The Years of Rice and Salt
by Kim Stanley Robinson
(HarperCollins Voyager, £16.99, 724 pages, hardback; published 4 March
2002. HarperCollins, £7.99, 772 pages, paperback, published 3 February
2003.)
Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt is a strange
book.
On the surface it's a novel about an alternate history in .jpg) which
the Plague wiped out Europe's population in the fourteenth century,
nearly extinguishing both Christianity and caucasians. The world that
unfolds in Robinson's centuries-spanning epic is dominated by the clashing
empires of China and Islam.
At first, the book seems to be a mosaic of chronologically arranged
stories set in various locations, each tale changing voice to reflect
the place and era it depicts. But then it gradually becomes clear --
partly through the device of having the characters of each episode meet
in "the bardo," where souls wait between reincarnations -- that the
book is one long narrative that follows a group of souls whose lives
are fated to come together time and again.
But then, other textual evidence -- for example, odd, unexplained footnotes
-- points towards the book being a literary work from Robinson's imagined
world, a historical novel combining historical "found" documents with
an anonymous (or at least undisclosed) writer's own prose.
The Years of Rice and Salt, then, is a subtle fiction within
a fiction, a novel about the history of another world written as if
by someone from that same world. The characters in this book are not
necessarily historical figures, but rather literary creations of the
author "channelled" by Robinson. The fantastical elements -- such as
reincarnation and other supernatural events -- are not to be taken literally.
Rather, they are either literary devices or they reflect the religious
beliefs of the mysterious "author".
None of this is ever made explicit. The nature of Robinson's novel
is seductively elusive.
The Years of Rice and Salt is bizarrely structured and even
more strangely narrated. But what else would you expect of a book from
another world?
Originally published The Montreal Gazette,
Saturday, 13 July 2002.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
Elsewhere on the web:
|
