Friday 31 July 2020

BOOK REPORT: THE GOLD EATERS BY RONALD WRIGHT

Ronald Wright



Ronald Wright’s 2015 novel, The Gold Eaters, is an epic tale of a civilization confronted with inevitable change wrought by a foreign power. It is the story of a young Inca boy, Wayman (his name means "hawk” in the Quechua language), born in a small fishing village along the Peruvian coast who, in 1527, is kidnapped by Spanish sailors led by Francisco Pizarro and eventually taken to Spain. He lives some years with his captors, who are soldiers of fortune seeking royal assent to return to Peru and conquer the Inca Empire. Eventually Pizarro is given funding from the king and returns with Wayman, who will be his official interpreter. Wright then details the next two decades, as Spanish forces and Pizarro’s band of rough-cut mercenaries gradually wrest the lands and wealth from the native peoples.
Wayman provides the reader with a fascinating glimpse of power struggles within the Spanish ranks, as well as those of Incan royalty. He helps us understand the native culture—its heritage, traditions, and beliefs; how people lived their lives and what mattered to them. Previously, I had little understanding of Incas, and had the standard, bare-bones history of "The Conquest" that we all know. Wright gives us insight into how the Inca Empire functioned and where its strengths and weaknesses lay. In his introduction, he says:

Far to the south, beyond the jungle, where the trees gave way to dunes and snow-capped mountains, lay the realm of the Incas. Running more than three thousand miles from southern Colombia to central Chile and western Argentina, the Inca Empire was then the second largest on Earth (after China) and the last great civilization unknown to the outside world.
In 1526, Francisco Pizarro, a founder and mayor of Panama, formed a company to find and conquer this golden land. (xiii)     

One of the reasons the Incas were vulnerable to the small Spanish forces was because Atawallpa, the last Incan ruler, was in the midst of a dynastic struggle, with competing elites vying for his throne. Of course, the host of “conquistadors” also brought with them European diseases, especially small pox, which killed over three-quarters of the native population. Wright describes how villages and towns up and down the empire had been ravaged by the disease. Wayman himself barely survives after contracting small pox in Spain, leaving his faced “pocked”, as were so many in his land.  
Disease and civil war left the Incas weakened and unprepared for the foreign invaders, but it was by no means a sure bet that Pizarro would succeed—his own small band of marauders was disorderly, ill-equipped and poorly supplied. Having guns and horses certainly aided the Spanish, but their advanced military technology by no means was the only factor in Atawallpa's defeat. Ruthless determination and a mad obsession to acquire gold at any cost (one member of Atawallpa’s court asked Wayman if the foreigners ate gold), and a good deal of luck made their desperate gamble pay off. During his first meeting with the Incan ruler in the capital Cusco, Pizarro observes his fellow countrymen:

“On battered helmets and rusting mail, on ragged clothes—half Spanish, half Peruvian—on the footwear of man and horse worn down by granite roads. On the crazed, truculent eyes that meet his stare. What a band of rogues! They may not frighten Atawallpa, but at times, by Christ, they frighten him.” (189)

After several years, Pizarro and waves of other Spanish eventually took control of the northern half of the empire, while the southern half stood in rebellion for some decades. And we see all this through the eyes of Wayman, kept prisoner by his Spanish overlords as he grows into manhood, his only desire to be reunited with his family and to find his childhood love, Tika.

Wright’s portrayal of the brutal and thuggish behaviour of the Spanish as they took from the Incas all they had is difficult to read. His book is a corrective for the ‘air-brushed’ images we have of Spanish conquistadors, and the shine quickly comes off their gleaming armour as it becomes tarnished in the mud and blood of Peru. The Inca Empire seemed a remarkably peaceful, organized and civil society, with its wealth distributed equitably and having few instances of poverty or need. As well, its native ethos or religiosity seemed in contrast to the contemporary civilization to the north, the Aztecs. In Wright’s description, the Incas have a life-affirming world view, with the sun as their principal deity. I’ve often felt the Aztecs had a more ‘death-oriented’ culture (notably involving human sacrifice) and a world view more akin to the ancient Egyptians. This contrast  is exemplified, for example, in how Incas gently greet the "four corners" of the sky  each day. (Though, there is a scene with Atawallpa caressing the mummified head of a rival war-lord, while he contemplates making the skin of another rival into a table-top! So there’s that.)
How Wayman’s personal life story concludes and the status of the Incan Empire after two decades of invasion leaves the reader satisfied with the former and saddened, and sickened, by the latter. 

One wonders what kind of society would have grown in the Peruvian highlands had the Spanish never arrived. Arguably, it would have been better than the one that took its place. 
A good, fun read!

Cheers, Jake.






Ronald Wright, The Gold Eaters. Penguin Canada Books Inc., Toronto, 2015.

