#59: The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton

This book has an awful lot going for it—it’s enough to give other books an inferiority complex. For starters, it won the 2013 Man Booker prize, the UK’s top literary prize. Add to that that it’s a beautiful object—a thick, handsome paperback with a beautiful cover and superb design throughout. Reading it on a plane, I was especially pleased to find that it would lay open on my tray without the aid of any additional weight. A flexible spine is a wonderful thing, for people or for books.

Of course, literary prizes and bindings are not intrinsic to The Luminaries as a work of fiction—you could order an electronic copy of the book and never be aware of such things. But even reduced to its chapters, paragraphs, and sentences, you would quickly understand that The Luminaries is a work of rare quality.

You are no doubt wondering if all this indirect praise is heartfelt, or whether I am about to attempt to take this book down a few notches. I want to have it both ways—to give The Luminaries its considerable due, but also to take issue with its somewhat airtight unimpeachable perfection.

The Luminaries is a complicated, original story well told. One of the blurbs on the cover describes it as “a lively parody of a nineteenth-century novel”; another describes it as “a twenty-first century Victorian novel.” And while it’s obvious that The Luminaries shares various characteristics with classic nineteenth century novels—its heft, its large cast of characters, its omniscient narrator and its elegant prose, for example—I never had the sense that it was commenting on or in any way seeking to separate itself from earlier work with which it shared those characteristics. It is most emphatically not a parody.

It’s also obvious from the start that The Luminaries is something more than just a complicated, original story well told—it goes places that Dickens and Eliot never went. This is made clear by the “Character Chart” at the front which presents the 18 major characters in groups such as “Stellar,” “Planetary,” and “Terra Firma” and also gives the first 12 a “Related House” and the other six a “Related Influence.”

Though the Character Chart page does not contain any terminology specific to the zodiac, each section begins with a chart. At the left are two examples

I’ve never been much for astrology, so I was hoping my lack of expertise on that subject would not put me at a disadvantage in reading The Luminaries. There are other indications that Catton is holding a few tarot cards up her sleeve. For one thing, the chapters and sections in the book grow progressively shorter. The first section is 360 pages long, the second 160 pages, the third 104 pages, and so on; the last is just two pages. I am not sure how this foreshortening effect connects to the zodiacal theme—if indeed it does. For me, such curious elements are reminiscent of the various mythological and symbolic overlays in James Joyce’s Ulysses and other modernist novels. The Luminaries could stand without them, but even though I didn’t pay very much attention to them, I think they probably heightened my sense of the intricacy and artificiality of the book. This was not a bad thing. I knew to be on my toes and to be willing to regard any and every detail as significant.

Perhaps I should mention what The Luminaries is about? It’s set on the west coast of the southern island of New Zealand, a damp and cool place not unlike the northwest coast of the US. The time frame is 1865-66. This is about 10 or 15 years after English settlers first arrived in New Zealand. There had been an earlier gold rush on the east coast of the island some years before, and now there is a second rush on the west coast where the town of Hokitika has sprung up. This is a real town, by the way, and so I assume that most of the historical setting is also authentic. Twelve men of the town, each corresponding to a sign of the zodiac, make up its civic structure. There is a banker, a chemist (that is, a pharmacist), a chaplain, a shipping agent, and so on. Two of the twelve are Chinese prospectors, and one, Te Rau Tauwhare, is Maori and “a greenstone hunter” who is after a different mineral than the others. These twelve are relatively static—the end of the book finds them much as they were at the beginning. There is a single exception—one of the twelve is killed.

Six other characters move through the book and move through space, for that matter, in a more dynamic manner, and even as I’m typing this, I’m congratulating myself for identifying them as the six "classical" planets known to the zodiac! Score for me! (OK, I see now that the Character Chart does classify these six characters as "Planetary," but I swear I just noticed that.)

The Maguffin of the story is a fortune in gold that changes ownership and form as we read (that is, it’s gold dust at one point, small ingots at another, and stamped bars at a third). Chronologically, the telling of the story starts in the middle (January 1866), runs forward as far as April 1866, then goes to May 1865 before finishing back in January 1866. So we join the action in the middle, see it through to its conclusion, and then circle back to see how it first got set in motion. This is all in proper mystery novel style, and indeed on a certain level The Luminaries is very much a whodunit, except that there is no single “it” that got done. I wasn’t quite sharp enough to figure out every detail—for example, I wasn’t sure who murdered one of the characters until I consulted the internet. But I definitely got most of it, and Catton is quite skillful in spinning us around blindfold at the beginning and gradually giving us just enough information to connect all the dots (to mix metaphors).

