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The Ear, the Eye and the Arm

  • ️Sat Nov 26 2011

The Ear, the Eye and the Arm (Literature)

A 1995 Newbery Honor Book, The Ear, the Eye and the Armnote  is a 1994 novel by Nancy Farmer set in a futuristic Zimbabwe.

In the city of Harare in 2194, Tendai and his siblings Rita and Kuda have lived a sheltered life and have a strained relationship with their father, the renowned General Matsika. Thus, with the aid of their caretaker, the Mellower, they sneak out of the house...and into a whole lot of trouble, getting themselves kidnapped. Meanwhile, the Matsika parents are frantic with worry, so the Mellower suggests hiring some detectives he has heard of - the Ear, the Eye, and the Arm. As the Matsika children struggle to survive, the detectives race to find them before it's too late.

Most notable for its heavy exploration of African myths and traditions, something that normally never appears in Western fiction.

This book provides examples of:

  • Abandon the Disabled: Trashman was abandoned by his mother because of his profound intellectual disability. The people of Resthaven have given him shelter, but still keep him at arm's length, believing that he might attract malevolent spirits.
  • Afrofuturism: The book is set in Zimbabwe in the year 2194.
  • All There in the Manual: Several of the myths, historic figures/events, and elements of modern (i.e. 1990s) African life are discussed further in a short appendix and glossary.
  • Ambiguously Gay: Myanda. She's married to one of Resthaven's elders, but they have no children, and she names Sekai after a former "girlfriend" from when she lived on the outside (She's also very fond of her husband's other wife, Chipo, who is Sekai's mother, but that may be more due to Big Sister Instinct).
  • Big Damn Heroes: The detectives pull this in Resthaven. Arm also attempts to pull this at the book's climax, but that doesn't work out. Instead, it's the She Elephant who ends up breaking the power of the Masks—literally, over her knee.
  • Bittersweet Ending: The kids are saved from becoming a sacrifice, the family soothsayer's mother serves community service for her extortion plot, but although she saved the day, the She Elephant still has to serve some jail time for her crimes.
  • Blatant Lies: Suspecting that the detectives don't have suitable formal wear, mother gives them each a dashiki; she says that the dashikis were given to the General as a gift, and he never accepts gifts to avoid the appearance of taking bribes. The detectives note how unlikely it is that the general was gifted three dashikis that fit the detectives perfectly, including one with matching earmuffs, but are grateful nonetheless.
  • Blessed with Suck:
    • Arm's telepathy grows in strength as the book progresses, making him more sensitive to what other people are feeling nearby, and thus making it harder for him to function around other people. Luckily for him, he loses his telepathy due to what the Gondwannan gods do to him.
    • Eye and Ear have similar issues with their own abilities. In addition to typical Sensory Overload and the disfiguring nature of their mutations, Eye is treated to a perpetual Gross Up Closeup of everything around him (and sunlight isn't his favorite thing either), while Ear's eponymous attributes are extremely delicate: at one point he suffers an excrutiating tear when he unfurls them in extreme winds.
  • Commonplace Rare: Plastics. Nobody really misses them, but plastic artifacts can be quite valuable as antiques to the right buyer.
  • Deadpan Snarker: ** The narration itself tends toward the bone-dry at times, although it's pretty understated compared to Rita.
  • Decade Dissonance: In 2194 there is Resthaven, which is an independent country with people who live their life in the Good Old Ways.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: When Rita steals some food while the siblings are in Resthaven, guess what her punishment is? They heat peanuts with coals and use them to burn her chest. Made even worse by the fact that she didn't know she was stealing; she ate because she was hungry, and didn't realize she had to ask.
  • The Dreaded:
    • Matsika. As security chief of Zimbabwe, he brought an end to the chaos caused by the great gang wars through sheer ruthlessness. Over a decade later, just mentioning his name is enough to make the surviving lesser criminals take flight.
    • The Masks, however, remain The Dreaded themselves, despite the general's best efforts. Their Establishing Character Moment is the bombing of a supermarket, and their motives (assuming they have any) remain a mystery. By the time we find out who they really are, and whom they serve, it's not at all hard to believe.
