Three Adventure Tales

The Romantic     William Boyd     (2022)  I had enough of picaresque novels when I taught eighteenth-century British literature decades ago—think Moll Flanders, Joseph Andrews, and Tom Jones. So I wasn’t keen on reading a novel that seemed to land in this genre. Never fear! Cashel Greville Ross, the star of The Romantic, is not a scalawag, and his adventures are seldom sordid. This tale of a fictional man who lived from 1799 to 1882, skips merrily from the west of Ireland to Oxford, to India, to Italy, to Massachusetts, to Zanzibar. The author establishes the story in the history of the period by having Cashel survive the Battle of Waterloo, spend a summer with the great poets Shelley and Byron (plus Shelley’s wife, Mary), and make a dangerous trek to the source of the Nile River. There’s also a grand love affair. William Boyd’s prose has just enough of a nineteenth-century tone to give the novel flavor and not so much as to render it tedious. One chapter bounces to the next for 446 pages of outrageous storytelling.

The Vaster Wilds     Lauren Groff     (2023)  Imagine a Robinson Crusoe tale, but set it in early 17th-century Colonial America. Make the hero a teen-aged female servant who runs away from a settlement of Europeans that is beset by famine and disease. Of course, famine and disease are also what this teenager encounters in the raw and gorgeous wilderness. I kept thinking that the plot of The Vaster Wilds would develop more in the present tense of the story, but instead what plot there is consists of flashbacks to past events in the runaway’s life. This is not a novel that you should read if you are prone to depression, but two elements make the grim adventure tale palatable:  Lauren Groff’s marvelous way with words and the inventive survival tactics that she describes. (I’ve reviewed two other excellent Groff novels: Fates and Furies and Matrix.)

Late Nights on Air     Elizabeth Hay     (2007)  Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories of Canada, sits at 62 degrees north latitude, where the short summers are glorious and the winters are very, very dark. Late Nights on Air starts out slowly, introducing readers to the staff of Yellowknife’s sole radio station, in 1975. The adventure comes in when four of the staff decide to take a six-week canoe trip through the Arctic wilds in the summer of 1976. The adventurers are always on the edge of disaster, facing ice-jammed rivers, back-breaking portages, and a bear attack, but the natural wonders that they encounter leave them in awe every day. Woven through the narrative are romances among members of the ensemble cast, plus a regional controversy over an oil pipeline. I lived in Toronto in the 1970s, so I appreciated many of the cultural and political references in this novel, but even I had to look up a few words. “Dene,” for example, is a general term for native peoples of the Canadian Arctic, who face many of the same issues today that they faced in 1975.

Dystopian Fiction: A Commentary

Our Missing Hearts     Celeste Ng     (2022)

The Handmaid’s Tale     Margaret Atwood     (1985)

I ordered the latest Celeste Ng novel from my library reluctantly, because dystopian novels set my teeth on edge. But I had reviewed Ng’s previous non-dystopian works (Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere) very positively, and I did not doubt her ability to deliver quality prose, so I steeled myself for a dystopian world of her creation. It was well worth all the cringing that I did.

The setting for Our Missing Hearts is an undefined time, not too long after the present day, in the Boston area and in New York City. Bird Gardner, age twelve, and his father scrape along in a grim student dormitory on a campus that closely resembles Harvard’s. Bird’s father had been a linguistics lecturer but now shelves books in the campus library.

The two keep their heads down and try not to attract attention in a society that has adopted a law called PACT, Preserving American Culture and Traditions. Under this law, Asian Americans suffer particular discrimination, and children deemed at risk of “anti-American” indoctrination can be forcibly removed from their parents. In Ng’s dystopian society, the PACT law is accepted by most of the public as a reasonable response to a previous period of civic unrest and economic crisis. Those who resist PACT are severely punished.

Bird’s mother, who left the family three years before the start of the story, was Asian American, and hence the lives of both mother and son are at risk. As Bird sets out on a journey to find his mother, the novel builds to a chilling climax.

Ng explains the basis of her plot in an Author’s Note at the end of the book: “There is a long history, in the US and elsewhere, of removing children as a means of political control.” She cites the compulsory separations of families in the years of slavery, the punitive boarding schools where Native American children were placed against the will of their parents, and the recent seizures of refugee children at the southern border of the US. These are well-documented cases, and Ng’s fictional world in Our Missing Hearts doesn’t exaggerate the dangers of such abuses of power.

As one character muses, “Is anyone listening out there? Are people simply rushing by? And how much of a difference can it really make, just one story, even all these stories taken together and funneled into the ear of the busy world. . . It is hard for anything to be heard and even if anyone hears it, how much of a difference could it really make, what change could it possibly bring . . . “ (299)

Our Missing Hearts joins the ranks of the classics of dystopian fiction that I read in high school and college: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (published in 1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953). And, then, of course, there is The Handmaid’s Tale, which Margaret Atwood published in 1986. Until this week, I had never read Atwood’s bestseller. (Okay, okay. I really dislike dystopian novels. Even though I lived in Toronto in the 1970s, when Atwood was an up-and-coming Canadian writer and could often be spotted on downtown streets, I never got past her initial fiction offering, The Edible Woman.)