All in all, a worthy entertainment, like a well-made summer blockbuster movie. There is a sufficiency of interesting characters and dramatic scenes, and the setting is interesting, though there is very little about the Maori, unfortunately. Were they really marginalized so quickly?

I’m trying to avoid the self-imposed trap here of having to render either a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down” on The Luminaries. Though it’s a (mostly) realistic novel, it reminds me of The Lord of the Rings in some ways: it’s a clockwork universe with its own logic, limits, and rules. Set in New Zealand, no less. It’s more about the interactions and intersections of the characters than it is about anything going on within their heads. I’ve never seen the Lord of the Rings movies (not all the way through, anyway), but I have read the books. Like The Luminaries, I would recommend them for long flights. To New Zealand, say.

#58: Supreme City – How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America, by Donald L. Miller

I grew up in New York City in the 1960s and 70s—not in Manhattan, but in the outer reaches of Queens, where there were backyards and squirrels and lawns to be mowed. When I was about 14 I first rode the number 7 line train into Manhattan—Times Square is where the 7 went, and the city I surfaced into was not in its prime—porn theatres, pawn shops, crazed people in filthy clothes. One transfer away was Greenwich Village, then home to about 500 “head shops” selling glass pipes and black light posters. This was more like it, because my friends and I were aspiring hippies.

Though I was fascinated by the crowds and the intensity and the giant buildings of Manhattan, I was also hypervigilant and a bit terrified by it all. The idea was to keep moving and not make eye contact. Manhattan offered no repose. After college, I lived in Manhattan for several years. I got to know Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue, the museums, the parks. I never learned to love New York, but it’s imprinted on me, somehow—its 22 square miles seemed as vast and varied as a continent. There were the fountains and plazas of the opulent districts, the avenues you could walk for miles, the mountains of garbage bags at 2:00 in the morning.

Anyway, here’s a book about how Manhattan got to be the Manhattan that I know. It answers the questions I never thought to ask: How and when did Park Avenue become the place where the richest people lived? Why are the most exclusive department stores all on Fifth Avenue? I accepted Manhattan as a given, an outgrowth of the bedrock, like Australia or Yellowstone, but it only really became the place I knew a few short decades earlier—in the 1920s.

Donald Miller, focusing on the 1920s, devotes chapters to the builders and the sellers, the broadcasters and the publishers, people whose names I had heard but whose stories I did not know. Miller’s book is about a small army of Horatio Algers, mostly Jewish, who helped turn Edith Warton’s Manhattan of wooden mansions and horse carriages into Metropolis.

David Sarnoff founded NBC and William Paley founded CBS, enterprises that grew from nothing into essential American institutions in just a few short years. Walter Chrysler built not only a major automobile company but also the tallest (briefly) and most lavish skyscraper in the world. The car company retains his name, but the skyscraper is his monument; it could almost have been his tomb:

The completed lobby is a masterwork of dramatic design. Indirectly lit, its walls are of red, richly veined Moroccan marble. The floor is Sienna Travertine carved into patterns that point the way to the elevators. There are thirty-two of them, in four groups, each car with a different design and color, and each operator dressed—originally—in a different uniform ‘for each of the four seasons.’ The interior of the cabs are finished in exotic inlaid woods: Japanese ash and Oriental walnut, among them.

And so on and so forth. Later we get to read about Chrysler’s “three-story Cloud Club, a male-only redoubt for the three hundred or so of the city’s power brokers.” This was during prohibition: “Members were allocated wooden lockers to store their bottles; each locker had carved hydrographic symbols on its doors to prevent federal agents from identifying its millionaire lawbreaker.”

Park and Fifth Avenues only became possible after the massive engineering project that created Grand Central Station also buried the rail infrastructure going north along the East Side underground. Where the rich now live was once a several hundred foot wide corridor of tracks, mud, and shanties.

Miller also includes star athletes like Babe Ruth, the gangsters from Hell’s Kitchen in the West 40s—George Raft and Mae West emerged from this demimonde—and even the competing founders of cosmetics empires—Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden—who had competing salons at either end of Fifth Avenue’s miracle mile.

Money was water and fertilizer to the stone gardens of Manhattan, and money still flows freely. But the stone gardens have become a bit rank and overgrown, and it seems unlikely that there can ever be a flowering like the one that took place 90 years ago. Which is an overly ostentatious way of saying that the real action might now be happening somewhere else.

#57: The Black Sheep, by Honoré de Balzac

This book has an unusual plot. The first half is set in Paris and gives us the history of the Brideau family. There are two sons: one an artist and an honorable man, the other a soldier and a scoundrel. Balzac is not one for moral ambiguity. This soldier, Phillippe Brideau, has fought with Napoleon and then, after returning home, becomes a gambler and a playboy who goes on to ruin his family’s finances.