Friday 24 July 2020

BOOK REPORT: THE GREAT BAY BY DALE PENDELL





THE OTHER DAY I PICKED UP A BOOK I had on my shelf, one that I’d read a number of years ago and decided to return to it to see how a second read went. It’s called The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse. It’s a sci-fi set in California and is structured as a set of archival journals and reports from the distant future. There are some recurring characters, but the book is mostly a collection of tales about a variety of people and settings over time. Author Dale Pendell takes the long view--very long--several thousand years in fact, and his main focus is on the effects climate change has on the lands and people of central California over hundreds, then thousands of years. His 2010 novel articulates the fears many of us have that climate change and global warming are events  we can no longer control. He details possible scenarios resulting from sea level rise for California, focusing on an area roughly from the Salton Sea to San Francisco. Over decades, then centuries and millennia, he writes about how this low-lying area is gradually inundated with rising ocean waters until it becomes a vast, inland sea, and how people survive and sometimes thrive there. He includes maps of the changing  landscape, as well as journal entries and other materials that tell the stories of various individuals and groups over the years. 
Dale Pendell
His stories detail people's lives and the struggles they encounter, and how they left behind legacies. For example, a camp established by survivors fleeing the violence of dying and decaying cities becomes, a century on, an important trading settlement for fishing communities along the shores of the “Great Bay”. One set of communities gives way to another as the lands, water, plant and animal life, and climate, change around them. Petty kingdoms and would-be civilizations rise and fall over the millennia. Pendell uses introductory material at each  stage of his future history and, in broad strokes, tells the story of the wider world and how humanity fares with rising sea levels, global warming (and later cooling) and changing climate patterns.  
The Big Bay circa 2130
The novel is set primarily in California, and is structured, as I've said, using 'archival sources' from different collections, presenting tales from various times throughout the long 'history of the future' Pendell envisions.

The final ‘entry’ is entitled “The Caribou Hunters” from a time some 16,000 years in the future. Presumably, some even more distant society arose after this time to uncover and record the myth  of Sengimet, Ridiwyn and Jennith, a man and two women, from a tribe of elephant hunters living on the Pit River (in northern California). It is a tale that at its core describes an act of cannibalism during a particularly brutal winter, with magical elements, and it ends with a cautionary message—a rather bleak one—of circularity and history repeating itself, over and over. By this time it is once again an ice-age and humanity lives, like our prehistoric ancestors did, as hunter-gatherers in a dryer, harsher world. The people painted on rock faces

"...elephants and bears, the big horned sheep and the long horned antelopes, the lions and the panthers, but compared to the art of the Upper Paleolithic the painting had a chastened quality. Humans were always depicted with the animals, often in scenes of great pathos, and plants and trees were painted in fantastically elaborated branchings. The paintings were elegant, but lacked the magical optimism and the sense of unlimited power that had characterized the paintings of their predecessors forty and fifty thousand years before them. Class Mammalia had dodged a bullet and everyone knew it.” (267-8)         

Cannibalism, in the myth of Jennith who transforms into a deer to be killed and eaten by the starving members of her family, suggests a society that is devolving, that is ‘eating itself’ until there will be nothing left. It is a stark and sobering vision, softened only by the knowledge there exists some greatly-distant, future society that has managed to arise once more, and is capable of understanding and recording the stories of our long and often troubled history. 

In his Afterword, Pendell is pessimistic about our future: 

"And it is unlikely that an apocalypse will save us. Much more likely is a gradual degradation of the quality of life, and, for many species, of their habitat and their chances for survival. In late Roman times, in the European provinces, where aristocratic estates shared the valleys with the estates of the Barbarians, citizens complained about the interruptions of the mail service, but went on writing poems in the latest styles. On the other hand, a storyteller has a certain license, and there is a mural in the British Museum depicting Canterbury in the seventh century: Saxon hovels set amid the ruins of the fine Roman buildings; sheep and cattle grazing the overgrown markets." (271)

There are many possible futures ahead in store for us and for the world we live in. The choices we make each day as individuals and communities will decide how narrow or how broad the range of those possible futures will be.

Cheers, Jake. 





Dale Penedell, The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse, North Atlantic Books, Berkley, California, 2010. 

MICHAEL BROOKS DIES SUDDENLY



A sad note for those who follow the work of Michael Brooks on YouTube. Michael passed away suddenly on Monday, July 20. He was a progressive commentator who had his own YouTube channel. He had appeared for a number of years on another, popular channel, The Majority Report. Michael’s was a voice that I had only recently come to listen to, but I found his commentary insightful and helpful for my own understanding of the progressive left. He’d just published a book,

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right, and his archive of interviews and discussions will, I am sure, remain relevant for many years to come.
He was articulate, dedicated, and passionate about working towards a better world. He was also a warm, funny and compassionate person. His was a bright light in American political journalism and one that will be missed. He was only 36 years old.

Jake.