Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
The world they make has its scientists and great thinkers, much like ours. K lives one life as a Galileo-like former alchemist who, with I, ignites a mini-Renaissance in Samarkand. B returns as part of a Japanese diaspora that harries the fringes of China's empire and teaches the Hodenosaunee how to fight off the would-be colonizers of Yingzhou (America). A kind of Enlightenment blossoms under K's charismatic rule in southern India, along with the promise of a world with "no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more qadis or mullahs or ulema."
Eventually, though, there comes the "Long War," a conflict that grinds on for 60 years, with the entire jati serving as soldiers and an eerie, nightmarish passage through the mountains of Tibet during which B suspects that the whole human race has fallen into the bardo and is serving as cannon fodder for the asuras (gods):
"Never had it been so clear to Bai that they had gotten caught up in some bigger war, dying by the millions for some cause not their own. Ice and black rock fangs touched the ceiling of stars, snow banners streamed on the monsoon wind away from the peaks, merging with the Milky Way, at sunset becoming asura flames blowing horizontally, as if the realm of the asuras stood perpendicular to their own."
Years pass, humanity begins to recover, and then the world has its own version of the '60s, a countercultural efflorescence in the coastal city of Nsara (in what we'd call France). B, in this life a young woman who has run away from her strict Muslim family in the Alps, meets up with K, an incendiary teacher who helps to lead an uprising against a military dictatorship. B's café-frequenting bohemian crowd even features a musician who revives the exotic music of the lost Franks in long concerts enhanced with opium and the stylings of "scent artists." During all of this I, again a scientist although considerably constrained by being born a woman, secretly works with a group of physicists, pursuing discoveries that frighten as well as exhilarate her.
It's only here, in the home stretches of "The Years of Rice and Salt," that Robinson's utopian inclinations wrest the novel away from his storytelling ones. The writing often becomes regrettably expository, weighed down by long, stodgy passages about economic and political developments. In a way, it's impressive that this element doesn't manifest earlier on, given how much information the reader needs in order to figure out what's going on. Robinson can work it in deftly enough at times, by making the characters teachers or philosophers, but at the very end, alas, it takes over.
Some of Robinson's historical revisionism seems unduly Pollyanna-ish. Would it really be possible for an international confederation of scientists to block the development of nuclear weapons? How, exactly, do the Hodenosaunee manage to become a world power without, it seems, adapting the social structures that industrialization seems to require?
Nevertheless, "The Years of Rice and Salt" is for the most part a magnificent and endlessly fascinating book. Setting himself the Scheherazadean labor of holding his readers through a chain of tales, a series of endings and beginnings in which we must let go of one story and then quickly be caught up again in the next, he pulls it off with a trapeze artist's grace. There is also something uncannily prescient about the novel's deep, subtle examinations of the divided nature of Islam -- does it offer a perfected covenant with the one true God that will guide his people to a better, less hierarchic society, or is it the creed of "ignorant fanatical disciples of a cruel desert cult, promised eternity in a paradise where sexual orgasm with beautiful houris lasted ten thousand years, no surprise they were so often suicidally brave, happy to die, reckless in frenzied opiated ways that were hard to counter"?
It is as hard to answer such questions in Robinson's invented world as it is in the real one. That, perhaps, is the most enduring impression that "The Years of Rice and Salt" (for all the progressive uplift of its conclusion) leaves. It is a novel in which chance and human nature intertwine in countless ways, producing an alternate history that provocatively intersects with and departs from our own. It offers a vision of the world in which what shapes our fate, in the end, are the raw materials of humanity -- our brutality and selfishness, yes, but also our curiosity, our capacity for sympathy and our stubborn persistence in muddling our way to a better life.
