Book reviews: Yellow Blue Tibia | The 19th Wife
HISTORY might be written by the victors, but historical novels tend to be the province of the losers. Although David Ebershoff's The 19th Wife and Adam Roberts' Yellow Blue Tibia are very different, but equally engaging, novels, they both are concerned with the human jetsam left behind by the tide of history. Moreover, they fulfil that vision by marrying the complexity and depth of "literary" work with the energy and velocity of "popular" fiction. In the case of Ebershoff, the reader is given a Donna Tartt-style murder mystery that doubles as a history of the early Mormon church; while Adam Roberts presents an account of post-Stalin Soviet lassitude that also involves an alien invasion.
The protagonist of The 19th Wife is Jordan Scott, a young gay man who was abandoned by his ultra-religious family. But he wasn't turned out of doors because he was a homosexual. In the suffocating world of the breakaway First Latter Day Saints cult, his sin was holding a girl's hand – but the real reason was the polygamous Elders' fear that any young man might break their monopoly on wives. Jordan only considers returning to Mesadale, Utah, when his mother (one of the novel's two 19th wives) is arrested for shooting his father.
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Hide AdInterspersed with Jordan's investigation into his mother's guilt, or innocence, are numerous "factual" documents, from Wikipedia pages to sermons and memoirs, about the life of Ann Eliza Young, the 19th wife of the second "Prophet" of Mormonism, Brigham Young. These pages chart her change from zealous believer to crusader against polygamy and scourge of the Church. We gradually learn about the schism between the official church and the "Firsts" that leads up to the present day crimes.
Ebershoff skilfully plants seeds of doubt into almost everyone's story, historical or contemporary. At the root of it isn't the sinister cult where "out here, if your dad says he wants to cuddle, get ready to be raped", but a fight over the legacy of Joseph Smith and the Mormons. If Smith's views on polygamy were not divinely inspired, what else might be suspect? Much more than a history, The 19th Wife is a mosaic of a book, far more than the sum of its parts, and a stark analysis of a very home-grown form of fundamentalism.
Yellow Blue Tibia is a more rollicking book all round. The central character, Konstantin Skvorecky, is a vodka-addled, impecunious translator. Once a noted science-fiction writer, he was commissioned, along with a cabal of other authors, to imagine an alien enemy on the orders of Stalin himself. With Nazism defeated and America broke, the USSR needed a new, less tangible threat to galvanise its actions. But something happened, and all the writers were told to forget they were ever involved in the project. Skvorecky's life is a miasma of Soviet shabbiness and melancholia, until the mid-1980s, when he is asked to accompany a group of Scientologists around glasnost-era Moscow. Then a series of coincidences convince Skvorecky that the tale they concocted in the dacha in the 1940s is actually coming true – and the aliens intend to blow up Chernobyl.
Roberts is a very witty writer, and there are moments of superb slapstick here (in particular, a scene where a KGB interrogator gets confused). Skvorecky has a mantra about "third ways" – "Time runs forwards. Or it runs backwards. One of the two. But it must do one of those two things, and there cannot be a third thing it does" – which becomes increasingly untenable as the narrative progresses.
The novel's conceit is driven by the fact that Soviet propaganda and sci-fi clichs are often indistinguishable – Stalin's name means literally Man of Steel – and the gap between rhetoric and reality gives a vivid insight into the absurdities of totalitarian collapse. History – possible histories, probable histories, secret histories – become the nemesis of Soviet "Destiny". "Comedy quantum agitprop" might be completely new genre of novel.
Both novels deal with major issues without hectoring the reader; both inform and entertain simultaneously. Who said the literary novel was dead?