The second half is set in a provincial town, Issoudun. Balzac leads off with a fascinating chapter about the history of this actual town in the center of France.

With all due respect to Paris, Issoudun is one of the most historic towns in France….[E]xcavations recently conducted by a learned local archaeologist … have discovered a fifth century basilica beneath the famous tower of Issoudun. The very materials out of which this church was constructed bear the marks of an ancient civilization, for its stones come from a Roman temple which it replaced.

The Issoudun part of the book tells of another branch of the same family, the final descendant of which is a dim witted middle aged man, who happens to be worth a fortune. His housekeeper and another former soldier (also a villain) have this heir firmly in their control by means of emotional blackmail. They scheme to get his millions.

The final part of the book is a battle of wits between the two soldier villains. The Parisian branch of the family hopes that Phillippe can somehow come between the blackmailers and the heir so as to bring the inheritance to them. We root for Phillippe, the scoundrel from the first part of the book, because he is struggling to break the hold the housekeeper and her sweetheart, Maxence Gilet, have on the old scion. His own crimes are set aside for the time being. But Balzac does nothing to suggest that Phillippe has reformed in any way—he’s managed to give up drink and gambling, but only so that he can pursue his plan of action at full strength. He’s purged the self-destructive side of his character so that he can focus full time on destroying others, the fact that he is working to outfox schemers almost as evil as himself notwithstanding.

The struggle between Phillippe and Max forms the climax of The Black Sheep. What could be more entertaining than two arch-villians going at each other? It’s like Frankenstein vs. the Wolf Man, or Godzilla vs. Mothra.

Rest assured, though, that there is a lot more going on here than the battle of wits between Phillippe and Max. There are numerous friends and relations that come and go—I would estimate that there are at least 50 characters that we meet in The Black Sheep, each with a history, a personality, and a role to play. The action covers a period of about 20 years and we learn much about the events that shaped France in the first decades of the 19th century. We learn how Napoleonic loyalists fared during the Bourbon restoration and how military widows could be pensioned by means of becoming lottery administrators. We dip into the world of the theater and gain some acquaintance with the art world, where placing a picture in the annual Salon could make an artist’s reputation. I don’t know much about this period, and I didn't stop to look up the references to various politicians and artists. I was well entertained by what remained, but someone who knows about France in the 1820s would probably get that much more out of the book.

I was curious about the title—The Black Sheep. Because “sheep” can be singular or plural in English, I wasn’t sure whether it referred to a single animal or two, given that there are two roughly equal villains in the story. After thinking about it I realized it had to be just one—Max Gilet isn’t actually a member of the family, and you can’t be a black sheep without a family. But in the meantime I checked the original French title—La Rabouilleuse. Google translate was stumped, so I looked the term up in an online French dictionary and found this:

Agiter, troubler l'eau d'une rivière ou d'un étang pour effrayer les écrevisses ou les poissons qui, dans leur fuite, se laissent prendre plus facilement.

It’s a regional term from “Centre de la France”; it translates this way:

Agitate, disturb the water of a river or a pond to frighten the crayfish or the fish which, in their flight, allow themselves to be taken more easily.

This left me momentarily more confused than ever, until I remembered that the housekeeper from the second part of the book is often referred to as “The Fisherwoman” due to the circumstances that led to her inclusion in the family household back when she was a young girl. We first meet her when the father of the dim-witted heir comes across her as he drives his carriage through the country:

With the help of a stout branch whose twigs were splayed out in the shape of a racket, she was stirring and muddying the water of the stream. Frightened by an operation they did not understand, the crayfish quickly swam upstream, and in their confusion got caught up in nets which the fisherman had placed a convenient distance away. Flore Brazier was holding her branch in her hand, with all the grace of innocence.

So here is our rabouilleuse, who retains her beauty but not her innocence. It changes our perception of the novel a bit—during the final contest between Phillippe and Max, Flore is very much central to the story. Phillippe eventually marries Flore after he vanquishes Max, so she is an essential link between the two villains, the fulcrum of their struggle. But we can understand why translators have avoided "The Fisherwoman" as a title, which is what Flore is called by the townspeople of Issoudun. Fisherwoman is a sort of dingy, smelly term with no poetry whatsoever, whereas La Rabouilleuse is delicate and conjures a scene. So instead, we get a sheep.

#56: A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James

Not so brief, as it turns out—this book runs to nearly 700 pages. It deals with gangs and politics in Jamaica, and centers around an actual incident: an assassination attempt on Bob Marley at his house in Kingston in 1976. The seven killings of the title are (I think) of the seven assassins. Certainly there are a lot more than seven killings in the book, so that’s another problem I had with the title.

