Eve's Alexandria

Two Reviews

A little bit of reading to help your Friday afternoon go more quickly:

1) My review of Lightborn by Tricia Sullivan has gone up on the SFX website ahead of its appearance in issue 203 of the print version:

Fiction – much like real life – is full of people whose relationships with their parents are fractious at best, and severely messed up at worst. Between a drowned sibling, a mother in a mental hospital and a father experimenting on his offspring, the main characters of Clarke Award-winner Tricia Sullivan’s latest could give anyone short of Oedipus a run for their money in the problematic parenting stakes. And all of that happened before the story even starts.

Go here to read the rest.

2) Secondly, my review of Ian McDonald's The Dervish House is over at the webzine Strange Horizons:

When the latest Ian McDonald novel came to me for review, more or less the last thing I expected to be pondering as I read was a certain stylistic parallel to Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantine Mosaic duology. Both works are, it's true, set in imagined versions of the same city: Kay's is a fantasy take on Justinianic Constantinople where ghostly fire plays in the streets, McDonald's is a bustling near-future Istanbul on the verge of a nanotech revolution. But of all the writers working in the SF/fantasy field today, they are hardly an obvious pairing; the precisely measured phrasings, heavy foreshadowing and high emotionalism of the former finds few echoes in the hectic, jump-cut information saturation of the latter.

Read the rest (somewhat longer than the average SFX review...). While I'm on the topic of Strange Horizons, I'd like to recommend a couple of the short stories that have been published there recently: 'The Red Bride' by Samantha Henderson, and - by way of complete contrast - Meghan McCarron's sweet coming-of-age tale 'WE HEART VAMPIRES!!!!!!'

Strange Horizons - which just had its tenth anniversary - is funded entirely by donations, so if you enjoyed those, do consider putting some change in the pot for this year's fund drive.

3) Finally, two weeks ago I went along to a couple of events at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. Niall, always more productive than I am, wrote a report about them so I didn't have to.

~~Nic

Colourless

This review - of The Black Prism by Brent Weeks - first appeared in SFX #201 (November 2010 - yes, I know it's odd that the November issue has already made way for the December one in mid-October). Let's just say I enjoyed writing the review a whole lot more than I enjoyed reading the book.

For my previous experience of reading Brent Weeks' special, special prose, see the first part of my review of the 2009 David Gemmell Legend Award shortlist.

--

Some books you simply reach breaking point with. In the case of Brent Weeks' latest, it came on page 22, when the main character, Kip, is filled with alarm at the thought of his fellow teenager Isabel being caught up in the impending violent slaughter of his hometown. Not because they're sort-of friends, but because she's hot. Sorry, "turning into a beautiful woman".

Now, it might just be an attack of poor phrasing - there's more than enough of that to go around in Weeks' latest - rather than a sign that this story and its characters have all the depth and maturity of a paddling pool. Indeed, in a better-written novel, Kip could have been an endearing lead: he's a smart, well-meaning boy who buries the twin insecurities of obesity and an abusive upbringing beneath a wisecracking motormouth persona. But here he's lost amid glacially-paced infodumping, the most laboured dialogue this side of a Babylon 5 episode, and plot twists so contrived that they require characters to act in ways diametrically opposed to their, for want of a better word, personalities.

The Black Prism reads like the fever dream of a teenage boy who sees more shoot-'em-ups than sunlight. There are bucketloads of explicit violence, but it's all more garish than gut-wrenching and our heroes' bruises have generally worn off by the next chapter; the tediously leery descriptions of female characters' physical attributes, meanwhile, are offset by an awkward coyness about consensual sex and a cloying sentimentality about childhood crushes. Bonus star for a nifty magic system based on how the human eye perceives different wavelengths of light; it's not exactly hard sf, but it does provide some much-needed colour in an otherwise dull tale.

~~Nic

Pocket Utopia

For now, all is calm. White flakes falling. I write in a kind of pocket utopia, a little island of calm in a maddened world. Perhaps it will make my future seem more plausible to me - perhaps [...] it will even seem possible.

But there's no such thing as a pocket utopia.

I don't think I've ever read a book that radiates sunshine quite so effectively as Pacific Edge (1988), Kim Stanley Robinson's warm, wise love letter to California and his hopes of a better tomorrow. There's an elegiac optimism - I'll come back to this unlikely phrase - that rolls off every page. It infuses the big-hearted, well-meaning characters and brings rich, warm colour to every description of this glittering landscape (and, since Robinson clearly adores the natural world with every fibre of his idealistic and unabashedly liberal being, there are many) - right from the book's opening lines:

Despair could never touch a morning like this.

