DeepGenre

Constance Ash May 1st, 2007

I finally finished Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons, his first novel since the wild success of Cold Mountain. I may have some trouble with this novel on certain grounds, such as the ‘good, magic, authentic Indian’ vs. the ‘bad mixed blood Indian’ and the tale having both Indians’ lives to a large degree revolve around the tale’s narrator, another magical person, who is a white man.

Shades of ye olde James Fenimore Cooper’s white Natty Bumpo hero, Chingachgook, the perfect authentic magic Indian, and Magua, the evil half-breed in The Last of the Mohicans (which BBC 1972 series I recently viewed too — but be assured, I have read all of the Leatherstocking Tales several times, starting as a child). Nevertheless, this Frazier fellow writes so very well, and tells a satisfactory tale. The book was an excellent bridge, a chapter or two a night, from the day’s activities to sleep.

Whether one would feel the same way if one were say, actually a Cherokee or a Creek, or a member of a family that survived the forced removal from the Southern Atlantic coastal lands to dusty Oklahoma via the infamous Trail of Tears, could well not be the case, perhaps. Additionally, Frazier’s characters who are removed, are among the very wealthy Cherokees, who owned plantations and slaves, and they didn’t march. They took train and ship and horseback with all their chattels, including their human ones, and then went to work rebuilding their mansions on the flatlands, with their slaves busting sod.

Certainly the author meant well. We always do though, don’t we?

However, as I’ve spent some time in the landscapes in which the novel is located since Cold Mountain came out (I had some serious troubles with the slavery situation in that book, which was so benignly portrayed, by and large, and yet evidently still not benignly enough for Hollywood, since the principal black character got turned white in the movie). I’ve spent a few days over a period of 3 years now in Asheville, North Carolina where Frazier was born (and which is also the natality of Thomas Wolfe). So the landscapes in which he locates the actions had another dimension of enjoyment that wouldn’t have been part of what I could bring to the text if I hadn’t hadn’t been there. This landscape still retains the power to hurt you and for you to get lost.

There have been many changes in this mountainous, wooded environment since the time span covered in the novel, but the novel is about time and change. There is a great deal of musing upon the big changes in this land in the living memory of many of the novel’s characters in contrast to how it is at the opening of the novel, and how during the long time frame of the story, more changes yet take place. This is what can be called, in literary terms, an elegiac novel. It teeters just on the edge of nostalgia and sentimentality, but the narrator’s voice works very hard to maintain a certain sardonic hard-nosed realism in play.

If you like reading good Western fiction, Thirteen Moons provides the satisfaction of a Western, which this Southern tale, the characters and the location are prototype for, which we see immediately post Civil War showing up in our national entertainment, along with the Wild West shows — all of which are part of Frazier’s novel.

I’ve nearly finished Sixty Days and Counting, the third installment in Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate change trilogy.

I suppose one could complain a great deal about this novel, and some have. To me this trilogy is exactly what it is supposed to be. It may not be a classic novel, in the sense that Thirteen Moons is. But Sixty Days is a wonderful novel of Science Fiction. It is just about the only Science Fiction novel I’ve encountered that takes on all of the pressing crises we’re in now, that must be solved right now, if our youngest children and grandchildren, nay, even the planet will have a future one can stand to contemplate. He connects specifically the crisis of climate change and the destroyed habitats of every living creature directly to patriarchy >over population> capitalism. He gets specific about the consequences, right here in the U.S., in its effect on politics, including the stealing of presidential elections, to which I can only, over my own lifetime’s experience, study and observation, agree. So I have to applaud both Stan and his publisher for that — so few, especially until even unto the very last few days, have dared to speak these truths about capitalism and overpopulation, and so far, it’s only the stealing of elections that is beginning to emerge in the primary media of national discourse (though I’m not sure I can dignify that bleating as ‘discourse, but nevermind for the moment).

In the meantime he provides one of the oddest panoramas of male principals and supporting characters you have ever encountered in a novel, genre or not. Not to say that any of these characters are so particularly odd in themselves, but as a connected collective. The male collective of friends and colleagues, and villains too — though these latter are pretty much always offstage — are those of Frank, one of the scientists, who may be the oddest principal, protag of them all, vis a vis he’s the one who has this collective.