Up until about page 500 I was finding this book more trouble than it was worth. The story is passed among the voices of a large set of characters, a la The Sound and the Fury. Many of these characters speak in a thick Jamaican patois. For example:

This is how nine man become eight. Last night Josey Wales tell we what we going do. Renton from Trench Town say him cut a hit tune and he not pulling no gun like that boy in the Heptones who in prison when white man put him song in a movie. He say that him baby mother go to the Singer record studio and they give her money for the baby and her mother and her whole family. And he know that she is just one of more than hundred people that get help from the Singer and what goin’ happen if that stop? Josey Wales say that don’t make him better that make him worse because all him doing is giving poor people fish to eat because now that he reach he don’t want nobody else learn how to catch fish for himself. Some of we receive that reasoning but not Renton from Trench Town. Weeper take out him gun to shoot the bitch right deh so. Josey Wales say no, man, listen to the man and understand him reasoning. Then Josey Wales say that one has to know the factors. We don’t know what he mean, so he say kinetic energy: KE = mv2/2 (where m is mass and v is velocity). Yaw. Deformation. Fragmentation. Bleeding. Hypovolemic shock. Exsanguination. Hypoxia. Pneumothorax, heart failure and brain damage. Bang. Him skull stopped the bullet but blood still splash on Weeper chest. Not me Starsky and Hutch t-shirt! Weeper say as the man body fall and he wipe brains off him chest. Josey Wales put the gun back in him holster.

Did somebody get shot or not? Possibly not in that paragraph, but probably in the next.

James deploys the full modernist bag of tricks: Long stretches of dialog without quotation marks where it’s often difficult to keep track of who’s speaking to whom. Chapters that provide one side of a dialog leaving the reader to puzzle out who is being spoken too and what the other half of the conversation must be, etc.

And so many characters, major and minor! Many of them are gang members, and it’s not easy to distinguish one from another. Some are killed off before we get a handle on them; others live long enough that we begin to be able to know them.

The result of all this is that it’s difficult to know from one moment to the next what’s going on. Some novels deliberately blindfold you and then spin you around for a few chapters at the beginning and then coalesce by page 100 or so. With A Brief History of Seven Killings it takes a lot longer than that. For the last 200 pages the action moves to New York City, and for me this was when the clouds finally began to part. More careful readers might have gotten their bearings earlier. I just forged ahead, watching as characters came and went and occasionally got raped or murdered, and figuring things out as best I could.

Part of me wonders if James couldn’t have made his book a little more accessible—did he write like Faulkner because he wanted to be seen as Faulkner’s equal? Then again, given that I am such a fan of Faulkner, why should I begrudge this writer the privilege of challenging readers to the same degree?

James does give us one character we can root for: Nina Burgess is a woman who has had a one-night stand with Marley and has taken to standing outside his house waiting for a chance to speak with him. I cannot remember exactly why she is determined to do this—I thought maybe she was pregnant with his child but that doesn’t seem to be the case. She is described in the Cast of Characters at the beginning of the book as a “former receptionist, currently unemployed.” So she is a bit unraveled even when we first meet her, but her problems quickly escalate. She is outside Marley’s house the night of the assassination attempt and comes face to face with the head assassin, who puts a gun to her but doesn’t pull the trigger. Thereafter she shows up in different places using different names. James doesn’t actually tell us it’s the same woman whenever she re-emerges, but he doesn’t make it hard for us to figure it out. He also doesn’t tell us, until the very end, why she is on the run, but we figure that out too. I’m not a big mystery reader so I’m not used to having to figure so many things out as I read a book. But even though this isn’t a typical mystery, you’d better have your deerskin cap on if you plan on reading it. If you didn’t know, for example, that Bob Marley died of metastatic melanoma that started in his big toe you’d be mystified by several long passages.

Nina Burgess is a plucky, resourceful character who eventually becomes a nurse in New York. After 30 or 40 or so pages of violence and mayhem it was always a relief to come upon one of her chapters for a respite—I actually started looking ahead to see where the next one was. Her goal is to get as far away from Kingston and the man who might want to kill her as she possibly can. Along the way she has an affair with an American executive where she tries to pass herself off as a sex kitten so that he might agree to take her back to Arkansas with him, and then later gets a job in New York as caretaker for a rich man with a rather peculiar mental disorder.