The air was cool, and smelled of sage. It had the clarity that comes to southern California only after a Santa Ana wind has blown all haze and history out to sea - air like telescopic glass, so that the snowtopped San Gabriels seemed near enough to touch, though they were forty miles away. The flanks of the blue foothills revealed the etching of every ravine, and beneath the foothills, stretching to the sea, the broad coastal plain seemed nothing but treetops.

Pacific Edge is the final instalment in Robinson's 'Three Californias' series, a trilogy of different imagined futures for the state, and it is - I gather - by far the sunniest of them. The book was recommended to me by Niall, who gets a far-away look in his eye whenever he talks about it. I don't quite share his raptures over it: I lack his longstanding emotional attachment to California, don't care about softball nearly as much as anyone in the story does, and (as I'll discuss in a moment) I have some problems with the central character. But, even with those caveats in mind, I found it beautiful and thoughtful in all sorts of unexpected ways. Not least, that it manages to be both optimistic and clear-eyed about utopia and its discontents.

The story is divided, unevenly, between two periods of time. The bulk of the book follows the lives of a small group of people - chief among them Kevin, through whose eyes we see the coastline in the extract above - in a small corner of Orange County in the mid-21st century, as they fall in love, gaze at the stars, go swimming in the ocean, help each other build communal homes, play softball on ground freshly liberated from obsolete roads, and debate water supplies and land use with astonishingly patient earnestness. There is wish-fulfillment in the vision of "orange groves and strawberry fields" saved from becoming "the worst kind of cheapshot crackerjack condominiums [...] bulldozers in the streets, earth-movers, cranes, fields of raw dirt", but a recurring theme is that utopia runs on volunteer labour and committee meetings. Lots of long, long committee meetings full of argument and hard bargaining.

For Kevin, we're told, "to feel was to act", and when the story opens it seems that his life to date has been no more complicated than that. He finds a simple, completely absorbing joy in physical activity, whether work or play, and his relationship with the natural world is one of intense sensation rather than something he spends much time reflecting on:

Kevin felt a stirring in him, the full-lunged breathlessness that marked his love for El Modena's hills, extending outward to these great peaks. Interpenetration with the rock. He was melting like the snow, seeping into it.

Introspection is supplied by Tom, an articulate, much older neighbour who remembers things as they were before utopia was created in Orange County, and to whom Kevin credits his "education - the parts he really remembered" - although he thinks of this primarily as "listening to Tom ramble" about how capitalism was evil, while he himself got on with the more important business of wading through rivers and suchlike.

Then one day he is hit for six (feel free to substitute a metaphor from softball rather than cricket, as preferred):

Everyone was cheering. Kevin looked back at Ramona. She had tumbled to the ground after the throw, and now she was sitting on the outfield grass, long, graceful, splay-legged, grinning, black hair in her eyes. And Kevin fell in love.

Of course that isn't exactly how it happened. That isn’t the whole story. Kevin was a straightforward kind of guy, and crazy about softball, but still, he was not the kind of person who would fall in love on the strength of a good play at shortstop. No, this was something else, something that had been developing for years and years.

The move to deflate the lofty romanticism of the first paragraph with the deliberation of the second is characteristic both of Kevin and, as it turns out, of the novel as a whole. Kevin is a man who operates on gut feeling more than he does on quick wit; he is quick neither to speak nor to reach conclusions, but once he does he is direct and harbours few illusions. Kevin recognises his feelings for Ramona through their physical effect on him ("Whoosh! went the air out of his lungs. His heart thudded, the skin of his face flushed and tingled with the impact of it"), and he is most comfortable with her in the context of shared outdoor activities: swimming, cycling, softball. Likewise, his most extravagant yearning for her dwells on her physicality, to a sometimes queasy degree:

He didn’t understand Alfredo. Imagine the chance to make love with this beautiful animal pumping away beside him, to, watch her get fat with a child that was the combination of him and her... He breathed erratically at the thought, suddenly aware of his own body.

Fair enough; this is who Kevin is. My patience began to wear thin, though, with the combination of puppyish devotion and unthinking entitlement with which he thinks about Ramona; he is nervous about discussing his feelings with her, but is convinced nonetheless that the simple fact of his being a Nice Guy who is attracted to her will make her swoon sooner or later. He gives no real consideration to her feelings - seems, indeed, unable to conceive of the idea that she might have ideas and emotions of her own that go beyond being on his pedestal - except to assume that she couldn't possibly like that jerk Alfredo, her on-off partner of fifteen years.

