attackfish

Because I was about to travel to my doctor's office, several big western states away, I first made my way down to the library. Nowadays I rarely head down to the library for fun, as University and research has eaten up almost all of my free time. I sit tucked away in the nonfiction section, packed amidst political documents and journalists’ exposés and try to ignore the plaintive whimpers and yelps from the Young Adult fiction section. This time, out of habit, my feet guided me across the atrium (such as it is) down to the nonfiction, the clamors and cajoling from the YA titles louder than ever.

Fish's Conscience: No no, you must resist.
YA Books: But you came in this time just for us!
Fish's Conscience: You have far more productive and scholarly things to do.
YA Books: But we never get to see you anymore.
Fish's Conscience: Don't lie! I see her sneaking down your way and stowing a few of you away each time she comes for school, don't you think I don't.
Fish: Shut up you. Books! My sweet YA fantasy, my darlings, how could I have strayed?

It's so wonderful to do something simply for the pleasure of it, entirely without guilt. High up on the reasons I would like to become a professional writer is that I could call reading my favorite books "market research.”

So, as such the entirety of my travel reading is brand new to me.

I've thought about it and thought about it, and I just don't see how I can write anything resembling a proper review of these two books without spoiling completely. Besides, I guessed the little twist a few pages in, and it didn't ruin it for me. All, or at least most of the spoilers are safely below the cut, however.

Young Prince Octavian has grown up in the lap of luxury. Surrounded by his strange nameless guardians, his every wish is attended to, his education handled with the utmost care by the finest tutors attainable. Yet something is off. A strange discontentment fills his elegant mother, and one of the servants whispers that he too has a name, and when Octavian ventures through a forbidden door, he finds out that the one thing his numbered guardians neglected to inform him in his education is that they own him.

Octavian is a slave on the eve of the American revolution, and part of an experiment to see if Blacks belong to the same species as Whites and to see if they share the same intellectual capabilities as their captors. To this end, Octavian is given the best classical education and musical training that the colonies can provide. He becomes an intellectual and a skilled violinist, with a passionate love for the Greek and Roman literary classics, and contemporary European music. His sheltered idyll comes to an abrupt end, however, when the patron of the institution training him dies and their new benefactor sees no reason to continue to treat a slave like royalty.

I’m still at the only semi-lucid state in talking about this book, and for a while last evening, I even had delusions of grandeur and wanted to write out this entire review out in the same extremely well educated mid to late 1700’s English in which the two books are written. You dear readers see however, one of the reasons I feel so entirely guilt free about reading the day away instead of writing while I'm at my doctor's (and also why I don't feel a bone deep craving to write) is that the testing turns my brain quite handily into mush. This is why, on reflection, perhaps these books were not the best two to bring with me. Long multi-claused sentences, full of large words used in ways we no longer normally use them wind across the page. It adds a lot to the characterization of Octavian (and gives him a thoroughly unique voice) and it gives the book a certain ambiance it wouldn't have otherwise have had, but it does make for orthographically as well as thematically difficult reading.

What made it for me at least, even more thematically difficult to read was a nagging sense that Mr. Sharpe was right, not in what he thought the College of Lucidity was doing wrong in its experiments, but that it was doing something wrong, not only ethically, but scientifically. Their sample size is too damn small. What if (had this not been fiction) Octavian had been particularly unintelligent, instead of particularly intelligent? What if he had developmental disabilities? That would certainly prejudice the results. That kept nagging at me and nagging at me, even as I kept telling myself that wasn’t the important part. The scientific flaws were meaningless next to the perfectly historically accurate moral travesty that was slavery and the pseudoscience and scripturally justified racism used to prop it up. Upon reflection, though, I think the scientific flaws do have some importance within the text, especially because, Mr. Sharpe, the College’s new source of funding, backed up by the investments of southern planters, while accusing the College of prejudicing the work was setting about to do just that. His quest to prove that Blacks are inherently inferior leads him to strip away any resemblance Octavian’s education has to a normal child of privilege’s education, whereas any scientist knows that a good experiment seeks to determine the change of one variable (in this case race) in the absence of change in all others (in this case type of education and treatment). Affirmation bias dear readers? Never. Likewise, Mr. Sharpe devises a way to suck all the enjoyment out of it for Octavian, the bastard.

I would like to have seen much more of Octavian’s mother and her views on what was happening. As part of the experiment with Octavian, yet both part of deceiving him and also deceiving her captors, she was in a really fascinating position, and the glimpses we as readers get of her personality (always through the lens of others) show her to be at the least an equally fascinating woman. Another character who I similarly would have liked to see more of was Nsia, the girl who Octavian became sweet on. Although I’m glad to have done without endless descriptions of her beauty, and Octavian’s short descriptors of her said a lot about him... Well they said very little about her, and I would have liked to have known what attracted Octavian and Bono to her other than her musical ability, her beauty, and a certain je ne sais quoi. The lack of women is understandable because the story is so overwhelmingly about Octavian, and much of it is spent in military situations, though, so I can’t quibble much. Or, I can always quibble much, but I have little justification to do so.

The duo of villains, Mr. Sharpe with his libertarian callousness and Mr. Gitney with his oblivious arrogance and spinelessness always mixed in with his affection foiled each other magnificently. For some reason, Mr. Gitney (who in the first volume provides the inspiration for an excellent statement about outrage and privilege) reminds me of a sort of demented version of the mentor archetype (of course this makes him also a foil for Dr. Trefusis, who has moments of cluelessness but fights them) with his waffling back and forth between the "my sweet boy” mentality and the “you really are my slave, you know” one. His diary at the end when Octavian basically invades his house? Genius.

I know I know, these books aren't fantasy, but the first is Gothic (so very Gothic) that it would make up for it if they weren't so awesome already. I'm not really sure if the the College of Lucidity's members are the monster, or the experiment, or Octavian himself, but Gothic literature it is. I have to wonder what Octavian would have thought of Gothic literature, or if he ever read any. I like to think at the end that he lived long enough and wasn't so isolated that he got to read a lot of it, and that he got to hear Romantic Era music. I think he would have liked it.

The American Revolution is most often presented as a sort of grand pageant, where all these big name historical people Do What They Know Is Right And Inevitably Triumph. Most teachers don't mention that it was the French who bailed our asses out, or that we were never much more than an annoyance to the Brits anyway (we just weren't worth the trouble) or, as Anderson brings clearly into view that almost all of our great talking heads were slave holders, and all of them in some way benefitted substantially from the system. They were fighting for their own freedom, and most likely, they never even noticed (or quickly discounted) the conflict.

These historical novels, told from a perspective so radically different from most of what formal education exposes us (except occasionally by implication) was by turns thrilling and heartbreaking, and I can’t recommend them strongly enough.