Some have stated that Sixty Days is dull — too much info dump. I disagree. For one thing, what these critics have called info dump, are really meditations upon the meditations of a range of fascinating American writers who have contemplated nature and human saps’ place within her order. Over the course of the three novels, Emerson becomes an American parallel of the Dali Lama, for instance.

There are many pleasures to reading Sixty Days, particularly if you were fortunate enough to now have read all three of the trilogy, in order, as they arrived: Forty Days of Rain, Sixty Degrees Below, and now Sixty Days and Counting. One of the greatest of these is the reader’s sense that a rich soul, cultivated as consciously and hopefully as the intellect and the body that house it, is being opened to you, to contemplate in the reader’s turn: contemplations on sociobiology applied to contemporary lifestyle courting patterns; Sara Hrdy (my favorite socio-biologist) ; Ã?stor Pantaleón Piazzolla, the tango, and Argentina’s “disappeared”; Emerson, Audobon and Muir; such a passionate love for our wilderness areas; solid conviction that a healthy body is fundamentally necessary for a healthy, creative, innovative brain — the men in Stan’s trilogy spend enormous amounts of time exercising, doing sports, from playing unconventional forms to frisbee to mountain climbing, to going to gyms — they do them ALL, as well as eat a really healthy diet; much, much more.

It is so particularly American, meaning of the United States, at once in the optimism that even the greatest of crises can be solved, if one is willing and able to be active and to have the will and to think outside of boxes — and that means faith in the sciences and those who have the faith to practice them. uncorrupted by power and politics. Anger is the one emotion that tends to be far from Frank and Charles and most of the other male characters, other than some of the members of the ‘ferals,’ homeless gangs of men with whom Frank spends a great deal of time, partly from conviction, partly due to the need to stay off the grid as much as possible due to threat by the villains. So it is also idealist in that peculiarly U.S. way, because the closest to anger one feels coming out of this novel is at the meddling with science that is referred to vaguely and generally by “previous administrations.” But personally, science history teaches us that scientists and engineers and technical innovators are no more immune to corruption than anyone else — for instance see the entire history of the American Army Corps of Engineers, who ultimately are responsible for the debacle of the levees at New Orleans, and it is not the first enormous catastrophe for which it is responsible. They’ve been so good at covering up — partly because, as Stan makes so clear in Sixty Degrees it belongs ultimately to the Pentagon, and the inconceivably enormous amount of money the Pentagon controls is beyond any accounting. (And then there are those wildly proliferating ‘black ops’ of surveillance, intelligence and so on, proliferating like toxic virii throughout our system ….)

The fertile cross-pollination of Buddhist practice upon U.S. thinking that seems so peculiarly Southern Californian to a lot of us has an important role in this novel set primarily in Washington D.C. Interestingly it is a Buddhist monastary group that has lost their homeland due to climate-change triggered flooding, that Stan picks as his representative West - East mixing, not Chinese, of whom there are so many U.S. citizens. So, along with Emerson and Thoreau, you have Tibetan Buddhist meditation on the paths of life and death swirling around Frank’s scientific thinking, Charlie’s political thinking and a small child’s rights.

In the end, this is so white, so middle class, so very much of the U.S. (on the other hand, yes indeed, this nation — and that until recently ever-expanding class — did break it, so they should fix it ….), I cannot buy it entiely. But you can really see why this world of Stan’s is so very attractive and why those who inhabit it would fight this hard to rescue it. This world does belong to them. Don’t know that most of the planet could possibly see it that way.

With those caveats, this is a novel that can provide many pleasures and delights to the reader who is prepared for them. This is a mature person’s Science Fiction novel, thank goodness.

As well I’m grappling with John Barnes’s poltiical “Introduction” to Payback, written in the 90’s, and still unpublished.

You can hardly find anything more contrary to Frazier’s re-imagined wilderness history and Kim Stanley Robinson’s corridors-of-power vision and idealism rooted in nature, than John Barnes Payback, an urban terror thriller of much smashbangdestruction in the gritty streets of Detroit, and not nearly so prettily written as either of the other two.

Politics: all three of these novels have political dimensions, and very large ones. You may read them without having your own politics engaged, if you are that sort of reader. As you can see, I am not one of those!

Love, C.

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