When Ramona ultimately goes back to Alfredo, it comes as a shock and an affront to Kevin. But the unenticing prospect of Kevin spending the rest of life brooding in bitterness about that evil Ramona's contrarian faithlessness is swiftly undercut, in a moment of epiphany that once again speaks to Robinson's soaring optimism about human nature and its capacity, however rueful or painful, to achieve and then confront self-knowledge:

When he was done he put down his tools. Behind him Orange County pulsed green and amber, jumping with his heart, glossy, intense, vibrant, awake, alive. His world and the wind pouring through it. His hands came together and made their half swing. If only Hank hadn't caught that last one. If only Ramona, if only Tom, if only all the world, all in him at once, with the sharp stab of our unavoidable grief; and it seemed to him then that he was without a doubt the unhappiest person in the whole world.

And at that thought (thinking about it) he began to laugh.

It's a marvellous ending; it doesn't quite reconcile me to Kevin as he is within this story, but makes me feel much better for his future. The process of loving and losing Ramona has woken Kevin to something larger: a fuller, more thoughtful appreciation of the utopia he lives in, and a deep commitment to fighting to preserve it.

The nature and rationale of this utopia is engaged with in the other strand of the novel. Events in Kevin's time are interspersed with short first-person sections, like the one quoted at the top of the post. They are set in 2012, in a world is sliding into collapse on various levels: environmental (a climate gone crazy), political (out of control wars, infrastructures crippled by terrorism) and ethical (in William F. Buckley's dream come true, HIV+ people have been rounded up and left to die in segregation camps). While his wife stranded is abroad by what looks set to be a lasting suspension of international air travel, Tom - the same Tom, it turns out - sits at home battling his growing sense of frustrated guilt and impotence. But however big the problem, he cannot bring himself to accept helplessness as a reponse to it: "One of the worst signs of our danger", he notes, "is we can't imagine the route from here to utopia." So, dreaming of Europe - told you Robinson is a liberal - he sets out to write a solution.

Must redefine utopia. It isn't the perfect end product of our wishes, define it so and it deserves the scorn of those who sneer when they hear the word. No. Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.

Whether Kevin's Orange County is the future Tom creates, or just the one he hopes for, is never completely clear (or at least it wasn't to me...). But in its emphasis on decision by committee, on everyone pitching in, and on setting more realistic expectations for what constitutes the good life, it certainly fits his model. Tom echoes Kevin's awakening from solipsism into self-awareness when he tells us that there is no such thing as a pocket utopia, because it is defined by the way we go about creating it. There is no good life without communal endeavour and complete equality; no life can be truly good when it coexists with injustice. Any system that depends on the suffering of others, on individuals measuring their success and happiness by how much more they have than their fellow human beings, can never produce utopia:

I grew up in utopia. I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed, I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure, and when I came home my mother and father created a home as solid as rock, the world seemed solid! And it comes to this, do you understand me - I grew up in utopia.

But I didn't. Not really. Because while I was growing up in my sunny seaside home much of the world was in misery, hungry, sick, living in cardboard shacks, killed by soldiers or their own police. I had been on an island. In a pocket utopia. It was the childhood of someone born into the aristocracy, and understanding that I understood the memory of my childhood differently; but still I know what it was like, I lived it and I know! And everyone should get to know that, not in the particulars, of course, but in the general outline, in the blessing of a happy childhood, in the lifelong sense of security and health.

What do you know, I seem to have gone all idealistic.

~~Nic

Rusty Nails in my Mouth

In my last post I mentioned the museum bookclub I've just started running. I was hooked into it via the adult education classes I teach: I was booked to lead a course in contemporary fiction in the spring but, for new job related reasons, was unable to commit to it.  With a heavy heart I passed it along to a colleague. Knowing how disappointed I was, my friend at the department suggested I might like a little bookish job at the local Yorkshire Museum. They were looking for a freelancer to lead bookclub discussions in partnership with their education and learning officer.  Although she had initiated the club and picked the books, she didn't feel confident enough to take on the literary side of the event.  Her part was going to be to choose artefacts and objects from the museum's collections related to each book to handle after the discussion. I liked the idea of the interplay between literature, history and material culture, and jumped at the opportunity.

We had our first session a couple of weeks ago now and it was a great success.  Our first book was a little unusual: The Emperor's Babe: a novel by Bernadine Evaristo.  Ever heard of it?  No, me neither.  It was first published in 2001, and seems to have garnered a good deal of praise at the time, although it was never on my radar.  In many ways it was a bold choice for a fledgling group: it's in verse, for a start, and intensely dirty and scatalogical for a second.  I fear it may have put less intrepid people off, but those who did read it and come to discuss it had been utterly converted by the final page.  Several actually professed love for it.

