Syncopation

Whitney French’s “Syncopation” is a novel-in-verse that drops the reader into the fractured aftermath of a ‘Memory War,’ where civilization has splintered into evolved new cultures, castes and coalitions. Fifty years after the war, Earth has become increasingly hostile. There are earthquakes that fracture the landscape, acid rain makes travel dangerous and a toxic environment has driven many humans toward the possibility of life beyond the planet. 

Against this landscape of ecological collapse and technological transformation, French constructs a distinctly solarpunk and Afrofuturist world populated by retrofitted food garages, microchip-sorting factories, hyperloop terminals and memory technologies capable of storing or erasing human experience. 

In the ‘Acknowledgements’ section of the novel, French identifies the work as a queer science-fiction novel in verse, a description that captures the striking convergence of its form and topical ambitions. The fragmented verse mirrors a civilization whose history has itself been thrust apart, while the novel's speculative technologies ask what remains of the self when memory, the record of who we have been and where we root identity, can become something manipulated or erased.

At the centre of this fractured world are the characters O and Z, two women whose encounter becomes both a love story and a collision between competing visions of the future. They find one another during an acid rain storm and become travelling companions and lovers, moving through a world in which survival requires constant adaptation. 

Yet their intimacy cannot erase the fundamental differences between them. O, descended from space pirates, has always looked toward the sky and imagines her future among the stars. Z is earthbound, a forager whose relationship with the damaged planet is rooted in care, restoration and a desire to help the Earth heal. Their love therefore develops within a tension between departure and belonging, between the desire to escape a dying world and the determination to remain and repair it. 

This tension gives “Syncopation” its emotional pulse. O and Z are not simply choosing between two places, they are choosing between two philosophies of survival. Their romance is tender and deeply felt, but French refuses the easy resolution in which love automatically conquers ideological difference. Instead, the women must confront the painful possibility that loving another person does not necessarily mean sharing the same vision of the future. Their decision to follow their respective passions transforms the novel's love story into something larger, an exploration of the sacrifices required when personal desire collides with ecological and philosophical conviction. Love, like revolution, becomes dangerous precisely because it refuses to remain orderly.

The title “Syncopation” offers a resonant key to the novel's form and emotional structure. Syncopation disrupts an expected rhythm by placing emphasis where the listener does not anticipate it, and French's verse similarly unsettles conventional narrative rhythms. 

Other reviewers have noted that reading the novel can feel like ‘hearing a song for the first time.’ The rhythm catches before every word has been fully understood. Meaning arrives through sound, repetition, interruption and image as much as through conventional narrative structure. The result is a book that asks to be experienced as much as interpreted, its language carrying the reader through a future in which memory has become currency and the remnants of humanity are struggling to determine what, and whom, is worth carrying forward.

There are the Chip-Users, people who store their memories via brain implantation and they are the “ones who use Earth Technology.” They are the ones who work with nature.The Chip-Users tried to upload the system, “but only had access to expired microchips & outdated software.” There are the Griots, they were raised amongst sound, they “leaned into the anonymity of a chorus.” The Adorners were raised to be draped in heavy cloth, they “assembled [themselves] as stitches among stitches among stitches of an unrelentless seam.” Then, there is the  Earth Tech, raised in the bush and in the mangroves, “[they] faded into greenlush.” Evocatively, there is differentiation between the named and nameless, the nameless, a mysterious group that defies categorization. 

To have a name is something that ensures rising above the atrocities of the Memory War. 

“yet all of us were ushered into a world where birthers, siblings, neighbours & entire households were named, labelled, quarantined and killed based on an entire community’s ability to remember. especially during the war. & what little coin there was to be collected to bless us with a baby name was later spent to honour the dead. we were unaware that their memory surpassed our necessity for being remembered.” 

A name becomes currency. A name is powerful capital in a society of categorization and segmentation. 

Yet, there is a timelessness of being nameless. The nameless haunt. 

“we are the shiver down your spine, the legion of labourers forgotten, the thing you work hard to remember, but often forget. a fleeting recollection. we, the flash of ancestral repetition made flesh, the phantom saying this, feeling that. we are your before…look! in your peripheral without moving your head, in the corner of your eye. yeah that’s us. the nameless.” 

The narrative voice is powerful. The narrative voice demands acknowledgement. In the section titled “Deja vu suite: I,” the narrative voice explains: “we were born into a world that demanded we have a name. & when we refused, we grew into the shape of burden.” Refusal and burden become something of a weapon. French succeeds in her world-building. 

“Syncopation” is organized with a prologue and epilogue. The novel is divided into seven sections, “Aria,” “Stay,” “Overture,” “Go,” “Dig,” “Diminishing Chord,” and “Fly.” These sections can be entered at different angles and lenses. The novel does not have to be read cover-to-cover. The reader will understand what they can, when they are ready to. 

