(March 2017)
A tale of imperial hubris gone awry, as it
inevitably will. Reminds me in many ways of Dan Simmons’s The Terror, if that book had been written without the supernatural
elements.
Both books take for their inspiration ill-fated
colonial expeditions, led by John Franklin and Pánfilo de Narváez
respectively. Both trips start off full of righteous arrogance, and are brought
low by failures to adapt, exacerbated by said arrogance. Both stories are told
from the perspective of a character not fully immersed in/tainted by that
arrogance by virtue of their outsider status (Crozier in The Terror is Irish, Mustafa/Estabanico here is an North African slave),
There is, of course, a significant degree of difference
between being a white Irishman in the company of Englishmen in the mid-19th
century, and being a black slave owned by Spanish conquistadores in the early
1500’s. And it is this difference which
means the neat comparison I’ve been setting up between these two books quickly
becomes to signify little more than the fact I’ve read both of them. There is,
I think, however, an interesting line of discussion about how Simmons felt the
need to go down the route of providing some sort of supernatural reason for the
total failure of the Franklin Expedition, whereas Lalami offers us nothing more
than the familiar human failings of ignorance and hubris. Interesting but also
fraught: from this point it’s just a hop and a step to talking about how the
authors position themselves regarding the othering of their characters and
settings, and then we’re in to the whole Song
of Kali business and I’m talking more about that than the book actually
under discussion.
Not to dismiss the value of that, of course, but
the point I’m trying to work my way towards is that The Moor’s Account is a more honest, stronger book for its shunning
of the fantastic. I tend to avoid blurbs and reviews of books I know I’m
interested in reading, so when in the prologue Mustafa tells us, “I have
described these events as I have witnessed them, including those that, by
virtue of their rarity, may seem to the reader to be untrue,” I was half
expecting a bit of magical realism, at the least. Throughout the book there is
a very deft positioning of both the reader and the narrator: those ‘untruths’ I
was expecting would, it turns out, only appear untrue to the 16th
century Europeans to whom Mustafa’s addressing his account; equally, the book
effectively engages the Noble Savage question by virtue of the fact that, to his
putative audience, the narrator is not so far removed from the indigenous Americans
his group encounters. Issues of complicity—both the narrator’s and the reader’s—are
smartly addressed throughout, both directly and implicitly. An intelligent
story well told; I can see why this attracted so much praise.
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