Month: December 2010

Last Thursday, I finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt. It’s a big book — nearly 800 pages in my paperback edition — but it took me even longer to read it than I expected. I think, in general, I enjoyed it, though I’m not entirely convinced it needed to be such a big book. Some spoilers may follow.

The novel is an alternate history, one that posits a deceptively simple question: what would happen if the Black Death, the plague that swept through Europe and Asia in the fourteenth century, had wiped out not just a third of Europe’s population, but a staggering 99%. How would the world that emerged, with Buddhist and Islamic cultures as the driving forces, have changed?

Robinson’s answer, detailed across centuries and continents from various on-the-ground points of view, seems to be: fundamentally? Not a whole lot. The specifics are different, of course — Chinese sailors discover America, for instance, and Christianity is an obscure and all but forgotten cult — but at heart, people are people, and Robinson’s history follows a relatively familiar trajectory. You can almost map our own history to the time line and maps that he provides.

In fact, late in the book, Robinson all but indicts the very idea of alternate history:

“It’s such a useless exercise,” Kirana reflected. “What if this had happened, what if that had happened, what if the Golden Horde had forced the Gansu Corridor at the start of the Long War, what if the Japanese had attacked China after retaking Japan, what if the Ming had kept their treasure fleet, what if we had discovered and conquered Yingzhou, what if Alexander the Great had not died young, on and on, and they all would have made enormous differences and yet it’s always entirely useless. These historians who talk about employing counterfactuals to bolster their theories, they’re ridiculous. Because no one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing at all. Because we don’t know if history is sensitive, and for want of a nail a civilization was lost, or if our mightiest acts are as petals on a flood, or something in between, or both at once. We just don’t know, and the what-ifs don’t help us figure that out.”

“Why do people like them so much, then?”

Kirana shrugged, took a drag on her cigarette. “More stories.”

And, in the end, that’s all Robinson’s book appears to be: more stories. The characters are continually being reborn — Kirana in one life, Kheim or Kokila (most likely) in others — and the sense of repetition that’s inherent in these reincarnations, even when the characters themselves are unaware of them, just further underlines the idea that we’ve seen all of this before and there is nothing new under the sun.

In the next, and final, section, Robinson writes:

“History!” he would say to them. “It’s a hard thing to get at. There is no easy way to imagine it. The Earth rolls around the sun, three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days a year, for year after year. Thousands of these years have passed. Meanwhile, a kind of monkey kept on doing more things, increasing in number, taking over the planet by means of meanings. Eventually, much of the matter and life on the planet was entrained to their use, and then they had to figure out what they wanted to do, beyond merely staying alive. Then they told each other stories of how they had gotten where they were, what had happened, and what it meant.”

In the end, it’s just more stories.

Which doesn’t mean the stories in Robinson’s book are uninteresting or poorly written. Far from it. They’re intimate portraits, as the back cover description indicates, “of soldiers and kings, explorers and philosophers, slaves and scholars,” and many of them are thoroughly engaging. I like that the novel is from the point-of-view of the people living this history, neither winking at the reader nor holding his or her hand. Unless you know your fourteenth through sixteenth century history considerably better than I do, the first few sections of the book read just as likely as historical fiction as they do alternate history. The back cover gives the plot away a lot more than Robinson ever does. It’s only slowly, as the more familiar elements begin to disappear, that it becomes evident that this is a very different world than our own.

But then, in the end, not so different after all.

And, in the end, that’s probably why I got a little tired of the book. Robinson paints a rich and convincing world, asking interesting and important questions along the way — about religion and culture and power — but in the end his story exists mostly just to say that history, whatever path it might have followed, would have eventually followed the same path. The details change, but the destination doesn’t.

That’s an interesting idea, and it’s one that keeps the book going for most of its run, but not quite its full 800 pages.