The story belongs to Zuleika, the child of Sudanese immigrants living in Londinium in the early 3rd century.  Married off to the fat, middle-aged and pathetic Lucius Aurelius Felix at the tender age of eleven, she has been kept caged in his villa for the last seven years: listless, childless and only allowed out on special occasions.  Into this bland, flat landscape comes Emperor Septimus Severus, on his way to vanquish Hibernia and extend his Empire just that little bit further.  The pair spot each other at the theatre: the eighteen year old ex-child bride and the aging warrior connect and, in Felix's absence, begin a short doomed love affair. 

The rest is all sex and death in irregularly rhyming couplets.  

I'll admit that I wasn't sure when I picked it up. The cover is just awful, and I'm not the world's keenest reader of poetry.  But the first few lines struck me immediately:

Who do you love? Who do you love,

when the man you married goes off

for months on end, quelling rebellions

at the frontiers, or playing hot-shot senator in Rome;

his flashy villa on the Palatine Hull, home

to another woman, I hear,

one who has borne him offspring.

I was won over.  That opening gambit of a question, the tone of which is multiple and impossible to pin down: is Zuleika earnest? Puzzled? Interrogatory? Aggressive? The caustic sadness of her childlessness, her loneliness, is palpable yet lightened by Evaristo's linguistic touch.  There is the humour too, and the playfulness, right from the beginning.  Throughout Zuleika's voice combines pidgin Latin, the Queen's English and what she calls her 'plebby Creole', the language of a childhood on Londinium's streets.  Gibbon's Rise and Fall of Rome meets Heat magazine. Her intelligence, circumscribed in every other way, finds its outlet in her clever funny first-person poetics.

...I have the deepest

fondness for my husband, of course,

sort of, though he spills over me like dough

and I'm tempted to call Cook mid coitus

to come trim his sides so that he fits me.

Then it's puff and Ciao, baby!

Solitudoh, solitudee, solitudargh!

But the funny has a sharp, steely edge to it.  Early reviewers called Zuleika 'sassy', 'sexy' and 'feisty', but I think not.  Poetry is a weapon to her, a tool of redress and retribution. When her father asks her what she has been up to towards the end of the book, she testifies:

Dammit! Words were forming like rusty nails

in my mouth, coating my tongue,

scraping my gums. I spat them out at Dad:

'I've been writing poetry'.

Not surprising that she is bitter. This is a woman whose body and soul has always belonged to someone else - her father, her neighbours, her husband, her lover.  Aged ten she fends off advances from off-duty soldiers in the streets:

they were everywhere, watching lumps

on our chests, to see if our hips grew away

from our waists, always picking me out,

plucking at me in the market,

Is our little aubergine ready?

Just a year later her father considers she is 'ready' and she is married off, subjected to a marital rape by a man over three times her age for whom she is nothing but a fashionable accessory: a black wife is the new white dontcha know.   Even her affair with Severus, while briefly satisfying, is about lust not love, and her powerlessness is part of their sexual dynamic; in the end it will inevitably kill her.

No surprise either that The Emperor's Babe makes constant and overt connections between women's bodies and the consumption of food.  Zuleika is a consumable.  She understands this early on in her marriage to Felix, when she describes preparing herself for an evening engagement with him:

After I have been oiled and scraped,

with all the finesse of a chef priming a skinned

pig for marinating, after I have been rubbed

and squeezed with all the finesse

of an expert baker and my body sizzles

like frying bacon, the girls dress me.

Later in the novel Severus takes her to a gladiatorial entertainment, which opens with an amuse bouche to enliven the palate: pregnant slaves 'fighting' lions.  As the women are reduced to cuts of meat in front of a cheering crowd Zuleika wets herself out of fear, excitement and self-loathing:

...it was the girl

who so long ago had been stillborn

inside the woman, my throat sore,

my eyes burnt, I screamed so hard

my stomach hurt, I rocked,

I hugged myself, the pitchfork entered

and turned, warm pee burst down my legs.

Women = meat; Zuleika = meat.  Which is not to say that she is entirely chewed up by life.  The sex she has with Severus is mind-blowingly erotic - possibly the best sex I've read in a novel - and allows her a small taste of freedom, even if that freedom is gained by throwing herself at the power of his mercy.  And in the end her poetry is a testament.  Yes, of her despair and her tragic, wasted, wanting life; but also of her linguistic skills, her powers of observation and understanding, her sense of humour and her capacity for experience.