The gangster story is, in the end, very impressive, more like Scarface than The Godfather. The CIA and the Columbian drug cartel play their part. In the early sections of the book there are several Kingston dons completing for power, but the one who survives and prospers goes by the name of Josey Wales. Which is odd because this character’s history goes back to 1966, but the Clint Eastwood movie that he presumably derives his name from came out in 1976, by which point the character in this book is well established. Wales is smart and he is as vicious as they come—the baddest of the bad. He eventually comes to control a large part of the North American drug market. But can he outrun his fate as one of the Marley assassins, or is he merely the last of the seven to meet his fate?

Marley, but the way, is mentioned maybe twice in the book by name—he is otherwise only referred to as The Singer.

The afterword to the book is revealing. James says:

The problem was that I couldn’t tell whose story it was. Draft after draft, page after page, character after character, and still no through line, no narrative spine, nothing. Until one Sunday, at W.A. Frost in St. Paul, when I was having dinner with Rachel Perlmeter, she said what if it’s not one person’s story? Also, when did I read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying? Well, maybe not in those exact words, but we also talked about Marguerite Duras, so I went and read The North China Lover as well. I had a novel, and it was right in front of me all that time. Half-formed and fully formed characters, scenes out of place, hundreds of pages that needed sequence and purpose. A novel that would be driven only by voice.

I’m thinking maybe Rachel should have kept her mouth shut. It’s a great pile of a book and it’s got some great stuff in it. But from a certain perspective it still reads like a work in progress.

#55: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain

Ernest Hemingway wrote that the American novels begins and ends with Huckleberry Finn. Google won’t tell me exactly when and where he said it, but I’ll accept that he did. As many people know, the character of Huckleberry Finn first appeared in an earlier Twain work—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The earlier book doesn’t rank nearly as high as its sequel—my impression is that it’s considered a kind of sentimental work perhaps more suited for the “young adult” demographic. Sort of like Treasure Island, but not so scary. I was fairly sure I’d never read Tom Sawyer.

Of course, anyone who wants to know a little bit about Tom Sawyer should probably be reading the relevant Wikipedia entry, or just googling for a more authoritative source, because the chances of me having anything original to say about this book are pretty slim. Reading a book like this is sort of like visiting a museum, or watching Casablanca for the eighth time. You might have something to say about your subjective experience of the thing, but you’d have to be pretty presumptuous to think you could tell the world anything new about it.

So with that, here are some things that I noticed. Tom Sawyer doesn’t really tell you much about what it would have been like to live at what was then the far western extreme of the United States in the 1830s—except insomuch as it tells you a bit about what some people might have been like in that time and place. In the first few chapters, the focus is on character sketches: Tom, his strict but fond Aunt Polly, his pesky younger brother Sid, his sweetheart Becky Thatcher, and his semi-homless friend Huck Finn. Tom is presented as an essentially good person who has a pretty fair idea of what the adults expect of him and would just as soon not oblige. I’m not thinking so much about how he cons some of the local yokels into painting his fence for him—it’s more when he absconds with a couple of friends to an island in the Mississippi for long enough for the people in the town to assume they’ve all drowned. Tom sneaks back into town one night and discovers that he is presumed dead, but instead of correcting this assumption he makes plans to stay away until the funeral and only then to reveal himself. The fact that I find this rather cold of Tom might indicate that I should have read this book when I was younger.

Whether by design or happenstance, the latter part of the book becomes more plot-driven, with a bona fide villain (the mixed-race Injun Joe) and an episode where Tom and Becky are trapped in a cave for a number of days. Injun Joe—a “hapless half-breed”—is kind of a frontier Shylock—he feels his outsider status as an injury, and is determined to pay it back double. Unlike Shylock, he is rendered without dignity or eloquence. But Twain does do himself proud in describing Injun Joe’s death from starvation in the same cave from which Tom and Becky were lucky enough to escape:

When the cave door was unlocked, a sorrowful sign presented itself in the dim twilight of the place. Injun Joe lay stretched upon the ground, dead, with his face close to the crack of the door, as if his longing eyes had been fixed, to the latest moment, upon the light and the cheer of the free world outside.

We read that he gnawed candle stubs before he died, and drank the water that dripped ever so slowly from a stalactite.

Has everything a purpose and a mission? Did this drop fall patiently during five thousand years to be ready for this flitting human insect’s need? And has it another important object to accomplish ten thousand years to come?

For some reason this puts me in mind of the sham eulogy that King Kong’s exploiter, Carl Denham, delivers at the end of that movie: “It was beauty killed the beast.” It might be more moving, Carl, if you’d shown an ounce of kindness or sympathy for the big guy before this. Too bad he didn’t land on you.

