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Round 2 Match 1 The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves vs The Trouble Begins at 8April 20, 2009
Judge Tim Wynne-Jones' Statement “Comparisons are odious,” my mother used to say. I think Shakespeare said it first, but my mother drove the message home. And yet here I am comparing not apples and oranges, so much, as pecans and kumquats. Never mind. Any of the four titles read by Roger Sutton and Jon Scieszka in round one of our branch of this Battle of the Books is worth extolling through whatever whacky means present themselves. Like Scieszka, I loved The Trouble Begins at 8 and for all the same reasons he gives in his decision. I like Sid Fleischman’s writing pretty well anytime but this is Fleischman channeling Mark Twain, the great raconteur himself. Specifically, he chronicles the early years that transmogrified wiseacre Clemens into wry and whimsically wise Twain. This is a biographical introduction to both the writer and his legend, and Fleischman is wise to the fact that the truth is a “more or less” kind of option when contemplating a storyteller who “confessed that he remembered things whether they happened or not.” The book is bound to win young readers as much by its style and verve as by its content. The words zing and buzz and pop right off the page into your ear. It’s life writ large – a life thoroughly adventurfied! I gobbled it up like pecan pie with a double scoop of ice cream in one pleasant, sunny afternoon. I cannot say that I gobbled up Octavian Nothing, The Kingdom on the Waves. I read the first half intermittently over a three-month period. I could put it down. But the important thing is that I couldn’t leave it down. It demanded to be read (albeit in a respectful tone, without raising its voice). Partly, I think the book itself – its tome-like physical entity – cast a spell over me. It looks portentous, right down to the well-cut version of Caslon, which, the colophon explains, was the very typeface used to set the Declaration of Independence. A book this thoughtfully designed exerts a lot of gravity upon a reader. And when I was drawn back into its orbit, I found that, as with the first volume, the second half of it – well, the last third, anyway – proved to be a real page-turner, a belated thriller. This is the prize awaiting the steadfast reader. Hang in there; there’s action aplenty up ahead! The thing is there is so much more than action. I’ve read most everything M. T. Anderson has written and the man knows all about holding an audience. Clearly, there was more at stake in writing this compendious account than mere diversion. Anyway, for those of you with more pressing concerns, let’s cut to the chase. I’m voting The Trouble Begins at 8 off the island, through no fault of its own. It’s a peach of a book. Meanwhile, I’m handing Octavian Nothing into the capable hands of Linda Sue Park for the next round of this improbable contest. The Kingdom on the Waves is dense, grand, epic in terms of its scope and virtue. And yes, it’s a marathon to read, by today’s standards, but that’s why it’s a book, rather than, let’s say a video game or a tweet. Books are what we turn to for the heavy lifting! Much of what we read nowadays is written, however unconsciously, in the grammar of film. We have come to expect jump cuts and cross cuts, reaction shots, montages and fade-outs. We have incorporated so much of this storytelling technique into contemporary fiction writing that we’re not used to the density of a book like The Kingdom on the Waves. As Sutton says, great books “resist us as much as we resist them.” I think that when you finally let go of your expectations that the book should read like a movie, you get a truly vivid sense of the huge antagonist of the piece, which is War, itself. You see beyond the savagery, treachery and sorrow -- “this tireless inferno, this monstrous riot” -- to the sheer tedium of it; the endless waiting, broken by occasional skirmishes, which often seem not to move the war along one bit (let alone the narrative arc of the story). As I mentioned earlier, Octavian does eventually see real action and it is very exciting. But unlike most fictional teen heroes, the boy experiences a fair chunk of the war below deck in “umbrageous darkness” in the sailing ship called the Crepuscule, which itself means Twilight. What we get to witness in this book is a prolonged autopsy of war, ill lit and conducted in less than sterile conditions. Layer of skin by layer of skin, the corpse is exposed – laid bare -- the organs dissected and weighed and the wounds and poisons laboriously descried. This is not Johnny Tremain. It may be the War of Independence, but it’s a different one that will bring no freedom or equality to the likes of Octavian, regardless of who wins. It is an existential war. As such, it might have proved dreary in the extreme, were it not that we experience it through the eyes of a most extraordinary and unique protagonist. Prince O., as his friend Pro Bono calls him, the “solemn poppet.” Octavian is the prince of anxious awkwardness. Intelligent, fastidious, prim, frustrating, softhearted and dispossessed, he is a boy on a journey, fleeing from deception to deception, from lucidity to chaos and through its annealing fire to manhood. “…this ain’t one of your romances,” says Pro Bono. (He gets all the best lines.) There is an implication in the subtitle about the improbability of any kind of permanent realm built on a shifting sea – a world in flux, tides that change. This is the extended metaphor of the book – the mind of the narrative. At times it feels like a lamentation. In the author’s note, Anderson says, “History is not a pageant arrayed for our delectation…We are always gathered there.” He seems to say that in this great genesis of a war, the clash of which still echoes down the centuries and the momentum of which still fuels the American psyche, let alone the American Dream as it plays itself out around the globe, there is more to find, more to unpack, and ever more to learn. That’s a bracing and profound idea. Difficult to imagine how it could be discovered in anything less that one great big honking read of a book.
 Gosh, I don’t know which was longer: the winning book or the judge’s decision. They both went on forever! And Tim has coined a priceless new euphemism for slogging: I could put it down, but I couldn’t leave it down. Alas, the first Cinderella has fallen! The possibility of an upset was intriguing, but deep in my heart I knew it was not meant to be. The Kingdom on the Waves is just too good. Both Roger and Tim have done a great job of articulating that this is not business as usual for historical fiction. This is not let-me-wrap-up-a-history-
Posted by Battle Commander on April 20, 2009 | Comments (0)
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