The book group all agreed that The Emperor's Babe was an unanticipated pleasure.  None of the participants had read a novel in verse before, and all of them said they definitely would in the future.  Which I think must be a win, for Bernadine Evaristo and for a sidelined form.  It has definitely enticed me to consider embarking on some of those long epic and narrative poems that I've avoided in favour of the short and pithy ones that look manageable on the page. 

After the book discussion, we handled several artefacts dating from 3rd century Roman Britain and the reign of Septimus Severus, including the bangles of a Roman woman of African descent discovered in York, a ceramic head-pot depicting Severus' maniacal son Caracalla and several items of jewellery.  It seemed utterly fitting that we should have done this in concert with reading Evaristo's book: she wrote the book after a residency at the Museum of London, in response to the Roman galleries there.  Material culture fed into the writing; material culture fed into the reading. 

Next month we'll be discussing Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier.

~~Victoria~~

It's been a while...

Forgive me for the hiatus in my posting recently.  You know how it is: life and blogging go to war, and life wins out as it is want to do (and absolutely should do).  I've just finished my postgraduate course in Archive Administration (which I started 2 and a half years ago), and just started my new and shiny but utterly terrifying first professional job as an archivist. Running up to finishing the course in September I was working every available hour on my final project; reading very little, writing even less.  And then since the new job started at the beginning of October I've been working much longer hours, and coming home completely zombified with all the thinking, talking, decision-making and planning that I've been doing.  I won't bore you with details of the new job, except to say that it's a massive promotion for me (from an assistant to a senior archivist), and also a massive challenge in terms of the state and future of the service I'm leading.  I'm just getting to grips with my responsibilities as an operational and line manager, and thinking ahead to the archives'  exciting future (which has, until recently, looked very bleak but hopefully no longer; all hail the bounteous Heritage Lottery Fund and it's bank vaults full of gold).  

As a consequence my reading has been, well, patchy at best.  For a start the rhythm of my reading projects on African fiction and heroines has been thoroughly interrupted (they were the 'summer plans' that became autumn plans that are now becoming winter plans); while Doris Lessing has been pushed to the back of my mind.  Leaving my old job has been a double blow to them.  Not only do I have less time, but I have also lost my privileged access to the university library where I used to work.  When I wanted the next Doris Lessing book on my list I used to trot off to the shelf dedicated to her ouevre, safe in the knowledge that there would be at least one copy of what I needed. Alas, no longer.  My new archive department is attached to a Public Library, and while said library is very well stocked with books of the last 5-10 years its back catalogue of Lessing leaves much to be desired.  Nor does it have a whole aisle devoted to African fiction or books about African fiction. My access to works of feminist criticism is now severely limited. Sob. I will have to rely much more on secondhand Amazon sellers, and probably change some of my more arcane reading habits. 

Which is not to say that there has been no reading at all.  I've read two African novels that I would recommend to everyone - The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola and Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga.  The former is a grand-daddy of African fiction in English, first published by Faber in the early 1950s, years before Achebe found fame with Things Fall Apart.  In many ways it isn't a novel at all, but a compact oral myth-cycle, in a rich, disjointed language that conmingles Yoruba folk tale with English tradition. It is gruesome, brutal, nonsensical; but utterly compelling, because it is both alienating and strangely familiar.  Different entirely from the polished stylistic flourishes of Nervous Conditions, although the books share a similar anxiety about the influence of the West on African traditions and peoples.  Dangarembga's book was published in 1989, and is a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman about a girl's experience of childhood and family in rural Zimbabwe, and the impact of a Missionary education on her perceptions of both.  It is also a brutal book - it begins with the memorable line 'I was not sorry when my brother died' - but is more clearly a product of the author's literary acculturation.  There is apparently a sequel - The Book of Not, published in 2006 - which I'm also eager to read.  There is something in the main character, Tambu, that reminds me of Lessing's Martha Quest; although one is black and the other white, and they are hardly contemporaries, they share an inhibited capacity for sympathy or empathy, an unyielding pride and a achingly naive determination to be themselves. 