  • Eldritch Abomination: The Gondwannan gods are supposedly these, as their worshippers sacrifice animals and humans in the most painful ways possible so that their tormented souls will "wake up" these gods. The Big-Head Spirit that the Gondwannans are trying to awaken is a particularly malevolent and dangerous entity, as its Big-Head Mask is described as not existing entirely in either our world or the spirit world, it is capable of (temporarily) killing Arm by devouring his soul, and it desires to destroy the mhondoro so that the people of Zimbabwe would lose their hope and morality.
  • Energy Weapon: Laser guns are illegal weapons in the future, used solely by criminals (and those with diplomatic immunity). In a subversion of most fictional lasers, a character actually does get temporarily blinded by looking at one.
  • Even Evil Has Standards:
    • Rita mentions that despite being their captor, at least She-Elephant made sure that the kids had enough to eat (and despite where she lives, she's quite the cook). Whereas in Resthaven, Rita gets burned with peanuts for taking a bit of food for herself.
    • For most of the book, the She Elephant is also perfectly happy to sell the children to the Masks. When she finds out their true intentions, and when they alter the deal for good measure, she throws down.
  • Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Mellower. Tendai ends up feeling vaguely guilty for not knowing the real name of the person who essentially raised them; Kuda, on the other hand insists that the Mellower doesn't have a name. It's Anthony Horsepool-Worthingham, though only his mother consistently calls him that.
  • Face of a Thug: The three eponymous detectives are mutants with, respectively, massive ears that can fold and unfold like flower bulbs, enormous eyes that are completely black down to the sclera, and Creepily Long Arms on top of a higher-than-average height, all of which frequently frightens the people they interact with. But compared with the average Hardboiled Detective, they are surprisingly soft-hearted towards the people they interact with, particularly Arm with his ability to feel others' emotions and enhance positive thoughts in those he touches, and despite their rough occupation only carry "Nirvana guns" that nonlethally knock out their opponents.
  • Facial Horror: While in Resthaven, Tendai is made to duel with a Kamba clan boy nicknamed Head Buster with a "horribly scarred face." Hodza tells him that Head Buster got the scars as a baby by falling into a cook fire. Tendai notes that, in the city outside of Resthaven, the scars could have been treated.
  • Fat and Skinny:
    • Two of the boys Tendai befriends in Resthaven, Banga and Hodza, are described as bulky and frailer.
    • The climax prominently features two employees at the Starlight Room restaurant: the chief cook, "built like a five-course dinner", and the salad master, "light as a lettuce leaf".
  • Fish out of Water: Tendai and his siblings, having no clue how to adapt to life outside their house.
  • Flying Car: It's the future, folks. Flying vehicles are everywhere.
  • Future Food Is Artificial: An algae described as "pond scum" which is "pressed into the shape of hot dogs, etc."
  • Gilded Cage: How Tendai, Rita, and Kuda view their mansion. Despite having every comfort, they resent the fact that they're rarely allowed to leave.
  • Good Is Not Nice: First and foremost, General Matsika, but also Myanda (who is herself a former criminal), as well as the mhondoro spirit who possesses Arm near the book's climax. Averted with the detectives themselves, who are surprisingly soft-hearted compared to their Western counterparts—but then again, before the Matsikas came along, a lot of their cases involved "sneaky husbands".
  • Good Old Ways: Deconstructed with Resthaven. It's a natural preserve of pristine beauty, and it's a very good place to live - if you're a man. If you're a girl, you can look forward to polygamy and drudgery for the rest of your life, and if twins are born, one of the twins will be killed. Yes, probably the girl. A character who left the modern world to live in Resthaven acknowledges both the good and bad aspects, and that you can't have one without the other.
  • Honor Before Reason: Because Resthaven is deep-rooted in tradition, they don't just call the authorities to let them know kidnapped children are with them. The kids even lampshade that surely someone has come looking for them.
  • I Am Very British: The Mellower's mother, a.k.a. Mrs. Beryl Horsepool-Worthingham.
  • Impoverished Patrician: Beryl Horsepool-Worthingham is a proud and proper Englishwoman whose large English-style estate was a nice place to live once but has since gotten run down and cluttered with junk. Even the robot servants have gotten creaky, and it's clear that it's because of her drained finances and lack of real employment. This is why she keeps the Matsika children at her home without contacting their worried parents yet; she wants her son the Mellower to convince the Matsikas to offer a monetary reward first.
  • Karma Houdini:
