Literary Wonderlands

by Laura Miller

  Ngũgĩ’s answer was to break with the early realism of novels such as A Grain of Wheat (1967) and Petals of Blood (1977), which he wrote in English as James Ngũgĩ. When, in the late-1970s, he renounced his Christian name and staged peasant theater in Gikuyu—the language of Kenya’s largest ethnic group—the prison sentence that resulted strengthened his resolve to write fiction only in his mother tongue. Wizard of the Crow was written in part to be read aloud in bars and matatus (taxis).

  Despite echoes of the great Latin-American dictatorship novels of Augusto Roa Bastos, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes, this grotesque, scatological universe feels closer to Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896)—the Macbeth parody that presaged the Theater of the Absurd—whose foul usurper is propelled by omnivorous greed. There may also be a nod to the bloating cadaver in Eugène Ionesco’s play Amédée (1954): the Ruler, having outlived his usefulness to his cold war western allies, balloons like a putrid corpse and births Baby Democracy, a cynical façade of multi-party politics. In an era of globalization, aid, and the “war on terror,” the Ruler “missed the cold war, when he could play one side against the other,” but finds ample pretext to crack down on opponents: “What I did before against communists, I can do again against terrorists.”

  Why did Africa let Europe cart away millions of Africa’s souls from the continent to the four corners of the wind? How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size?… How did we arrive at this, that the best leader is the one that knows how to beg for a share of what he has already given away at the price of a broken tool? Where is the future of Africa?

  The political satire has a counterpoint in a transcendent world of resistance heroes that recalls Ngũgĩ’s childhood. His father was forced off his land by British settlers. Ngũgĩ’s mother was jailed for three months in a colonial jail when his elder brother joined the Mau Mau army. Another brother died in World War II, while another, who was deaf and mute, was shot dead by a British soldier for failing to hear the order to halt. The fog of rumor, spin, and mythic invincibility that surrounds the eponymous wizard and his lover harks back to Mau Mau heroes and their heirs.

  Some imagery is biblical; the Bible was the first book Ngũgĩ read in his mother tongue—though to speak it at school was punishable with the cane. He later found in Brecht’s poetry an “extraordinary optimism about the capacity of human beings to change their environment”—an optimism this novel ultimately shares.

  MICHAEL CHABON

  THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION (2007)

  A detective story set on an Alaskan island where Jewish refugees have created a vibrant, complex, Yiddish-speaking metropolis, now on the eve of its destruction.

  “Nine months Landsman’s been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker.”

  The first lines of Michael Chabon’s (b.1963) fourth novel announces it as a detective story in the tradition of Raymond Chandler. But the mean streets Meyer Landsman must travel are not in Chandler’s Los Angeles, or any other American city, for “Landsman is the most decorated shammes in the District of Sitka.”

  In our world, Sitka, located on Baranof Island and the south half of Chichagof Island in the Alexander Archipelago of Alaska, has a population of little more than 9,000, although in terms of land area, it is the largest city-borough in the United States. In Chabon’s alternate world, it is the Federal District of Sitka, offered as a temporary refuge for Jews fleeing Nazi rule in Europe, and then to Jewish settlers in Palestine after their newborn State of Israel was destroyed in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. But now, after sixty years, the big, booming, metropolis created by the settlers—“a pinnacle of Jewish civilization in the north, people say”—will revert to the State of Alaska, and the more than two million Jewish, Yiddish-speaking inhabitants will lose their home. Published in 2007, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union unites the detective story with the strand of science fiction known as the alternate world. Such stories generally start from the notion of there being one decisive moment at which the history of the world we know is changed: A significant figure is assassinated (or not), or an important battle is won by the other side. It is difficult to pinpoint just one change to our history that would have led with any kind of inevitability to the vivid and compelling northern city he depicts, but Chabon begins with the proposal made by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes in November 1938 that Alaska could be used as a haven for Jewish refugees from Germany. (Since it was then a territory, not a state, the usual immigration quotas would not apply.) In reality, the proposal received little support from anyone, but in Chabon’s counter-factual history, the sudden, accidental death of Alaska’s non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives allows it to be pushed through in 1941. Millions are saved from the Nazis’ “final solution” and the war in Europe only ends in 1946 when the atom bomb is dropped on Berlin.

  My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

  The original seed for the novel was planted by Chabon’s discovery of a copy of Say it in Yiddish (1958), edited by Beatrice and Uriel Weinreich, published as part of a series of phrase books for travelers: “I could neither understand nor stop considering, stop wondering and dreaming about, the intended nature and purpose of the book… At what time in the history of the world had there been a place of the kind that the Weinreichs’ work implied, a place where not only the doctors and waiters and trolley conductors spoke Yiddish, but also the airline clerks, travel agents, ferry captains, and casino employees?” In the same essay (“Imaginary Homelands”), Chabon wrote about his feeling of being a writer in exile, not only as an American Jew, but as a lover of genre fiction: “Because when you are talking… about lands that can be found only in the imagination, you are really speaking my language—my mamaloshen.”

