Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Saturday July 17, 2010
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THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET
David Mitchell
Random House
ISBN 978 0 679 60358 0
479 pages
$26
Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post Book World. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/roncharles. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
A decade ago, Granta, the Guardian and the Mail on Sunday marked David Mitchell as one of Britain's best young writers. Anybody who considered that judgment premature must be nursing his bitterness in a dank basement somewhere.
Starting with "Ghostwritten" and "Number9Dream," Mitchell fused coincidence and fate, reality and fantasy in nested, refracted stories that could drive M.C. Escher mad. In 2004, his American publisher timidly brought out "Cloud Atlas" only in paperback, but readers in this country were just as enthusiastic as his British fans, and that mind-bending masterpiece was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Then in 2006, as his reputation was starting to coalesce as a writer of super-sophisticated speculative fiction, he repressed his trademark trickery and released "Black Swan Green," a perfectly charming autobiographical novel about a 13-year-old boy.
And now he startles us again with a rich historical romance set in feudal Japan, an epic of sacrificial love, clashing civilizations and enemies who won't rest until whole family lines have been snuffed out. Yes, the novelist who's been showing us the future of fiction has published a classic, old-fashioned tale. It's not too early to suggest that Mitchell can triumph in any genre he chooses.
"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" draws us into the redolent atmosphere of those grand 19th-century epics by Melville, Dumas and Sir Walter Scott. Japan remains a favorite subject for this peripatetic author, who began writing fiction in his 20s while teaching English in Hiroshima. But this time Mitchell sits still in Japan, abandoning his time-traveling, world-spanning, intertextual sorcery for the satisfaction of a single (and singular) time and place.
It's 1799, and the Dutch East Indies Company maintains the West's only trading post in Nagasaki. Or rather, near Nagasaki. Employees of this potentially lucrative monopoly don't live on the mainland or even visit it except on special occasions. Instead, they work and sleep on Dejima, a fan-shaped, man-made island, surrounded by a high wall and connected to Nagasaki by a heavily guarded bridge. This gracious prison is a striking manifestation of Japan's determination to avoid exposure or contamination, a policy set down almost 200 years earlier by the first Tokugawa shogun, Ieyasu.
But speaking of the shogun, don't expect James Clavell's slashing saga. There are blood-curdling moments during this cerebral thriller, and an outrageous 600-year-old sadist who sounds like Dr. Fu Manchu as chairman of Goldman Sachs, but most of the action is carried out by accountants and translators, not soldiers and samurai.
In fact, despite the ghastly crime at the center of the story, Mitchell exercises extraordinary, even excessive restraint. He mutes moments of crisis, breaks away just before a killing blow, denies romantic consummation and even abandons international battles that could change history. What seems at first a case of thrillus interruptus is actually a reflection of the novel's theme: the triumph of decorum and honor in a world of corruption and perversion.
Mitchell is working within a literary tradition stained by Western slurs about the inscrutable ways of orientals, their seductive mysticism and occult sensuality, but he represents and deconstructs those racist stereotypes with a shipload of fascinating domestic and imported characters. Several years ago, while composing this story, he told a Japanese newspaper, "My intention is to write a bicultural novel, where Japanese perspectives are given an equal weight to Dutch/European perspectives." And to a remarkable extent, "Thousand Autumns" does just that, illuminating the whole spectrum of villainy and virtue in both these imperial cultures.
At the electric point of contact between East and West stands our hero, Jacob de Zoet, earnest and incorruptible, clinging to a contraband copy of the Psalms. (All elements of Christianity are strictly prohibited in Edo-era Japan.) "An honest soul in a human swamp of crocodiles, a sharp quill among blunt nibs," Jacob comes to Dejima under a new director to audit the company's fraudulent books.
Although his boss promises that the only danger in Japan is monotony, the righteous Dutchman quickly finds himself caught in a thicket of corruption, thwarted by pirates and thieves left over from the previous administration. Still, he's thoroughly convinced that in the matter of "moral bookkeeping ... all that matters is truth." Of course, truth is a soft metal when fortunes can be made by melting it down.
In the first part of the novel, Mitchell spins out this ethical dilemma in careful -- probably too careful -- detail. Initially, the great cast of characters on the man-made island has just barely enough to do to keep the story moving forward, particularly one that rests on the ever-fascinating subject of accounting. But Mitchell is an author who deserves your trust, and he has constructed an apothecary cabinet of vibrant set pieces, including a beheading of petty thieves, a bladder-stone operation that will make you wince, and the arcane diplomatic rituals of meeting the shogun after "a ten-weeks' tributary arse-licking pilgrimage."
