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I've often thought that there are Boy Books and Girl Books. I realize that this seems
fearfully retro and unfeminist, not to mention easy to disprove: I know men who adore THE
GOLDEN NOTEBOOK and women who are enamored of Hemingway. What I'm getting at, though,
isn't really a generalization about who will like what. Rather, it's an attempt to home in
on a type of novel in which certain elements are absent and others are in the ascendant.
This is a Boy Book, by which I mean that the plot dominates; the action is conducted
mostly in the public spheres of politics, work, carousing, and all-around masculine
adventure; there are almost no female characters (and when there are, they tend to be
whores or crones); and the voice is that of a detached, ironic observer. First published
in the UK (one of the six blurbs quoted on the back cover, by the way, is by a woman), THE
RISING SUN is a first novel by a young Scotsman about a dark chapter in the history of his
country: the disastrous attempt, in 1698, to found a colony called Caledonia in Darien,
the part of the world now known as Panama.
THE RISING SUN could be pegged as: (a) sea story, (b) young-man-coming-of-age saga, and
(c) tale of the white man's effort to tame an unruly tropical wilderness, HEART OF
DARKNESS style. The combination is reminiscent of Conrad and Melville, of course, and
perhaps, less ambitiously, the rousing shipboard adventures of C. S. Forester and Patrick
O'Brian. But to me the book seemed to owe even more to the picaresque first-person novels
of the 18th century and later --- Fielding, Defoe, Swift, Dickens; this resemblance is
made explicit by Galbraith's decision to cast the entire story as a journal kept by one
Roderick Mackenzie, Superintendent of Cargoes for the expedition. No omniscient narrator
here, but no baring of the soul, either, for Mackenzie is keeping this record for
posterity; he compares himself to Herodotus and writes: "I must give up the lacy
vanities of biography for the solemn weight of History... Willing or no, I am the
historian of Caledonia." Galbraith adds to the effect by embellishing THE RISING SUN
with a consciously archaic subtitle (really more like a paragraph): "Being a True
Account of the Voyage of the Great Ship of that Name, the Author's Adventures in the
Wastes of the New World, and his Attendance at the Crimes and Betrayals that have so
lately Aggrieved these Islands." (Compare Daniel Defoe's A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE
YEAR: "Being observations or memorials of the most remarkable occurrences, as well
public as private, which happened in London during the last great visitation in 1665.
Written by a Citizen who continued all the while in London. Never made public
before.")
The framework and the language do make THE RISING SUN feel immensely authentic, almost as
if it were a genuine 17th-century document, with brown and curling edges and those esses
that look like effs. But because Galbraith seems more concerned with creating a correct
period piece than with reaching the emotional heart of his story, the device of the
journal serves merely to put Mackenzie and the other characters at a further remove from
the reader. (Kind of like Scorsese's Age of Innocence movie, which got the minutiae right,
but missed the larger point.) It is difficult to care about the Darien colonists, despite
their tragic fate.
The expedition never achieved its goal of bridging the isthmus with a road that would
relieve European trading ships of the need to go around Cape Horn (the southernmost point
of South America) to reach the ports of the East, thus reducing the journey from two
months to two days. Scotland was supposed to control access to this short cut and reap
profit from it. Instead, Spain made war on the colony; England forbade other countries
from trading with it; and, most of all, the land itself soon had the Scotsmen drenched,
sick, starving for protein, and fighting among themselves. But there is little tension
about the sad outcome, which is ominously prefigured at every step and described by a
young man dulled and made cynical by the greed and self-delusion he has observed. Even the
atrocities seem anticlimactic.
Don't misunderstand me: The book, all 535 pages, is beautifully written, its plot ironies
cleverly crafted. It just didn't move me. Bear in mind, however, that I am a Girl Book
person all the way (another recent and much praised historical novel, THE PAPER
CONSPIRACY, left me similarly cold). If you, male or female, are fond of Boy Books and
thoroughly sick of reading about the inner life, you may find this confident first novel
as refreshing as a dip in the salt sea.
--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
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