Reviews and Comments

When King Leopold’s Ghost was published two decades ago, its only briefly blipped on my radar, leaving me with the vague impression that of the hells European colonisation created in Africa, Léopold’s (and subsequently Belgium’s) Congo was located in the deepest circles. Historical colonialism, however, beyond being bad on principle, was not an issue the liberal German Left was worried about at the end of the 20th century – in part because sympathy for the post colonial struggle was de rigueur, in part out of the entirely unfounded feeling that we Germans got out of that particular pickle just in time.

Fast forward 20 years, and Germany is beginning to acknowledge its colonial past, leaving no way to dismiss the story of the colonial Congo as some other nation’s problem. Colonialism, it turns out, was hellish everywhere, with the German colonies no exception (the chicotte, the rhino hide whip that became eponymous with forced labour and cruelty in Congo, had a name in the German colonies where it was in use, too: Nilpferdpeitsche), and much of Hochschild’s account of the horrific slaughter of about ten million people through, as a consequence of, or as an incidental of violent resource extraction feels like a shameful past we Europeans have in common. Léopold II, Roi des Belges, might have been a particularly greedy bugger, but he was not doing anything much other, less unsavoury, characters, didn’t.

All of which is to say that Hochschild’s book still hits all the right notes long after its original publication. Although not an academic work, it is thoroughly researched, well balanced, always aware of its limitations and blind spots, and so superbly written you will sometimes forget that the breathless yarn you are reliving is one of something that, half a century before the Nuremberg Trials, a prescient observer called “a crime against humanity“.

On the face of it, writing a (notionally fantasy) novel from the inside view point of slave rebellion is a laudable endeavour. Though recent fantasy has tackled topics of colonialism and the oppression and estrangement of the peoples suffering from it, the viewpoint has mostly been one of its eventual subversion (with the poster child probably being Dickinson’s Baru Cormorant series), which tends to neatly evade the fact that, historically, resistance has mostly been successfully repressed (for a time, at the very least), often violently. This is especially true of slave uprisings, most of which have been drowned in blood, from Antiquity to the antebellum US South. The fantastic literature I am aware of has done little to address this horrific leitmotif of history, beyond using it as a foil for its plots.

Callender attempts to change that in the second and final instalment of their Islands of Blood and Storm cycle. King of the Rising starts where Queen of the Conquered left off, switching viewpoints from the Islander slave owner Sigourney to the leader of the uprising, Løren, and follows his doomed struggle to salvage a better world from the ashes of chattel slavery.

As a narrative of the deep and lasting damage to the soul the trauma of slavery causes, King of the Rising is a triumph. As a fictionalisation of slave uprisings, it is a hodgepodge of eras and forms, combining elements of genocidal colonisation, the late antebellum US slavery era and historical uprisings in the Caribbean, which irks the historian in me no end. As a novel, especially as a fantasy novel, it is a failure – and that is a pity.

The first instalment, while marred by one-dimensional characters and a slow, often repetitive pace, kept the reader engaged with its colonial game of thrones participants missing the ultimate point. The second never manages to go beyond hypnotic bleakness. Its cast loses all remnants of depth, getting relegated to set pieces illustrating the impending doom (especially Sigourney, who is reduced to the kind of “in the end, everybody is either evil or weak” cardboard cutout last seen in Abercrombie ’s First Law trilogy); there is no arc beyond the certainty of violent death under the merciless sun (characteristically, the one sequence involving getting help from outside the islands is the books’s weakest, remaining almost entirely inconsequential to the unfolding action); and the magic that was so central to the first part is surplus to requirements (it just adds to what is already there: fear, pain, power imbalance, treachery).

With all this said, Callender’s voice still is a resonating one, and until fantastic literature does better at giving the forgotten their voice back, their deeply flawed pair of novels should be on your reading list.

… you know Mary Robinette Kowal is expanding her Lady Astronaut universe. This instalment is the first not focussed on “the” Lady Astronaut, Dr. Elma York, still on her way to Mars (the timeline parallels The Fated Sky, with the latter’s plot a background thread). It is also notably darker than its predecessors, with the casual misogyny of the early sixties, which sees Nicole Wargin, an overachieving, hypercompetent colleague of Elma York relegated to supporting roles again and again by the conceited men who consider themselves her betters, meeting the screaming stupidity of a terrorist movement that thinks their God has decreed humanity needs to perish with its planet – when they acknowledge the planet is perishing at all. In this, as in many things, the novel feels painfully close to our time, albeit nominally playing in 1963, and that quality makes it punch way above the weight of its “counterterrorism on the Moon” plot, which Kowal pulls off with her usual talent.

While reading this, I’ve quipped this is a good biography, as biographies go, while reminding me why I can’t stand biographies. I stand by that assessment, but would like to expand on it a bit.

The problem with writing a biography about someone dead for going on two millennia based on close to zero first hand information on that person is structural. There are source critical approaches that, shedding light on how we construct history, can make for an engrossing read without constructing narratives out of thin air; unluckily, none of these have been chosen here. Instead, we have an old style, capital “H” Humanities book: assuming that a smart interpretation of a finite set of materials thoroughly known to specialists, delivered in an authoritative voice, is good enough. For a long time, it actually might have been, but the current chaos embroiling the Humanities makes me suspect that time has passed.

This being said, Goldsworthy is very adept at his game, and excellent at writing in an accessible way. The result is both a pretty good primer on “what people told us about Augustus“, which is precious little, and on what modern historiography cannot be if it wants to stay relevant.

This pseudo history of House Targaryen’s conquest and early reign over Westeros, the fantasy kingdom A Game of Thrones is set in, exhibits all of Martin’s strengths and weaknesses as an author. Unluckily, the chosen format, an erudite fake history, makes the former – Martin’s ability to write engrossing, believable characters and tell a rich yarn through their eyes – mostly shine through their absence while the latter – Martin’s notorious lack of understanding of the histories and societies he draws his inspiration from – are painfully highlighted. Apparently, in the 150 or so years the book covers, the society, economy, technology, even fashion (judging from the illustrations) of Westeros did no evolve one iota; more vexing even, in the light of a radical paradigm change in warfare, dragons (and let’s not go into the naive nerdy Wunderwaffen belief that lies a the core of that; I’ll refer you to the strategic bombing campaigns of the 20th century, especially the Napalm fuelled ones of the US’ Vietnam war, to figure out how much of it has a foundation), neither weaponry nor tactics seem to change the least bit.

Much like the Ice and Fire series it silmarillions off of, Fire & Blood seems to be intended as a morality tale about people in power, disguised as the musings of those involved (or, in this case, later observers). I suspect much of that will go right over the reader’s heads, being entirely too subtle to hold its own against the sheer narrative spin, while some parts are so heavy handed they make you wonder if Martin is phoning it in (Elmo and Kermit Tully? Really?).