So we leave Tom and his townfolk, none the worse for wear in the restored purity of their town. Here’s how Twain ties it up:

Most of the characters that perform in this book still live, and are prosperous and happy. Some day it may seem worthwhile to take up the story of the younger ones again and see what sort of men and women they turned out to be; therefore it will be wisest not to reveal any of that part of their lives at present.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a charming book, and it holds up reasonably well, but it feels like a rather minor thing in the end. As though its author sat down to write one morning and proceeded to try out a few different kinds of things until he pulled it all together with some melodrama at the end. For me, it’s just a bit of preparation for re-reading Life on the Mississippi and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, two books that I’ve read before and for which I have much higher expectations.

#54: The Orenda, by Joseph Boyden

The Spanish and the English knew how to take care of business. They efficiently carved up and took possession of their respective portions of the Western Hemisphere. The Spanish came with crucifixes, but soon developed a knack for plucking the hearts out of native Empires: first Mexico, then Peru. The rest was just mop up. The English were a bit shaky for a decade or so, but by the latter part of the 17th century they were taking enthusiastic bites out of the North American continent. After rebranding themselves as Americans, they developed a system of treaty and relocation that steadily swept the original inhabitants of the continent out of their way. By the time they reached California in the 1840s and 50s they were exterminating Indians matter of factly. Missionary zeal was a distant memory. Here’s a quote from a New York Times review of a book titled An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873, by Benjamin Madley:

The slaughter of California’s Indians was rapid and thorough even by the grim standards that had been set elsewhere in North America. Before 1846, California’s native peoples suffered great losses from diseases and dispossession. Spanish colonizers and their Mexican successors wanted to preserve Indians as mission inmates or as cheap and dependent farm labor. The American newcomers, however, came by the thousands and treated natives as menaces best destroyed, the sooner the better.

It’s incredible that I had no more than an inkling of any of this until I read that review. And to think that all this was going on while, not far off, Mark Twain was writing about jumping frogs. Did he know? If he did, maybe that helps to explain the jarring depictions of mass slaughter in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

But the Spanish and the English were not the only nations with American franchises: the French were here too. They came in smaller numbers, but the crucial difference is that they did not sweep native societies before them, but rather injected themselves deep into the heart of the continent, along the St. Lawrence at Quebec and Montreal. This made them vulnerable in a way that the Spanish and English were not. The French led primarily with priests—Jesuits—rather than soldiers. Militarily, they were no stronger and far less numerous than the Iroquois of New York State, with whom they battled for supremacy for over 100 years.

I first became interested in the French experience in North America while reading Francis Parkman’s seven-volume history, France and England in North America, republished by the Library of America in the 1980s. The series was originally published between 1865 and 1892. I had known little about the French experience in America, other than the gory tales of martyrdom I heard in Catholic school, but it’s a great story, from initial explorations and settlements through an extended if stunted colonial phase to a might-have-been attempt to master the entire continent, with settlements and trade networks deep into the Midwest and northern Rockies. Beyond Quebec, little remains of these ambitions other than place names—St. Louis, Des Moines, and of course New Orleans. I’d love to ramble on about things like the battle for Atlantic Canada, culminating in the French defeat at fortress Louisbourg in Nova Scotia in 1758. The result of this defeat was that French settlers near the Atlantic coast were shipped off to Louisiana, while unruly Catholic Scots from the Highlands were brought it to take their place. Another remarkable episode is that of the coureurs de bois, literally “runners of the woods,” French agents who set up trading networks that spread across thousands of miles of the North American interior. Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, was one such, and from him we get the name of a northern city—Duluth.

But perhaps the best story of all is that of the mission to the Hurons. This took place in the 1640s. The Hurons were related to the Iroquois but not allied with them. They had established a set of agricultural settlements near the southeastern shore of what is now called Lake Huron. The French decided that the Hurons would make good partners, and so they sent several of their Jesuits out to live with and preach among them. They wanted a strategically placed ally, and they wanted to save souls. The journey from Montreal, the nearest French settlement, to the country of the Hurons required a difficult canoe journey through potentially hostile territory lasting several days. Once ensconced in Huron territory, the Jesuit priests were as far from rescue as astronauts would be on Mars.

So far from home, the Jesuits could not rely on weapons or technology to testify to the superiority of their religion. In a way they relished the challenge—saw it as a test of faith. Parkman describes one incident where a priest shows a picture of Jesus to some Hurons. Instead of noticing the white man in the picture, they noticed the animals—I think they were sheep, which no Huron had ever seen. The priest’s next annual letter to his superiors in Quebec requested some new pictures, this time without any distracting animals or vegetation that might detract from the primary pedagogical purpose of these visual aids.