  SUZANNE COLLINS

  THE HUNGER GAMES (2008)

  Collins’s wildly successful Hunger Games series is set apart from a wealth of YA imitators by its powerful female protagonist and searing vision of an unsettling dystopian future that revolves around a deadly reality TV show.

  The dystopian adventure trilogy made up of The Hunger Games (2008), Catching Fire (2009), and Mockingjay (2010) is one of the twenty-first-century’s best-selling works of fiction and it’s not hard to see why. The novels revolve around the intriguing premise of a savage television game show in which teens from different parts of the country are confined in a forested area and compelled to fight one another until only one is left alive. The outline of this horrifying idea has been seen before in Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale (1999), but Suzanne Collins’ epic tale builds into something greater than the sum of its narrative parts: an interrogation of questions of political and social freedom, its appeal, and its costs.

  The Hunger Games is set in a post-apocalyptic version of America called “Panem” consisting of twelve districts. The wealthiest is the high-tech city of the Capitol, the seat of the oppressive government. The other districts exist in grinding poverty. Long ago, the districts rebelled against control by the Capitol, but the revolt was violently suppressed and a thirteenth district supposedly destroyed. Now an annual gladiatorial “Hunger Games” is staged to remind the districts of their subjugation with violent spectacle and entertainment. One teen boy and one teen girl are chosen from each district by lottery as “tributes,” and brought to the Capitol to fight in the televised games. The winner’s district is rewarded with food and other supplies.

  Katniss comes from District 12, where life is unusually hard even by Panem standards, and starvation common. The first novel is the most grippingly plotted, building an impressive narrative momentum as we wonder how she can survive the violent arena in which she finds herself. The two subsequent books broaden and deepen the focus of the story, encompassing the nature of fri
endship and loyalty, the difference between love and friendship and the need for independence—issues core to the lives of the book’s “Young Adult” demographic.

  Each rural district is dedicated to one industry: agriculture in one, mining in another, fishing in a coastal district, and so on. On one hand this is a little hard to picture—it’s never quite explained how these goods are transported across Panem to the Capitol on the scale that would be required, given the general poverty; or how distant District 12 can be a short train ride from the Capitol. But in another sense the landscape works very well. It symbolically externalizes two things that shape people’s sense of their place in their real world. One is the sharp contrast between the way the rich and the rest of us live. The other is the general sense of surveillance. To walk down a road after reading these books is to feel the nagging sense that your every step is being watched by spy-tech. Collins’s creation literalizes and externalizes the senses shared by teens everywhere: the unfairness of arbitrary authority, the oppressiveness of being watched all the time, the importance of friendship, and the need to fight back.

  Panem is a terrifying land, sharply divided between the superficially utopian high-tech Capitol and the dirt-poor districts, but that doesn’t diminish its appeal. On the contrary, though perhaps counterintuitively, dystopia exerts a more powerful grip upon the imagination than utopia, since it has more conflict and therefore more drama, which provides far more imaginative potential than the static staleness of social perfection.

  HARUKI MURAKAMI

  1Q84 (2009–10)

  This shifting and complex narrative vigorously demonstrates the power of the novel, describing the closely intertwined fates of two people through themes of murder, religion, family, and love.

  Haruki Murakami (b.1949) has been creating “other worlds” in his fictional landscape for decades. His characters jump into apparently bottomless wells, ride down metaphysical elevators, descend into subterranean caverns beneath the Tokyo subway system, or simply wander too far out into the woods. Next thing they know, they are in an “other world.” This parallel-world structure, which has been prominent particularly since Murakami’s second novel, Pinball, 1973 (1980), alternates between the physical and metaphysical worlds (or consciousness and unconsciousness), between the activities of parallel characters in the story, or both.

  In the early days of his career, Murakami was known (and sometimes criticized) for creating heroes who were too “detached” from the societies in which they lived. That changed dramatically after the “Aum incident” of March 20, 1995, in which members of the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo released the lethal nerve agent Sarin into various Tokyo subway trains and stations during the morning rush hour.

  Murakami’s work had always been tinged with a certain spiritualism; his characters enter into the “other world” not for kicks, but in search of self-discovery, and sometimes for self-preservation. Their goal, then and now, is to preserve a unique core identity—what Murakami now terms the “narrative” (monogatari)—against the harmful, even obliterating effects of the prefabricated, groupist identity offered by contemporary postindustrialist society. Accordingly, the culprits in Murakami novels in those early years had generally been politicians backed by their soul-sucking, mass-consumerist utopian social systems.

  In the years that followed the Aum incident, Murakami cautiously approached the topic of religion, and particularly the Aum Shinrikyo, perceiving among its members people seeking what he himself sought: an alternative to the premade identity narratives offered by contemporary Japanese society. He interviewed victims of the incident, and then members of the cult itself and, while he did not share the latters’ radical nihilism, he seems to have recognized in them a desire for something more spiritual than the consumerist model could offer. He toyed with religion in his short fiction—notably in “All children of the gods dance” (2000)—and finally explored the formation of religious cults in 1Q84 (2009–10).