The beauty of French’s world-building within a futuristic society, is the continued connection of the human to the earth. In the part “Overture,” and in the poem titled, “A Brief History of Memory War One (MWI), part IV,” French shows this earthen connection. “We were once co-conspirators with rock, plants, kin, once as electric as dirt/ toothing the rings of a black oak, Earth she absorbs our electrons & our anxieties & our pains, she’s strong/ enough to hold some for ourselves.” This connection is not severed, and in that continuity, there is hope. “Our blood/ a weighted, heirloomed root system/ compressed into our spines.” And, in that bloodstream, memory resides. 

The title “Syncopation” offers the first key to the novel. In music, syncopation disrupts the expected rhythm, placing emphasis on the offbeat rather than the anticipated downbeat. It is irregular and surprising, a break in the pattern that catches the ear precisely because it refuses to move as expected. French makes that disruption in writing. Syncopation eventually emerges as part of a plan that may offer the fractured world a possible future, with O and Z drawn into its uncertain possibilities, but the novel's most compelling syncopations are more intimate. The relationship between O and Z moves in its own broken rhythm, stopping and starting, separating and converging. There is always something fractured yet still whole.

The same principle shapes French’s language. Her lines resist predictable patterns, her verses break and reform, repetitions arrive at unexpected moments and unusual word choices can suddenly shift the reader’s footing. Meaning is therefore never entirely settled or confirmed. The reader is repeatedly asked to pause and reconsider what has just been encountered. 

Like a syncopated rhythm, the novel's disruptions become its source of energy. What initially feels irregular gradually becomes a new kind of music, one in which the broken beat is not a failure of rhythm but the rhythm itself. French invites us not merely to follow the story but to listen to it, allowing its interruptions, repetitions and unexpected stresses to create the pulse of O and Z’s world.

Syncopation is referred to explicitly on several occasions within the novel. In the section, “Go,” a poem titled “rainy train ride to Vancouver,” syncopation is used for the first time. “A man/ teaches his daughter syncopation/ lest no one else learn his lineage: aligning/ pattern & pulse; lest the Chip-Users/ wipe them out again.” Survival is found within the off-beat, what cannot be said. Here, there are still family ties, there is still another generation to speak to. There is still opportunity to control the narrative of identity and familial affiliation. All is not lost. A second reference, in “When martyrs run,” Part II, “she gurgled a weak syncopation, sound requires something else, someone else to bounce off of: the harshest punishment isn’t silence, it’s severance.” And, perhaps, that is exactly what this novel-in-verse accomplishes, something to bounce off of, a connection to be made. 

In the same poem, French repeats a question without the stamp of punctuation. “How much can a body/ abide,” is repeated three times between three different stanzas. A body, to remain or stay. A body, to tolerate and to endure. A body, to obey, to accept a rule or a decision. 

On a page alone, there are three arrows pointing from the left in, and there are three arrows from the right pointing to a centre. Below, the word syncopation is captured between two singular arrows. Like this: 

>>><<<

<syncopation>

Arrows that converge to an unspecified centre. Two opposing forces that meet in the middle. The second line could be translated as notation, the angle brackets could function like coding, a tag, the indication of an opening tag. But, regardless, the appearance of this final reference to the word syncopation suggests what is pushing back from the middle, a displacement, in being able to hear what we are not accustomed to listening to.  

The title of the novel is obviously an entry-point. The musical practice of disrupting an expected cadence by emphasizing the off-beat or weaker beat, a technique particularly associated with jazz and funk. French translates that principle into both narrative and form. The story arrives in verse, but the poetry itself is arranged to interrupt expectation of what poetry typically accomplishes. Through broken lines, shifting rhythms and repetitions, these mechanics can suddenly alter the reader’s sense of what is literal and what is metaphorical. What initially feels disorienting gradually becomes purposeful. The novel asks its reader to listen differently. 

Whitney French is a Toronto writer, multidisciplinary artist, educator, editor and publisher whose literary practice moves freely across poetry, fiction, children’s literature, screenwriting, speculative fiction and essays. A graduate of Concordia University’s Creative Writing program, where she also studied Child Psychology, French has developed a body of work deeply attentive to memory, technology and Black futurism. She has taught creative writing at Toronto Metropolitan University and the University of Toronto. As the editor of the award-winning “Black Writers Matter and Griot: Six Writers’ Sojourn into the Dark,” and as co-founder and publisher of Hush Harbour, a Black queer feminist press, she has extended that literary practice beyond her own writing, helping to create space for voices and stories historically marginalized within Canadian publishing.

Thank you to Whitney French, Wolsak & Wynn and River Street Writing for a complimentary copy in request for an honest review.