    • The Mellower's mother. She hides the fact that she has Matsika's children in the hopes that he will eventually offer a reward that she can collect. This delay gives the She Elephant time to track them down, re-kidnap them, and sell them to the Masks, which almost results in their death by torture. Her consequence? 1000 hours of community service.
    • Averted by the She Elephant, who ends up doing some jail time for her crimes despite her eventual Heel–Face Turn.
  • Karmic Death: Obambo Chivari and his Mask cronies had spent years subjecting people and animals to torturous deaths in service of their God of Evil. The "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue says that they themselves were given similarly unpleasant deaths by their Gondwannan superiors for letting the Big-Head Mask be destroyed.
  • Lovecraftian Superpower: Downplayed in the titular characters, but their powers are derived from physical mutations, and their appearances are very unsettling to others. Eye's eyes are bulbous and protruding, Ear's ears are huge and mobile (to the point where he can fold them to focus on a point like an animal's ears or curl them up for storage), Arm's namesakes are of the Creepy Long variety with (slightly adhesive) Fingers and legs to match.
  • Made a Slave: The children are temporarily forced to mine plastic in the Dead Man's Vlei while the She Elephant arranges to sell them into more permanent slavery.
  • Malevolent Masked Men: The Masks are a gang that wear animal-themed masks. They're infamous for being very brutal and sadistic even compared to other gangs, and they still lurk in the shadowy parts of Harare killing and torturing people even long after General Matsika neutralized those other gangs. They're secretly a front for Gondwanna, the Arch-Enemy nation of Zimbabwe, who seek to perform Human Sacrifice to destroy the mhondoro guardian spirit of Zimbabwe and bring its people to despair and depravity. The animal masks are not only necessary to channel the tortured animal spirits for their ceremonies, they also disguise the fact that many of them are actually prominent Gondwannan diplomats, most notably Gondwannan Ambassador Obambo Chivari.
  • Maniac Monkeys: The Blue Monkey, a genetically engineered Talking Animal. He's a jerk.
  • The Men First: Implied that this is part of General Matsika's professional standards. By the end, Tendai develops similar beliefs.
  • Mirroring Factions:
    • Although the Gondwannans are Zimbabwe's historical enemies and blamed for everything from locusts to headaches, Tendai surmises that they probably carry on boring lives exactly the same as the Zimbabweans. Horribly subverted when it turns out that they actually carry out Human Sacrifice by way of Cold-Blooded Torture in order to appease their Eldritch Abomination gods.
    • A more straight example seems to be the opposing tribe in Resthaven, who engage in fist-fights with Tendai's group as a coming of age rite but are presumably virtually identical to Garikayi's tribe.
  • Missed Him by That Much: A recurring issue for the three detectives is that their investigation keeps leading them to places the missing kids had already left not long before. The worst example is when the detectives are right outside the entrance to the subway where the kids are frantically getting on the train; Ear, even with his Super-Hearing not being focused on it, can tell there's some commotion going on downstairs, but Eye and Arm convince him to come along to investigate Resthaven (which the kids just left) because that's where their current clues are leading them.
  • Mistaken for Dying: After escaping Resthaven Rita falls seriously ill and Tendai fears for her life, knowing that she could have caught any number of dangerous diseases that have been eradicated in 2194. It turns out she did catch an extinct disease — chicken pox.
  • Motive Misidentification: She Elephant planned to sell the kidnapped Matsika children to the Masks assuming that the Masks planned to corrupt them into criminals who would be at odds with their own law-and-order father. In reality, the Masks wanted the kids for a Human Sacrifice that would destroy the mhondoro of Zimbabwe. This doesn't sit well with the She Elephant at all.
  • Mutants:
    • The Ear, the Eye and the Arm are from a village called Hwange whose water source was tainted with radiation; their pregnant mothers drank the water, leading to their unique abilities.
    • The people of the Dead Man's Vlei develop into a sort of shambling hive mind due to prolonged exposure to the toxic environment.
  • A Mythology Is True: The ancient African myths are very real and drive a lot of the story.
  • Noble Savage: Resthaven is a cultural preserve where a select few live the life of pre-colonial Africans. Serves as a deconstruction as the initially idyllic lifestyle is shown to be full of sexism, superstition, and child murder; it's explicitly stated such a culture can only exist as a whole and you can't pick and choose only the "good" parts..