  1Q84 explores questions of fate/determinism and free will through the movements of its two protagonists, Aomame and Tengo, who met as children, drawn together (though they did not know it) by their shared sense of alienation both from their parents and from the other children who surrounded them. Aomame, as the daughter of religious proselytes, was embarrassed by the very public demonstrations of faith (such as praying aloud before meals) her religion obliged her to make before her classmates; Tengo was ashamed of his father’s equally zealous devotion to the government-owned broadcasting agency, NHK, for which he collected monthly “dues,” dragging Tengo along on Sundays.

  Even as children, readers learn through flashback scenes, Tengo and Aomame seem to recognize that some bond exists between them. One day, ten-year-old Aomame suddenly grasps Tengo’s hand and looks into his eyes. No words are spoken between the two, but from this moment Aomame appears to feel that Tengo is her soul mate, and she stubbornly waits for fate to bring them back together. “What I want is for the two of us to meet somewhere by chance one day,” she tells a friend. Later in the same conversation she asserts the possibility that “everything’s decided in advance and we pretend we’re making choices. Free will may be an illusion.”

  Aomame’s willingness to accept fate is put to the test when she unwittingly steps into the latest of Murakami’s magical wonderlands, which she decides to call 1Q84, a grim joke based on the year in which the story is set—1984—with “Q” standing for question mark. 1Q84 is very nearly the same as 1984, yet just a little sinister: The police carry automatic weapons in place of the revolvers she is used to; two moons hang in the sky, where before there had been only one; and certain events appear to be controlled by “the Little People,” spirits who rule the metaphysical “other world” and take an active interest in the affairs of humankind. Less like gods than mischievous wood sprites, the Little People appear to lay claim to the fate of Aomame and Tengo and, more importantly, to the fate of the child they have conceived.

  It is for the sake of this child that Aomame decides, at long last, that she will escape 1Q84 and the unwanted influence of the Little People. Although warned that either she or Tengo must perish in order for the other to escape, Aomame determines that she and Tengo must both survive in order to nurture and protect their child. It is at this point that she breaks faith with fate and declares her own free will. “I am not just some passive being mixed up in this because someone else willed it,” she says to herself. “I chose to be here of my own free will.” This declaration marks her independence from the ruthless zealotry of her parents, a break with her tightly controlled past. In the wider context of Murakami’s fiction, it is a reaffirmation of the inner “narrative,” and the individual’s right to determine her or his own destiny.

  WU MING-YI

  THE MAN WITH THE COMPOUND EYES (2011)

  A folk-inspired fantasy parallels hard political and ecological realities in a tale of a boy determined to defy his destiny.

  Wu Ming-Yi (b.1971) is a man of many talents, turning his creative attention variously to writing, painting, and photography. Professionally he is no less multifaceted: he lectures in literature and creative writing at National Dong Hwa University in Hualien County, Taiwan, publishes on lepidoptery, and tirelessly raises awareness as an environmental activist. And it is this commitment to ecology that informs his metafictional parable, The Man with the Compound Eyes (first published in Mandarin in 2011, and in its English translation in 2013), an environmental-disaster novel set in the near future on the island of Taiwan.

  Like Haruki Murakami (here) and David Mitchell (here), Wu combines hard facts and richly detailed fantasy. As author and critic Tash Aw observes, his story hovers “over the precipice of wild imagination before retreating to minutiae about Taiwanese fauna or whale-hunting.” The environmental disaster depicted is anthropogenic and all too realistic. Discarded plastic swirling around in the Great Pacific Trash Vortex—an enormous gyre of sludge and debris that is hard to map, but that conservative estimates have
placed at more than 270,000 square miles wide—forms a giant, floating trash mountain that crashes into Taiwan’s east coast, ruining hundreds of miles of shoreline. Two of the clean-up volunteers, Dahu and Hafay, are indigenous islanders. They relearn how to live an off-the-grid, no-garbage lifestyle and teach it to others, including Detlev, a German geologist, and his friend Sara, a Norwegian marine biologist studying the ecological impact of the trash tsunami. In this way, the storylines of the individual protagonists tangle together into a narrative of collective environmental action.

  The imaginary and real are also bound together by the disaster, entwining Atile’i, a denizen of an imaginary Polynesian atoll called Wayo Wayo, into the story, too. Wayo Wayo is so resource-poor that the islanders have had to impose a drastic restriction on family size, and all second sons, like Atile’i, are sent into the sea as sacrifices to the Sea God at fifteen years of age. Atile’i, however, is determined to defy his destiny and become the first to survive the cull. Soon after he departs his island home, he sights a pod of whales, avatars of the spirits of all the second sons who have perished at sea. But instead of joining them, Atile’i becomes caught up on the floating trash mountain, and the sea soon hurls him, along with tons of refuse, onto Taiwan’s eastern shore. There, he meets Alice, who takes him on a trip to the mountains, where she believes her Danish husband Thom and son Toto went missing on a rock-climbing and insect-gathering expedition.