(no subject)
Jan. 16th, 2018 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI just finished Natasha Pulley's new book, The Bedlam Stacks; it's gorgeous and enthralling and I partially loved it and I am also afraid there might be something rotten at the heart of it and I need someone smarter than me to tell me about it.
I mean, I know there's something rotten at the heart of it, the book knows that: our protagonist Merrick Tremayne is a gardener-spy in the employ of the East India Company, destabilizing economies round the world for fun and profit. Shortly after the book begins, Tremayne and his old Navy friend Clement Markham are sent to steal cinchona trees from Peru in order to get around the closely-guarded monopoly on quinine, the only extant cure for malaria. The mission is complicated by a.) the fact that, due to a relatively recent injury, Tremayne has a very bad leg and walks with great difficulty and b.) Tremayne's secret orders: "we know getting a viable cinchona cutting is a very long shot and we very badly need the quinine, so if it turns out you can't manage Plan A, move on to Plan B and get your Sympathetic Family Man friend Markham dramatically killed to give us the excuse to invade Peru in retaliation."
That's not the first thing that happens in the book. The first thing is that a tree from Peru explodes on Tremayne's house, and a statue his father brought back starts to move around the garden. Tremayne's family connection to the Peruvian village of New Bethlehem -- Bedlam -- which Tremayne's father and grandfather both respectively visited long ago, and from which they brought back wonders, becomes the official excuse for Tremayne and Markham's visit.
Tremayne's guide to Bedlam is Raphael, the book's other central figure, an indigenous Peruvian priest with a perfect grasp of English and Spanish who is understandably not excited about to the fact that he is now responsible for two Englishmen on a stupid suicide mission who are constantly peppering him with anthropological questions to boot. Tremayne gets some comfort, during the journey to Bedlam, out of the knowledge that he's at least somewhat less irritating to Raphael than Markham is. It's possible that Raphael's orders are to protect Tremayne and Markham; it's equally possible that his job is to kill them to protect the quinine monopoly. But once they reach the intensely mythic claustrophobia of Bedlam, eventually the global geopolitics cease to matter (to Tremayne) except insofar as they threaten Raphael and Bedlam (which they do).
The book knows about all the evils that accompany British imperialism, much as Tremayne knows he's not a particularly good person, but it seems there's not much to be done about it in either case; Pulley's story is about Tremayne and Raphael and Bedlam, and only glancingly about Tremayne and his own conscience. The prose is dense with numinous melancholy, but, you know, Peru is a real place, and I don't know how much beautiful, witty prose and several degrees of dry self-awareness can pull you out of the too-common trap of turning a foreign country into a fairyland. I'm just going to quote a passage of conversation here between Tremayne and Raphael, because I think it sums up the part of my feelings about this book that are conflicted:
So Raphael, throughout the book, makes several frustrated and disparaging comments about his own people. Finally, Tremayne: "Why do you hate Indians? You know white people are much worse, don't you? It isn't as though there's some kind of international bar you're not reaching out here. We're terrible at everything. Lasting much past forty-five. Learning more than one language. It's a miracle, actually; sickly prematurely ageing worryingly inbred horsey idiots have managed to convince everyone else their way is best by no other means than firmness of manner and the tactical distribution of flags. I can't believe no one's called our bluff yet."
To which, Raphael: "I don't like bad translation. I don't like idiots who go around telling white men that the mountain's alive and it thinks things, and that villages are watched over by special people who turn to stone."
Tremayne: "But that's what it is."
Raphael: "No it isn't. That's terrible. That's not how you'd say it in Spain or England, is it? You'd say, there is a particular hereditary illness in the Andean highlands that causes petrification and eventually renders the sufferers inert in a kind of permanent catalepsy and apparently part of the surrounding rock, which has led to a cultural tendency to be very careful of stone, and a religion that reveres it. That's exactly the same thing, in a language that you actually speak rather than in Quechua but using Spanish words. Bloody Quespañol. Speak one or the other, or don't complain when someone smacks you over the head with a Bible and calls you a moron."
And then they both laugh and continue with the plot, and I don't -- it's clever about language and translation, the whole book is clever about language and translation, but I'm not sure Natasha Pulley gets to put that in the mouth of an indigenous character and call it a day, especially since none of the other Quechua-speaking characters have the narrative status to argue with him. In the same way, it nags at me from a Doyelistic standpoint that Raphael speaks perfect vernacular British English -- and then Pulley consistently translates the Spanish that semi-fluent-in-Spanish Tremayne hears throughout his adventure into casual vernacular British English as well, because I think one of her theses is that if we all spoke the same language then perhaps we'd all see each other as people, and she does want you to see all the people in her book as people. Except it turns out the language you have to be heard in, for that to work, is perfect vernacular British English. I don't think I'm getting at this well, and maybe indeed I'm getting it all wrong, but I'd very much like to see someone else try and get at it better.