Writers have not failed to recognize the dramatic potential of French Canada in general, and of the mission to the Hurons specifically. Irish author Brian Moore’s 1985 novel Black Robe, which later became a pretty good movie, is one example. Now another writer, critically acclaimed Canadian novelist and short story writer Joseph Boyden, has mined this episode for The Orenda.

Boyden sticks very close to the facts, in terms of dates and events. Some of his characters can be identified with actual people from the historical record; others seem to be composites; still others are made up.

Boyden speaks through three main characters: a Huron leader named Bird, a young female Iroquois captive named Snow Falls, and a French priest generally identified just as “The Crow.” Through the eyes of the Indians we see a strong society with rich traditions. It would be perfect, except that it is precarious, because when the hunting is not good, or when a fungus strikes one of their staple crops, they face starvation. And then there are the Iroquois—a numerically superior nation that seeks to annihilate the Huron. Perhaps only such precarious societies, where survival requires cooperation and courage, and when a people must rely entirely on themselves for everything, can ever seem perfect.

Boyden knows everything that Parkman knew, and he also knows about things that anthropological studies have turned up since Parkman’s time, like the Huron feast of the dead, which involved digging up the cemetery when it was time for the residents of a village to relocate. For a couple of days the corpses, in various states of decay, took up residence with their families.

Once all of the families have had sufficient time to see and to mourn over the bodies of their loved ones again, they then cover them with magnificent beaver robes. And when this stage of the mourning comes to a close, the families once again uncover the bodies and set to work stripping off the flesh and skin that might still be left, taking special care to burn this in the fire, along with any old furs and mats used in the original burial. Those bodies that have not yet putrefied enough are covered by a robe and left on a bark mat.

This reportage is in the context of a letter the priest is writing to his Superior. He continues:

Now, it may seem barbaric and ghastly to hear of this practice of picking bones clean, but I must tell you, dear Superior, that I have never witnessed such absolute and pure love for a relative who has passed.

The priest has by this point in the story mastered the Huron language and is sensitive, compassionate, and intelligent enough to understand how the natives think and why they do what they do. And yet he remains convinced that their lives are ruled by Satan and that he is justified to use threats, bribes, and deception to pry them away from their beliefs and practices—the term Orenda, to borrow from Wikipedia, is “an Iroquois name for a spiritual power inherent in people and their environment.”

Boyden never suggests that the priest experiences any doubt or internal conflict. Nor does he show any interest in making the priest’s Christianity appealing in any way—there’s no passion or feeling in the priest’s faith, though he is absolutely willing to die for it.

Boyden, a Canadian writer with some Indian ancestry, seems more comfortable inhabiting the minds of his Indian characters. The Orenda is the final volume of a fictional trilogy dealing with a single Indian family through the generations, though the first two volumes take place in the 20th century (I haven’t read them). As astonishing and strange as such customs as the feast of the dead are, there is a vaguely unsetting familiarity in the way Boyden presents the inner lives of his Indian characters. The language with which he renders their thoughts has an easy kind of modernity to it:

How is it that I lose one family, a family that I love so much, only to be ensnared by these two demanding and difficult children, these two being who drive me mad? I guess this is the way of our world.

I realize that depicting the lives of people so different from ourselves is a no-win situation. If you show only as much of their articulation as could authentically be gleaned through the language and cultural barriers, you end up with the kind of clichéd utterances we know from movies—Many moons have passed since the buffalo has roamed our lands, etc. But if you take Boyden’s strategy, opting to equip his Indian with a full set of emotions and thoughts, you have no emotions or thoughts to equip them with except our own modern-day emotions and thoughts, rendered in modern day language. It just doesn’t feel authentic, no matter how well researched or how true it may be to actual events.

What Boyden might have done is to include some discontinuities in his tale, some jagged pieces that don’t quite fit together, to at least acknowledge the bits that must inevitably be lost in rendering their world in our words. But I can appreciate that Boyden might not be that kind of writer. You can’t just sprinkle obfuscations into a text to create the impression of authenticity. Some writers have a knack for that sort of thing, and some don’t.

Like a lot of people, I am fascinated by Native American culture. I took an anthropology course in college titled “Prehistory of North America,” but I was disappointed to discover that after a few weeks the syllabus came down to differentiating among various types of arrowheads—how they were shaped, how they were serrated, etc. It’s works like Parkman’s history, or Edward Curtis’s The North American Indian, a 20-volume work combining photography with descriptions of native language and customs, that connect with our imaginations. Works that don’t try to inhabit the minds of the Indians, but merely the experience of encountering those minds, and trying to present them with sympathy and scrupulousness.

