20 Books of Summer, 1-3: Ceremony, Vathek, Erewhon

Here are the first three books and reviews of this year’s 20 BoS! The first has a one-word title but is technically not on the Guardian top 1000 novels list. That is very much a failing of that list: Ceremony has been highly influential and definitely deserves a place in either the “War and travel” or “State of the nation” sections. The second and third both have monologic (monologous?) titles and appear on the Guardian list (both in the rather broad “Science fiction and fantasy” section, in another instance of the literary establishment being unable to grasp the idea of multiple subgenres, modes, or traditions of un-realist fiction).

Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko (1977): This tale of the gradual healing of a Laguna Pueblo man with severe PTSD from his time in the Pacific theatre of WWII strikes me as the kind of book it would be very easy to teach to high schoolers. That’s both not a bad thing and a somewhat telling thing. There’s a lot of symbolism (the herd of skinny spotted cows; the physiological trait of being light-eyed and what it means about a person’s ancestry; the role and function of alcohol in mediating between the novel’s characters, particularly Native men who are now-unwanted US Army veterans). There are a lot of parallels: the spiritual sickness of Tayo, our protagonist, and the spiritual sickness of the land in which he grew up, which now contains a mine for the uranium that went into the atomic bomb; the interspersed Native myths about quests to save the people from physical starvation and the efforts of Native healers Ku’oosh and Betonie to save Tayo from emotional starvation. It reminded me sometimes of a less oblique Winter in the Blood or a less self-consciously stylised Cormac McCarthy (the latter mostly in the matter-of-fact descriptions of action within landscape: “That last summer, before the war, he got up before dawn and rode the bay mare south to the spring in the narrow canyon. The water oozed out from the dark orange sandstone at the base of the long mesa. He waited for the sun to come over the hills.”—p. 86). It’s super atmospheric, even if it also seems to contain less plot than its length could hold. I’m not convinced by the ending, in which Tayo’s inaction leads to the death of another Native man at the hands of two more; the idea seems to be that by not resorting to violence, he has reached his cure or salvation, but it seems hard to reconcile to the fact that he might have been able to save a life and chose not to. I would love to read more considered criticism, especially Native criticism, of Ceremony; my edition just has a short, appreciative but not very informative foreword by Larry McMurtry. Source: bought secondhand from the Oxfam bookshop in Herne Hill

Vathek, by William Beckford (1786): When I worked at Heywood Hill, a customer once listed this as his favourite book. I found it an unusual choice then, but now—having read it—I find myself almost speechless, not because Vathek is poorly written but because Beckford’s extreme youth (21 when he wrote it), inconceivable wealth (heir to £100,000 p.a. in sugar money at a time when £400 p.a. guaranteed a life of leisure), and predatory nature (he was sexually abusing a thirteen-year-old boy at the time of Vathek‘s writing) is so apparent within it. It’s Gothic, but not as we know it: Radcliffean feudal tyranny becomes Arabian Nights-style oriental despotism, gloomy European castles become decadent Middle Eastern palaces. There’s some Faust and some Milton in Vathek’s appalling bargain: the sacrifices of innocent children and his own eternal soul for the gratification of curiosity and desire. The lingering, caressing gaze of the narration on the barely-adolescent boy Gulchenrouz is also squicky (Vathek ends up with G’s female cousin, Nouronihar, but Gulchenrouz gets all of the sensual descriptive imagery). But the novel, although legible as a moral fable about an overreacher’s fall, always seems more nuanced than that. Vathek has enormous drive and charisma, despite the despotism. There’s a lot of humour (“The subjects of the Caliph, like their sovereign, being great admirers of women and apricots from Kirmith…”, p. 10). It’s better written than many novels of its decade, the prose only rarely becoming empurpled, and remarkably well researched, with nearly as many pages of Beckford’s notes as there are of text. And the hellish palace of Eblis (Islam’s Devil) doesn’t scare Vathek’s mother, the extraordinary witch Carathis, who takes such full advantage of the few days’ grace before her eternal damnation that the narration can’t help but admire her dauntlessness. A fascinating confection. Source: borrowed from Bromley libraries #LoveYourLibrary

Erewhon, by Samuel Butler (1872): “You may say that it is your misfortune to be criminal; I answer that it is your crime to be unfortunate.”—p. 117. Thus does an Erewhonian judge sentence a young man who has been found guilty of pulmonary consumption to life imprisonment with hard labour—for in Erewhon, those who commit moral crimes like theft or fraud are carefully nursed back to the path of rectitude, but those who are ill, poor, or unlucky are considered criminals and punished accordingly. Butler’s “nowhere” utopia was famous for challenging ideas about morality, religion and the state when it was published, but in this regard at least it feels not unlike contemporary America and Britain, where reliance on the healthcare or welfare systems is painted as shameful parasitism and punished by deliberately unsympathetic government policies. The eugenicist results—no one in Erewhon is anything other than conventionally attractive and physically robust—are obvious, but all the more unnerving to the contemporary reader for going largely unremarked upon. The same is true of our narrator’s evangelicalism and extractive colonialist mindset: he only stumbles across Erewhon (implied to be in New Zealand) because he is seeking unclaimed land that he might be able to start exploiting before anyone else, while his belief that the Erewhonians are the lost tribes of Israel impels him to plan for his spiritual enrichment by being the one who converts them to Christianity, and later his material enrichment by forming a limited liability company to organise their enslavement. It’s hard to know how ironically Butler intends us to take any of it, and he’s not very good at character development, but I don’t regret reading this—an often thought-provoking, often infuriating example of the utopian travel story. Source: borrowed from Bromley libraries #LoveYourLibrary