Just in time, the threads of this dilatory plot begin to pull tight around a young Japanese midwife who catches Jacob's eye. But before he can express his affection, she's banished to a cloistered monastery for disfigured nuns. At that point, the administrative fussiness of the novel's first section gives way to a fantastic and eerily told adventure that reads like an Asian version of Margaret Atwood's "Handmaid's Tale."
What unspeakable evil festers behind the holy rituals of this sanctuary high in snow-capped mountains? I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you. Brave men will give their lives to find out during 120 pages of peril at the center of the book -- a legendary rescue attempt in a setting so exotic that it reaches into the realm of fantasy.
But even as the forces of evil ramp up, this remains a resolutely thoughtful novel about a country wrenched into the modern age. Carefully controlling all contact with the West, Japan reveres its official translators, its only windows on the world. And so language serves as Mitchell's central subject throughout "The Thousand Autumns."
Sword-swooshing samurai are cool, of course, and who can resist a priest who sucks the life force from flying insects or an assassin who runs a spike through his victim's entire body, starting at the feet? But, honestly, the real warriors here are the subtle translators, who must convey -- or sometimes distort -- meaning as it tries to leap from one tongue to the next.
Some of the tensest scenes describe diplomatic meetings where the fate of nations rests on the best guesses of linguists reaching over the horizon into the darkness of foreign idioms. Lives hinge on the conjugation of courtesy, the semantics of bluffing, the rendering of metaphor. Forget the deadly Ninja; it's the translator you've got to watch in this smart saga that never cracks a smile no matter how much fun it's having.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE SULTAN'S SHADOW: One Family's Rule at the Crossroads of East and West
Christiane Bird
Random House
ISBN 978 0 345 46940 3
374 pages
$28
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
Christiane Bird's account of the Al Busaidi sultans in Oman and Zanzibar during the 19th century is, she says, "a tale rich with modern-day themes: Islam vs. Christianity, religion vs. secularism, women's rights, human rights, multiculturalism, and a nation's right to construct its own destiny." In truth those themes are not quite so visible in "The Sultan's Shadow" as its author would have us believe, for despite her lucid prose and dogged research, the book never comes together into a coherent whole. Instead, it is an oddly arranged miscellany, some parts of which are exceptionally interesting, but she never manages to connect them to each other in a convincing fashion.
Part of the problem may simply be that she is trying to tell a complicated story that few in the West know anything about. At the outset, as she presents it, we are led to believe that this is the story of a sultan named Seyyid Said and his daughter, Seyyida Salme, aka, Emily Ruete, and that story alone contains enough interest and drama to make a compelling book. Bird insists on dragging in so much peripheral or tangential material, however, that the reader too often becomes lost in side excursions as well as "the endless fray of alliances and betrayals that characterized life in the royal Al Busaidi family," all of them involving equally endless lists of Arabic names and surnames that cumulatively have the same numbing effect as the names in a 19th-century Russian novel.
Boiled down to its essence, the tale begins with the ascension of Seyyid Said to the Omani sultanate in the 1820s after a prolonged (and thoroughly confusing) period of violent squabbling that culminated in the murder of a rival. He seems to have been a remarkable man who "committed his share of atrocities when dealing with his enemies but was a just and liberal ruler at home, beloved by his people, especially as he grew older." The celebrated explorer Richard Burton called him "as shrewd, liberal and enlightened a prince as Arabia has ever produced," and an Italian physician who served him for a time said: "His constant love of justice, and distinguished clemency, the effects of which are felt, not only by his own subjects, but even by his domestic slaves, make us endeavor to forget the deep atrocity of that crime which places him on the throne."
The country where he took command today is "the Sultanate of Oman, a modern nation with clearly defined borders, but during Seyyid Said's time, ("Oman") was used more loosely, to refer to a broad swath of territory centered on the country's northwestern mountains." Strategically located then as now, with direct access to the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, it was an important link for trade between East and West, which included the East African slave trade. This trafficking in human lives was then, and remains now, far less known than the West African trade that fed markets in the New World, but it was big business: "During the mid- to late 1800s, when Seyyid Said and his sons were in power, over a million Africans may have been abducted from East and Central Africa to Zanzibar, with between a third and a half then shipped farther north -- to Arabia, Turkey, Syria, the Persian Gulf, and India."
Slaves brought to Oman "were treated relatively well -- though there can be no such thing as a 'good' slave system." The traffic in slaves intensified after Said moved his capital to the island of Zanzibar, that "romantic land of lustrous white beaches and swaying dark green palm trees ... twenty miles off the coast of East Africa," which he chose because it was "an ideal central refuge for the Indian Ocean traders, who stopped here to rest, repair their ships, and replenish their supplies," and because "it provided a safe anchorage year round." Before long it was discovered that Zanzibar had perfect conditions for growing cloves, which quickly became a central part of its economy and further enriched the Al Busaidi family. Harvesting cloves required skilled workers, which meant that experienced slaves were treated far better than those elsewhere, though scarcely so well as if they had been free. Among them were numerous concubines:
"Most ordinary Arabs in Zanzibar owned concubines, and they often had more children through these relationships than they did with their legitimate wives. Seyyid Said's family composition was the norm, not the exception. Every child born to an Arab father and a concubine was regarded as an Arab, and was treated, in theory at least, as the social equal of their freeborn siblings."