I've had less success with Charlotte Bronte's Villette, so far at least.  I originally started reading it at the beginning of September, during an impromptu trip to Brussels to see Esther's sister.  I thought: what better time or place to read it?  It also happened to be the first case-study book for my heroine's project.  I read the first 40 pages in the airport (delayed plane, of course) and was immediately captivated by the character of Lucy Snowe.  As the book opens she is quietly staying with her godmother in the village of Bretton, escaping some unexplained family trauma, when the tranquility is broken by the arrival of the precocious Paulina, a child with a gift for dramatics.  Lucy observes her with a detached, cool bemusement - at one point she states quite candidly 'I, Lucy Snowe, was unmoved.'  She is an utterly fascinating young woman, difficult to read, difficult to predict, vaguely caustic.  Time moves on (as does Paulina) and Lucy subsequently spends some short time as the resigned companion of an invalid lady, before flinging herself into the hands of fate and leaving England for Brussels in a bid for security on the continent.  A hard journey and a serendipitous meeting later, she washes up on the doorstep of Madame Beck's Pensionnat de Demoiselles and embarks on a new life as a teacher.  And that is as far as I got before apathy overtook me.  First, by page 80 Lucy had lost some of the steely interest she had in the first two dozen or so; second, she had exhausted me with her homeless, chilly life.  It has taken me a few weeks to feel ready to come back to her story; until today even.  When I started reading the book a friend told me it was Bronte's 'most difficult' novel, and I scoffed a bit; but now I understand what he meant.  It is like Jane Eyre, but with all the colour and energy sucked out of it.  It is a novel of resignation rather than fiery determination; Lucy's flame is as damped down and cold as her name.  I hope she rekindles a little along with my interest.

In other news I've been drawn into C.J. Sansom's Shardlake mysteries.  Not by choice, at first.  I've taken on the role of discussion facilitator at a local museum bookclub (once a month, a book associated with artefacts in the museum's collections), and the organiser has chosen Sovereign, the third book in the series, as December's read.  Of course I felt duty bound to read the first two before the third, and hence the swift race through Dissolution and Dark Fire.  I'd be a liar if I said I hadn't enjoyed them.  Although they're formulaic and occasionally predictable, Sansom does paint a very vivid, very compelling portrait of the unsettled political and social world of the late 1530s.  His protagonist, the hunchback lawyer Matthew Shardlake, is an interesting enough figure and improved dramatically between the first and second books.  Shame there isn't a credible female character in sight thus far, but perhaps that will change in book three.  I may even read Revelation and Heartstone if Sovereign can hold my interest.

Finally, oh, the enormous pile of books I'm looking forward to reading now that my study/work mountain has been (mostly) surmounted.  I've picked up or been sent some intriguing books recently, mostly from small presses.  I have two Pereine Press titles that I must, must pick up soon - Veronique Olmi's Beside the Sea and Friedrich Christian Delius' Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman; as well as Purge by Sofi Oksanen and Tony and Susan by Austin Wright from Atlantic; and two books by Betsy Toibin from Short Books, Iceland and Crimson China.  They also very generously sent me The Last Resort, a book about white farmers in Zimbabwe, and the completely wonderful offbeat Finnish romance Benny and Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti.  (I read the latter months ago now when it first came through the letter box, and have been meaning to spread the word about it every since. Tis basically about the relationship between a recently widowed librarian and a backwoods bachelor farmer in 21st century Finland.  I read it while I was ill in bed and it was just the right mix of whimsical and cynical.)  I was also sent a copy of Quilt by Nicholas Royle from Myriad Editions.  I read the first couple of pages with great interest, so I should get to that soon too. 

What I haven't got is a big pile of Booker reading. I've barely kept up with it this year, not least because my blog reading has been as curtailed as my book reading. Did the best man win? I have a copy of Kalooki Nights but have never ventured forth with it.

~~Victoria~~

 

Writing the Landscape

The Indians of Peru were so idolatrous that they worshiped as Gods almost every kind of thing created. Since they did not have supernatural insights, they fell into the same errors and folly as the other nations of pagans, and for the same reasons both the Peruvians and the other pagans were unable to find the true God. This is because they were immersed in such an abysmal array of vices and sins that they had become unfit and unworthy of receiving the pure light that accompanies a knowledge of their Creator. Moved by his arrogance and envy of our welfare, the common enemy of mankind, using malice and astuteness, succeeded in usurping from these blind people the adoration that they really owed to their true Creator, and he kept them prisoners in harsh bondage, depriving them of the happiness which he himself did not deserve. Upon finding fertile ground in the simple-mindedness and ignorance of these barbarians, he reigned over them for many centuries until the power of the Cross started stripping him of his authority and ousting him from this land here as well as from the other regions of this New World.