Which is not to say that Boyden hasn’t written an engaging and beautiful novel. If I touch on what left me unsatisfied about The Orenda, it is because it feels like a single nagging defect in an otherwise wonderful novel. Details of how people lived, what they ate, what their experience of the natural world was like, and how the various tribes, along with the French, competed and cooperated by turns, are all rendered perfectly. The fictional lives of his characters mesh perfectly with the historical disaster that ultimately befell the Huron.

But does such a book keep those people, in the their time and place, alive, or does it just add one more filter, one more set of assumptions, between us and them?

#53: My Struggle, Book 4, by Karl Ove Knausgaard

It’s becoming an annual tradition for me to read the latest installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical saga My Struggle. The middle volumes are less intense than the first two, but I’ve read that he dials up the intensity again in the final 1000+ page volume. In book four our narrator conducts us down the stream of time in a relatively laminar manner, with only one major chronological perturbation. We begin with the 18-year-old author arriving in a small village above the Arctic Circle in Norway, to undertake a year of schoolteaching. Norway has difficulty attracting and retaining teachers for such remote locations, and so the government has a program that allows recent high-school graduates to come north for one-year postings. The communities get inexperienced teachers, but I guess the alternative is no teachers at all.

In the UK edition, they give each volume a title in addition to a number—this one is Dancing in the Dark. For about 130 pages we read about 18-year-old Karl Ole’s first few weeks in the north, weeks filled with solitary microwaving, lust, and drinking. He is also attempting to write, and I did admire his determination in that regard, for what on earth does he have to write about? But he’s just as determined about the drinking. He regularly drinks to the point where he “blacks out,” such that he has no memory of what happens beyond a certain point in the evening. In relating one such incident, he writes:

I had experienced blackouts like this, after which I remembered only fragments of what I had done, ever since I first started drinking. That was the summer I finished the ninth class, at the Norway Cup, when I just laughed and laughed, a momentous experience…

Then he begins to fill in the details about that earlier time. We expect to return to the Arctic shortly, but in fact half the book, about 200 pages, elapses before we do so, by which point we have begun to suspect that we might never return. Because Knausgaard has no use for such quaint literary conventions as chapters, we have only a single blank line to mark the transition.

This time slip is strange because the 18-year-old Karl Ove, obsessed with sex and alcohol, that we encounter in the first and last hundred pages isn’t much different from the 16-year-old Karl Ove, obsessed with sex and alcohol, that we encounter in the middle two hundred. It’s like a double image in photography—if there is any intent to put these two periods of his life into perspective, to “compare and contrast,” it isn’t apparent to me. The discontinuity serves to remind us that Knausgaard is a meta-novelist and that this isn’t your everyday fictionalized memoir. Maybe that reads as if I’m accusing the author of being cynical, and maybe I am a little, but I didn’t really mind the discontinuity, and it did sort of raise my level of vigilance, and also reminded me that it’s neither the 18-year-old nor the 16-year-old who is delivering words to the page, but the 44-year-old writing in 2009.

Knausgaard’s much despised father is not spared in this volume any more than he is in any of the previous three. Here he is divorced and remarried and sinking steadily into chronic alcoholism. He alternates between grim white-knuckled sobriety and unsavory drunken sentimentality.

The memoir of a teenage boy in the 1980s who faces no daunting challenges, learns no dark family secrets, and makes no remarkable journeys is a peculiar thing. Who would undertake to read such a book, in translation no less, if it were not part of a larger, more remarkable series of books? But that is exactly the sort of brinksmanship that makes Knausgaard so remarkable. The reward is in the workmanship, the attention to detail, and not in any dramatic flourishes. Any number of passages could serve to illustrate this point. I’ll choose one that describes the onset of encompassing darkness as winter comes on in the Arctic:

The days became shorter, and they became shorter quickly, as though they were racing towards the darkness. The first snow arrived in mid-October, went after a few days, but the next time it fell, at the beginning of November, it came with a vengeance, day after day it tumbled down, and soon everything was packed in thick white cushions of snow, apart from the sea, which with its dark clean surface and terrible depths lay nearby like an alien and menacing presence, like a murderer who has moved into a neighbouring house and whose unheeded knife glints on the kitchen table.

The snow and the darkness changed the area beyond all recognition. When I first came, the sky had been high and luminous, the sea vast and the countryside open, nothing seemed to hold together the village with its random huddle of houses, it barely existed in its own right. Nothing stopped there, that was the feeling. Then came the snow and the darkness. The sky fell, it lay like a lid over the rooftops. The sea disappeared, its blackness merged with the blackness of the sky, no horizon was visible any longer. Even the mountains disappeared and with them the sensation of finding yourself in wide open country. What remained were the houses, which were lit day and night, always surrounded by darkness, and now the houses and the lights were the focal point to which everything gravitated.