  • No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: She-Elephant does pull a Heel–Face Turn when realizing the children are going to be sacrificed. The thing is that she kidnapped them in the first place, which set the whole plot into motion. Thus, she is sentenced to some jail time because the father is definitely pressing charges for endangering his children.
  • Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: Tendai doesn't enjoy his martial arts training and isn't particularly good at it, but he's easily the best fighter out of the youth in Resthaven.
  • Nothing Is Scarier: The "decorations" at the Masks' shrine...as well as the eyes of the Big-Head Mask. It's never stated clearly how a mask's eyes can "open", or show hunger as a sacrifice is prepared—but then again, it may be better left unspecified.
  • Pet the Dog: Despite being a child kidnapper and essentially a slave master, the She Elephant is not stingy with her (surprisingly good) food, letting the Matsika kids eat as much as they want.
  • Psychic Powers: The Mellower has a mild case, but Arm fell out of that particular tree and hit every branch on the way down. He loses some of them at the end, but he's not entirely ungrateful. See Blessed with Suck, as well as...
  • Reactive Continuous Scream: Arm and Sekai accidentally get into a psychic version of this at one point. It nearly breaks them both.
  • Religion of Evil: The Masks.
  • Sheltered Aristocrat: Tendai and his siblings are the children of a high-ranking government official who keeps them mostly confined to their house to protect them from his many enemies. When they finally leave, they are ill-equipped to deal with the real world.
  • Shown Their Work: The depictions of African traditional culture and mythology are very thorough.
  • Spanner in the Works: The Masks did not count on She-Elephant's Heel–Face Turn.
  • Star Scraper: The Mile-High Macllwaine, which lives up to it's name. Stated to be less of a building and more of a self-contained, vertical city within the larger Harare metroplex.
  • Super-Senses: Eye and Ear each have one super sense. Go on, guess what they are.
  • The Teetotaler: The three detectives are noted to avoid alcohol. Whenever they go to Mr. Thirsty's bar for socializing and covertly eavesdropping on criminals, they always order fruit juice.
  • Theme Naming: This trope feels the love. The three detectives, the Mellower, the She-Elephant, Knife and Fist, Trashman...
  • Tranquilizer Dart: The Nirvana guns are said to produce "vibrations" that knock people out for 15 minutes, but they also use "rounds" implied to be some kind of physical ammo.
  • Translation Convention:
    • Most of the characters speak chiShona unless otherwise specified. At one point, Tendai finds an antique glass bottle with English labeling, and has to work a little to translate it.
    • Many key cultural terms (most prominently the mhondoro) are left untranslated—along with loanwords from Afrikaans, Portuguese, and a few other languages to keep things interesting.
  • Trash of the Titans: The Dead Man's Vlei — an abandoned toxic waste dump — is spacious enough to house an entire colony of scavengers, and so deep that slaves mine for salvage.
  • Two Lines, No Waiting: Soon after the kids are kidnapped, the story alternates every few chapters between two plotlines: the plight of the children in captivity along with their attempts to get home, and the work of the detectives to find the kids and figure out why they were taken in the first place.
  • Urban Hellscape: Toxic slums, borderline-Privately Owned Society, food shortages... an excellent example from the trope's heyday in the mid-90s.
  • The Wall Around the World: In Zimbabwe in 2194, Resthaven is a large preserve that has been set aside where a select few live in the Good Old Ways of pre-colonial Africa. It's large enough to hold at least a couple villages with their livestock and agriculture, and surrounded by an enormous wall to block out the sights and sounds of the modern world, mirrored on the inside to give the impression of going on forever. The residents call the wall "the edge of the world" and aren't even curious what's on the other side, knowing it only as Mwari's country.
  • "Well Done, Son" Guy: General Matsika starts out as part of this for all his children (especially with Tendai). As you might guess, it doesn't work out very well for him.
  • Witch Hunt: In Resthaven, after the twins are born. A very literal and very unpleasant example—even though the ancestor spirit who possesses the nganga prevents him from framing Tendai as he was planning to do. Instead, the "evidence" points to Myanda, whose fate is left unspecified.
  • Would Hurt a Child:
    • Most of the inhabitants of Resthaven, as long as it's a girl. It's also their practice to kill one of the babies if twins are born.
    • Another version of this crops up at the climax. The mouth of the Big-Head Mask is lined with very small teeth, and the children are to be tortured to death.