Spanish Jesuit Bernabé Cobo (1580-1657) spent most of his long life travelling, teaching and missionising in Spain's American colonies. He arrived there in 1599, a little under 70 years after Pizarro's conquistadores had defeated and captured the last of the Inca rulers, Atahualpa, to take control of what became Peru (and, more significantly for Spain's fortunes, of its considerable silver reserves). To judge from the extracts collected as Inca Religion and Customs (translated by Roland Hamilton, 1994 ed.), his vast Historia del Nuevo Mundo was illuminated by the spirit of enquiry but directed by the unshakeable assumption that the peoples of Peru had lived in doomed - if well-meant - ignorance until they were liberated by the conquistadores and their true religion.

Contrary to what might be expected, this was not the only view of the situation among the early-modern Spanish intellectual elite - Bartolomé de las Casas (d. 1566), for example, a post on whose work is forthcoming, was outspoken in his criticism of the violence and rapacity that had accompanied the conquest - but it was certainly the prevailing one. Typically for his time, Cobo is never shy to attribute the locals' pre-conquest religious practices, which he describes so carefully, to the nefarious workings of the Christian devil, as the opening extract demonstrates.

Cobo's exhaustive catalogue of pre-Christian shrines (huacas - often springs, stones, caves, etc., but also man-made monuments) are what the work is usually read for. Organising them by their location - that is, by their places along certain sacred lines (ceques) radiating outwards from the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco - Cobo records each huaca's name, its function, any stories attached to it, and sometimes the families that provided the attendants who looked after the huaca. In compiling this list, Cobo drew heavily upon the writings of previous Spanish chroniclers of the New World - not least because there was little, by his time, that could be observed directly - and in some respects what makes the work valuable is simply that he collects all this information in one place. (He was clearly of an encyclopaedic bent; another of his works was a ten-volume epic on South American flora and fauna.)

This is a typical entry:

It was among the most important shrines of the whole kingdom, the oldest which the Incas had after the window [cave] of Pacaritampu, and where the most sacrifices were made. This is a hill which is about two and a half leagues distant from Cuzco by this Road of Collasuyu we are following. On it they say that one of the brothers of the first Inca turned to stone, for reasons which they give. They had the said stone hidden. It was of moderate size, without representational shape, and somewhat tapering. It was on top of the said hill until the coming of the Spanish and the Incas held many festivals for it. After the Spanish arrived, they [the Spanish] removed a great quantity of gold and silver from this shrine but paid no attention to the idol, because it was, as I have said, a rough stone. This situation gave the Indians an opportunity to hide it until Paullu Inca, on his return from Chile, built a house for it next to his own. From that time on, the festival of Raymi was held there until the Christians found out about the stone and took it away from him.

There is no real sense of what this huaca meant in terms of Inca daily life and culture, and here, as in many cases, Cobo says little about the rituals and offerings associated with it, or what said offerings meant to achieve. When he does discuss a shrine's perceived power, his comments tend towards the general: protection of travellers, boosting the health of the current emperor. But he does make an effort to distinguish the relative importance of the shrines he discusses, and in some cases - like the coming-of-age rites linked with Huanacauri - he goes into some detail about aspects of dress and action.

Furthermore, while Cobo apparently believed that Inca religious practices were essentially static before the conquest (and attributed more or less every shrine to the Inca period, when some predate it), Cobo allows for change with the arrival of the Spanish: as this passage demonstrates, he records the disruptive effects (to him positively so, of course) of the Spanish occupation on local modes of worship. He also notes elements of syncretism or Pagan survivals in the Christianised locals, such as the fact that some people continue the custom of shouting during lunar eclipses, traditionally believed necessary to drive off the creature (a lion or a serpent) that was attacking the moon.

Despite Cobo's assumption that Inca religion was idolatrous and false, there is a certain paternalistic sympathy in his work for the benighted 'Indians'. While in the passage quoted above he castigates their "vices and sins", elsewhere he is careful to note that the "fabrications, hoaxes and absurdities" of their beliefs - which, he damns with faint praise, were "the best organized and most reasonable compared with the nonsense and errors of the other nations of these Indies" - are not an indication that the Inca were "dumb animals". After all, even "the most noble and wise nations of Europe and the other parts of the Old World such as the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Greeks, and the Romans, whose knowledge has been so highly valued throughout the ages" held pagan beliefs. Rather, their problem was not lack of rationality or mendacious intent; it was that they weren't lucky enough to know God, and thus inevitably fell short of the correct way because rational deduction alone is not enough:

Similarly, it does not follow logically to argue that the Indians were incompetent just because they worshiped idols and transitory things; on the contrary, it shows that though they lacked the true light of faith, they did have the ingenuity to look for something which they could respect and have confidence in. And it is no trifle that the Indians themselves took the trouble to look for the cause of each thing, like the pagans, and though the Indians were mistaken in their inquiry, not even the ancients, who were so given to scientific study and investigation into the nature of things, ever succeeded in finding the true Architect of all creation. Moreover, the ancients also worshiped sticks, stones, images of animals, and other man-made things such as these.