I mean, I know there's something rotten at the heart of it, the book knows that: our protagonist Merrick Tremayne is a gardener-spy in the employ of the East India Company, destabilizing economies round the world for fun and profit. Shortly after the book begins, Tremayne and his old Navy friend Clement Markham are sent to steal cinchona trees from Peru in order to get around the closely-guarded monopoly on quinine, the only extant cure for malaria. The mission is complicated by a.) the fact that, due to a relatively recent injury, Tremayne has a very bad leg and walks with great difficulty and b.) Tremayne's secret orders: "we know getting a viable cinchona cutting is a very long shot and we very badly need the quinine, so if it turns out you can't manage Plan A, move on to Plan B and get your Sympathetic Family Man friend Markham dramatically killed to give us the excuse to invade Peru in retaliation."
That's not the first thing that happens in the book. The first thing is that a tree from Peru explodes on Tremayne's house, and a statue his father brought back starts to move around the garden. Tremayne's family connection to the Peruvian village of New Bethlehem -- Bedlam -- which Tremayne's father and grandfather both respectively visited long ago, and from which they brought back wonders, becomes the official excuse for Tremayne and Markham's visit.
Tremayne's guide to Bedlam is Raphael, the book's other central figure, an indigenous Peruvian priest with a perfect grasp of English and Spanish who is understandably not excited about to the fact that he is now responsible for two Englishmen on a stupid suicide mission who are constantly peppering him with anthropological questions to boot. Tremayne gets some comfort, during the journey to Bedlam, out of the knowledge that he's at least somewhat less irritating to Raphael than Markham is. It's possible that Raphael's orders are to protect Tremayne and Markham; it's equally possible that his job is to kill them to protect the quinine monopoly. But once they reach the intensely mythic claustrophobia of Bedlam, eventually the global geopolitics cease to matter (to Tremayne) except insofar as they threaten Raphael and Bedlam (which they do).
The book knows about all the evils that accompany British imperialism, much as Tremayne knows he's not a particularly good person, but it seems there's not much to be done about it in either case; Pulley's story is about Tremayne and Raphael and Bedlam, and only glancingly about Tremayne and his own conscience. The prose is dense with numinous melancholy, but, you know, Peru is a real place, and I don't know how much beautiful, witty prose and several degrees of dry self-awareness can pull you out of the too-common trap of turning a foreign country into a fairyland. I'm just going to quote a passage of conversation here between Tremayne and Raphael, because I think it sums up the part of my feelings about this book that are conflicted:
So Raphael, throughout the book, makes several frustrated and disparaging comments about his own people. Finally, Tremayne: "Why do you hate Indians? You know white people are much worse, don't you? It isn't as though there's some kind of international bar you're not reaching out here. We're terrible at everything. Lasting much past forty-five. Learning more than one language. It's a miracle, actually; sickly prematurely ageing worryingly inbred horsey idiots have managed to convince everyone else their way is best by no other means than firmness of manner and the tactical distribution of flags. I can't believe no one's called our bluff yet."
To which, Raphael: "I don't like bad translation. I don't like idiots who go around telling white men that the mountain's alive and it thinks things, and that villages are watched over by special people who turn to stone."
Tremayne: "But that's what it is."
Raphael: "No it isn't. That's terrible. That's not how you'd say it in Spain or England, is it? You'd say, there is a particular hereditary illness in the Andean highlands that causes petrification and eventually renders the sufferers inert in a kind of permanent catalepsy and apparently part of the surrounding rock, which has led to a cultural tendency to be very careful of stone, and a religion that reveres it. That's exactly the same thing, in a language that you actually speak rather than in Quechua but using Spanish words. Bloody Quespañol. Speak one or the other, or don't complain when someone smacks you over the head with a Bible and calls you a moron."
And then they both laugh and continue with the plot, and I don't -- it's clever about language and translation, the whole book is clever about language and translation, but I'm not sure Natasha Pulley gets to put that in the mouth of an indigenous character and call it a day, especially since none of the other Quechua-speaking characters have the narrative status to argue with him. In the same way, it nags at me from a Doyelistic standpoint that Raphael speaks perfect vernacular British English -- and then Pulley consistently translates the Spanish that semi-fluent-in-Spanish Tremayne hears throughout his adventure into casual vernacular British English as well, because I think one of her theses is that if we all spoke the same language then perhaps we'd all see each other as people, and she does want you to see all the people in her book as people. Except it turns out the language you have to be heard in, for that to work, is perfect vernacular British English. I don't think I'm getting at this well, and maybe indeed I'm getting it all wrong, but I'd very much like to see someone else try and get at it better.