The video streaming adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale that started in 2017 has amplified Atwood’s message, bringing her warnings to a much wider public. But the original novel, which focuses on the subjugation of women in the realm of Gilead (a remade United States), is even more disturbing than Our Missing Hearts. I was struck by Atwood’s prescience, nearly four decades ago, in constructing a fictional world that predicted toxic destruction of the global environment; extreme fundamentalist censorship of written and visual materials; inequitable stratification of society; and, most shockingly, pregnancies forced on women.

Why do people write dystopian novels? Why do they create alternative histories? It’s often to send a message about totalitarian societies. The emphasis of the work can be political, economic, scientific, environmental, technological, religious, or a combination of these aspects. Dystopias are usually constructed by those with left-wing views, but they need not be—witness Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047. I reviewed this 2016 novel which, despite the horrors of racism and poverty that Shriver depicts, is fascinating in its exaltation of a libertarian utopia that contrasts with the dystopia that she fashions.

I don’t plan to read a lot more dystopian fiction. It gives me nightmares. But I take the point that citizens in democratic societies need to be vigilant and activist if they want to protect their civil rights—indeed, their human rights. And authors like Atwood and Ng have chosen fiction as their medium of alarm, not articles in the New York Times. 

Bonus Post: 2 Novels about Slavery

Washington Black     Esi Edugyan     (2018)

Edugyan’s fictional slave narrative, set in the 1830s, artfully establishes itself in the brutal realities of the sugar cane fields of Barbados before drawing readers into grand continent-hopping sequences that take on the quality of myth.  

George Washington Black is about 11 years old in the opening sequence in 1830, narrating his first-person account in language that is evocative of the era and yet unpretentious. We quickly grasp that “Wash,” as he is known, is an exceptional fellow. Right away, readers will want to learn how he develops from an uneducated and maltreated cane-cutter to become not only literate but also eloquent. Wash’s facility with realistic drawing propels him into the protective orbit of Christopher (“Titch”) Wilde, the scientist brother of the plantation slave master. Titch and Wash escape Barbados in a hot-air balloon, ending up first in Norfolk, Virginia, and then in the Arctic reaches of Canada. Wash becomes more and more proficient in marine biology, especially in technical illustrations, as he travels to London, Amsterdam, and north Africa, seeking acceptance and hoping for love. He’s marked not just by his skin color but by a facial disfigurement from an accident, an undesirable identifier as he flees slave catchers.  

Novelist Edugyan probes the inhumanity of the institution of slavery, certainly, but more notably she analyzes the motivations of the abolitionists who aid Wash. Do they truly view the enslaved Africans as equals, or do they want to save white slaveholders from eternal punishment for their viciousness? Edugyan also does an excellent job of portraying the enthusiasms of 19th-century scientists, in an era when the field of inquiry was vast and the methodology was still under development. Her ending to Washington Black is somewhat ambiguous, but then I like tidy wrap-ups, and life is seldom so orderly.  

The Eulogist     Terry Gamble     (2019)

Terry Gamble’s novel is set in the very same era as Esi Edugyan’s, but The Eulogist takes place in southern Ohio and northern Kentucky, right on the border between the free states and the slave states of pre-Civil-War America.  

The fictional first-person narrator, Olivia Givens, is an 86-year-old woman writing in 1890, looking back at her astounding early life. Olivia’s family of well-educated Protestants emigrate from Ireland in 1819, settling in Cincinnati. Olivia’s mother promptly dies in childbirth, and her father soon deserts his teenage children, Olivia, Erasmus, and James. James builds a successful business through hard work and a shrewd marriage, while Erasmus, latching onto religious evangelism, becomes an itinerant preacher despite his continuing habits of debauchery. Olivia, a woman who defies convention, marries a local doctor and is drawn into the many dramas of her husband’s slave-owning family in Kentucky. Slowly, slowly, the Givenses come to espouse the abolitionist cause, mainly because of their individual interactions with slaves.  

Olivia’s story is frank and at times drolly comical. Her language has a 19th-century tone and vocabulary (“Erasmus looked as peaked as an Ohio winter” [38]). The narrator and her readers know the horrors that will unfold with the Civil War, but her characters in the 1820s and 1830s and 1840s do not. This knowledge gives the novel a taut and expectant quality. Gamble’s plot is intricate, with the final connections not offered until the last chapter, and then only briefly. As I read this book, I kept wondering, Who is the eulogist of the title? This question also is answered in the last chapter, and I won’t spoil it for you.  

Both Washington Black, reviewed above, and The Eulogist are excellent novels that explore the issue of slavery in depth, without resorting to stereotypes or platitudes.