Encounters with the peoples of the New World, who were strangely ignorant of the omnipotent Creator of all, presented a significant theological challenge for early modern Christians. It is fascinating to see Cobo wrestle with the issue, even as his rhetoric frames it as a thunderously straightforward one. For all his ringing certainty, he vacillates between at least two different explanations for the state of these peoples' souls during this work. In some places he argues - as in the first passage quoted - that the 'Indians' were prevented from learning about the one true faith by the deceits of the devil. In others, as here, he seems to tend more towards suggesting a simple lack of opportunity: they had not yet had contact with God. That is - although Cobo would probably have resisted the formulation, being insufficiently universalist for his tastes - they'd hadn't met any Christians yet and therefore couldn't have heard of the Christians' God.

He delves into it again when considering the vexed (and much debated, in his sources) question of whether or not Inca religion had involved human sacrifice. Cobo argues that it did, and - in something (sort of) approaching a non-judgemental way - attempts to understand why:

Their religion was so firmly established, universally received, and amazingly strict that they offered and sacrificed even their own children by killing them and their own property by burning it, as was their custom. Therefore, it cannot be presumed that their acts were empty gestures, because human nature would not allow them to kill their own children and jeopardize their property so happily if they did not expect some reward for what they were doing or if they did not believe that they were sending their children to a better place than the one they had here. And it is evident that for people to produce exterior signs of happiness in making these sacrifices, in their own minds they believed without any doubt that the sacrifices were not made in vain. Thus there is no question that these acts were conditioned by some hope. People who would kill their own children and destroy their own property would be acting more like animals than human beings, unless they felt that such acts were somehow useful.

Here as elsewhere, there is no evidence that he actually asked any of the native peoples he met in Peru for their views on such sacrifice (assuming, after 70 years of Christian rule in the region, there was anyone who still remembered, or would have admitted remembering); instead, he imagines the motivation, and again is more willing to assume good (if misguided) motives than received images about early European attitudes to the New World might suggest. He's hardly an ethnographer, and certainly isn't interested in being neutral, but he is less quick to condemn than I expected.

While passages such as this are as much about engaging in intellectual and theological debate with his Spanish contemporaries and forebears as they are about any observed reality in pre-conquest America, the text is sprinkled with Cobo's own observations. In several places he discusses the famous practice whereby elite families would embalm their most prominent members after their death, and then maintain their routines and status, acting as the corpses' continuing voice in the world. The bodies were carefully "adorned", they retained much of the wealth that they had in life, and they were brought forth to make public appearances for important events and festivals; their birthdays were celebrated, they were guests of honour at feasts (as shown in the image to the left, drawn c. 1615 by the chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala), and they were consulted for their opinion on public affairs:

There was an important Indian man and woman assigned to each one of these bodies, and whatever these men and women wanted was said to be the will of the deceased. Whenever the men and women felt the desire to eat or drink, they said that the deceased was making a request. And they would say the same thing if they felt like going out to enjoy themselves at the homes of some of the other deceased, since it was customary for the dead to visit each other, and these visits included extensive dancing and drinking. A great many people, both men and women, devoted themselves to the service of these dead bodies.

(Cobo makes no mention of it, but I recall reading somewhere during my undergraduate days that the bodies were sometimes even married to the living, the prestige of their lineages apparently not ending with their deaths.)

What makes all this more vivid, if no less boggling, is that Cobo has seen one of these embalmed bodies, and is able to describe - with evident amazement - what it looked like and some of how the effect was achieved:

[O]nly a few years ago I saw one of these bodies that had been taken away from certain idolators. This body was so well preserved and adorned that it looked as if it was alive. The face was full, with such a natural skin complexion that it did not seem to be dead, though it had been for many years. The face was preserved that way because there was calabash rind placed under the skin of each cheek. As the flesh dried out, the skin had remained tight.

Besides its religious component, the book also contains a great deal of fascinating information on the daily life of the descendants of the Inca and of their subjects: their language (Quechua, with its profusion of terms for relatives, indicating quite a bit about the cultural priorities of the people), their food, agricultural techniques, clothing, medicine, marriage and childrearing, and even the dice and board games they played. It's certainly not an objective account, nor for the most part even a first-hand one, but it gives an interesting window onto what 17th-century Spaniards understood (or didn't) about the peoples they ruled half a world away from home.

~~Nic