We don't know how many concubines served Seyyid Said's pleasure, but doubtless there were scores of them. One was Djilfidan, "a tall Circassian slave with knee-length, jet-black hair," who in August 1844 gave birth at Zanzibar to a daughter, Salme. Salme lived there throughout childhood and adolescence, developing "the outspoken, independent, and impulsive spirit that would get her into so much trouble later in life." She received a bit of education -- Arab girls usually got the short end of the educational stick -- but was given ample opportunity for healthy play: "She and her siblings were left largely on their own from dawn until dusk -- free to roam about the palace and its grounds, play tag among the clove trees, or go down to the beach to swim and sail boats."
Her father died suddenly in October 1856, leaving his 12-year-old daughter bereft and ending her innocence at a very early age. There ensued the predictable struggle to succeed him, which eventually was won by her brother Majid, "a gentle and amiable person who ... lacked the charisma and force of character of his father, but was an effective and steady ruler." At a very early age, Salme was drawn into palace intrigue, not all of which turned out to her credit, and then "sometime after July 1865" she met, and soon fell in love with, "a tall, blond German businessman named Heinrich Ruete." This romantic entanglement of East and West was "an astonishing development for that time and place," and became all the more so when, the following year, she managed to escape from Zanzibar -- an act of "extraordinary courage" -- and to marry Ruete in May 1867, six months after giving birth to his child.
It was a happy marriage. The first child died at an early age, but three others were born later; Salme "was a devoted mother and throughout her life would make many decisions based almost exclusively on the welfare of her children." But Salme hated Hamburg, to which she and Ruete moved shortly after their marriage, and after her husband's death in 1870 in an accident, she felt completely lost. Her "position in Hamburg society devolved overnight from that of an exotic, mysterious princess married to a wealthy, well-respected businessman to that of a lonely and needy widow with three small children to support." She missed Zanzibar dreadfully, but her brother Seyyod Barghash, who had assumed the sultanate after Majid's death, refused to admit her to the island or to see her. She lived until 1924, but the last decades of her life were spent adrift, though somehow she managed to write a memoir, "Memoirs of an Arabian Princess," that appears to be an essentially reliable account of her highly unusual life.
This is the essence of the story, and it's a good one. Unfortunately, though, Bird insists on padding it out with far more than is really necessary about the roots of the Al Busaidi dynasty, the East African slave trade and, quite incredibly, the search for the source of the Nile. This last leads her into a digression of more than 50 pages in which the story of Salme is completely ignored while that of David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley is explored at length. This is, as is well known, an interesting story in and of itself, but its pertinence to the Al Busaidi story is marginal at best; it adds length to this book, but not depth. A few bold slashes of an editor's blue pencil would have made "The Sultan's Shadow" a far better book than it is.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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EXTRA LIVES: Why Video Games Matter
Tom Bissell
Pantheon
ISBN 978 0 307 37870 5
218 pages
$22.95
Reviewed by Stephen Lowman
The video game industry, writes Tom Bissell in "Extra Lives," began "as an engineering culture, transformed into a business, and now, like a bright millionaire turning toward poetry, (has) confident but uncertain aspirations toward art." Bissell believes it's time that this art form, however nascent, answered some big questions: How do video games create a narrative, and what's the criterion for judging their value? Can the games offer profound aesthetic experiences? What compels a person (usually male) to spend hours engaged in shooting, bludgeoning, roadkilling and pretty much making a bloody mess of things onscreen?
If your last contact with a video game was, say, "Pong," then you'll be staggered by how far the medium has advanced both technically and in terms of storytelling ("Grand Theft Auto IV" has a plot, and it's richer than you might imagine). Yet this book won't get you to care enough to buy an Xbox. Passages explaining a particular game's characters and levels get tiresome, and Bissell's interesting ideas feel haphazardly arranged. Still, for anyone who has spent a weekend thrilled by the prospect of beating a game, "Extra Lives" will cast the addiction in a new, cerebral light. Bissell's reflections on how he has been affected by his play -- especially when it was paired with his once endless craving for cocaine -- add an unexpected poignancy. But like a player encountering the "Game Over" screen, the reader puts down this book sighing for more.
Stephen Lowman can be reached at lowmans(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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