floods the narrative with so many facts about everything and anything as if to hide the glaring omission.
Btw, besides this, I enjoyed the book.

[Samantha]

I didn't have a problem understanding the characters' races at all. Their names were usually culturally specific enough for me to gauge their ethnicity.

[Anfenwick]

I'm pretty sure I knew the ethnicity of every character in the book, even the minor ones and including the way ethnicity interrelated with socio-economic status in all sorts of ways. For example, it was very obvious to me that a lot of the people at the top of the economic pyramid in the story were white. I got that 'black' was the character's default or would be if it weren't sub-divided into a whole lot of different ethnicities. I'm not really familiar with South Africa's various ethnic groups but I'm used to thinking in those terms anyway. I do wonder if the references to ethnicities rather than the use of terms like 'black', 'white' could throw some people.

Still, I don't think it's at all a book 'about' race. Which is fair enough.

[Carla]

I didn't find it hard to tell who was what ethnicity when it was important - when it wasn't important, who cares?

Then, again, I'm Black, so maybe it's easier for me to tell what ethnic groups people belong to... maybe not.

One thing I loved about the book was that it was a white woman who wrote it - she has a really good hold on what might be going on in a black woman's head. There aren't many writers who are able to write from inside the heads of those of different ethnicities, different genders, different cultures, and/or different classes. I really admire it when an author can.

Octavia Butler was able to do it (in her case, being a black woman able to speak the minds of men, white people, from different cultural backgrounds, etc.)