What You Didn't Learn in Civics: Alexander Irvine's A Scattering of Jades
Reviewed by Theodora Goss
19 August 2002
The first time I read a story by Alexander Irvine, I thought, here is a writer with a devious and logical mind. The story was "Akhenaten," in which the pharaoh with the spindly arms and elongated head turns out to be a visitor from the distant future, a temporal alien who wins the love of Amenhotep's wife Tiye, succeeds Amenhotep to the throne of Egypt, and imposes the worship of Aten, the sun-god, on his adopted land. As an explanation of Akhenaten's anomalous monotheistic reign, Irvine's version makes considerable sense. Why not, I found myself thinking. According to Akhenaten's supposedly realistic statues, he looked more like something from Close Encounters than your average Egyptian. Who knows, it could have happened that way.
In A Scattering of Jades, Irvine does again what he has done so well in his stories: rewrite history, or rather write the strange truth behind a history we think we know. This time the year is 1843, the place is New York City, and the history is as American as apple pie. But in Irvine's America, Aaron Burr conspires with his financial backer Harman Blennerhassett and an itinerant showman named Riley Steen to revive the Aztec god Tlaloc, whose return will bring about the time of the Sixth Sun, in which sacrificial fires will once again burn to the gods and the conspirators will rule an American empire. According to Burr's research in the archives of the Tammany Society, to revive Tlaloc the conspirators must locate a chacmool, an ancient mummy concealed in the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky. They must also prepare an appropriate sacrifice. A child is ritually scarred in a New York fire and stolen away by Steen, to wait for the chacmool's awakening. And all that happens before the first chapter.
Our hero, of sorts, is Archie Prescott, who believes that his wife Helen and daughter Jane died in the Great Fire of 1835. Archie doesn't know that the Great Fire was started by the ritual that scarred Jane, identifying her as Nanahuatzin, the sacrificial victim who must die so Tlaloc can return. He also doesn't know that the disfigured orphan who begs by his tenement every morning is his daughter, escaped from Steen and eager to be reunited with her father. Absorbed by grief for the wife and daughter he has lost, he attempts to become a newspaperman at James Gordon Bennet's Herald. While Archie tries to create a life for himself in New York, Steen is travelling around the country, assembling all the pieces for Tlaloc's revival. Burr and Blennerhassett have died, poor and dishonored, but Steen is determined to bring about the Sixth Sun and succeed where they have failed. The first step involves bringing the chacmool from Kentucky to New York, where it is placed in P.T. Barnum's American Museum. The second involves recapturing Jane. Predictably, Steen soon runs into trouble. Neither the chacmool nor Jane is easy to control. Most troubling of all, Bennet has asked Archie to investigate the activities of the Tammany Society, which brings Archie into continual conflict with Steen's plans. It begins to look as though the Aztec gods have a purpose for Archie, a purpose that Archie himself must slowly discover.
Although Irvine wrote A Scattering of Jades before the stories for which he has become known, the novel displays the same precise, evocative prose. Nineteenth-century New York, with its omnibuses and ox carts, its abolitionists and newspaper boys, its pigs rooting through garbage, becomes a character in the novel. It is a quintessentially American city, where the privileged play political games and poor children beg in the streets, where crime is a spectacle and the criminals are on politicians' payrolls. Here we meet Royce McDougall of the Dead Rabbits, an Irish enforcer for Tammany Hall; the consummate showman Barnum; and even a reticent William Wilson, who is fascinated by live burial and whose real name seems to begin with Edgar Allan. A Scattering of Jades moves back and forth between New York and the Mammoth Cave. In a recent interview, Irvine mentions that he visited the Mammoth Cave several times while writing the novel. While reading it, I felt as though I were experiencing the cave as well: its absolute darkness, the weight of the rocks above pressing downward, and a silence so intense that the mulatto guide Stephen Bishop is convinced he can hear ghosts. I was sitting in a sunlit room, with the noise of city traffic outside, but Irvine's description made me feel claustrophobic. It also made me want to visit those ancient spaces.
These two locations structure Irvine's novel, both because characters travel between them and because they have a symbolic resonance. New York belongs to the America we know, where Archie tries to find satisfying work and Tammany Hall carries on its political machinations: the America of political corruption and "huddled masses yearning to breathe free." The Mammoth Cave represents an America we don't know or would rather not acknowledge. In it we find the chacmool and Stephen, the Indian and the slave, members of populations conquered to make that other America possible. Although Irvine certainly delivers "one wild ride," as Karen Joy Fowler promises on the jacket cover, he also presents us with a vision of America as fundamentally double, both the ancient America of the Indian and the modern America of the immigrant, both the land of economic opportunity and a land whose economic system is founded on oppression. As Archie travels south, he confronts the brutality of slavery; when the steamboat on which he is traveling sinks, the slaves working on her drown, dragged to the bottom by their shackles. Simultaneously, we experience slavery from inside Stephen's mind, sharing his dream of becoming a free man and moving to Monrovia. In the end, Stephen must make the most difficult decision of the novel, choosing between his own freedom and the freedom of the society that has enslaved him.
But no decision made by a character in this novel is easy. When Archie finally realizes that Jane is his daughter, he must decide whether to follow Steen back to Kentucky and participate in a conflict he never quite understands, between inscrutable gods whose messengers make shifting and unstable alliances. Royce, who is charged with transporting Jane, must decide whether he is ready to kill a child to maintain his reputation as a New York tough. Steen, rapidly losing control of the entire enterprise, must decide if he still wants to bring on the apocalypse, even if he won't get to rule the world. And even Jane, affected by the magic of the chacmool, must decide which is stronger: her desire to escape the scarred body she has hated all her life, or her love for her father. As all of the characters converge on the Mammoth Cave, where Stephen is waiting, the novel moves inexorably to its ultimate decision: whether the chacmool will succeed in bringing about the return of Tlaloc, whether, that is, the hidden darkness of the American story will overwhelm the daylight world of work and family, of the fragile love between father and daughter. This is magical history at its finest, magical both because in Irvine's America the ancient gods are always ready to return if offered belief and blood sacrifice, and because Irvine's prose magically makes a forgotten era come fully and satisfyingly to life. Who knows, it could have happened that way.
Theodora Goss' stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Realms of Fantasy, Dreams of Decadence, Mythic Delirium, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and Alchemy. She is working on a Ph.D. in English literature, with a focus on Victorian gothic. She lives in Boston with her husband, who is a molecular biologist, and four cats who like to eat her manuscripts. For more about her, visit her Web Site.