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A Novel
by Mat Johnson
Book Reviewed by:A comic journey into the ultimate land of whiteness by an unlikely band of African American adventurers
Recently canned professor of American literature Chris Jaynes is obsessed with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allan Poe’s strange and only novel. When he discovers the manuscript of a crude slave narrative that seems to confirm the reality of Poe’s fiction, he resolves to seek out Tsalal, the remote island of pure and utter blackness that Poe describes with horror. Jaynes imagines it to be the last untouched bastion of the African Diaspora and the key to his personal salvation.
He convenes an all-black crew of six to follow Pym’s trail to the South Pole in search of adventure, natural resources to exploit, and, for Jaynes at least, the mythical world of the novel. With little but the firsthand account from which Poe derived his seafaring tale, a bag of bones, and a stash of Little Debbie snack cakes, Jaynes embarks on an epic journey under the permafrost of Antarctica, beneath the surface of American history, and behind one of literature’s great mysteries. He finds that here, there be monsters.
Imagine the conversation around the table at Random House when Mat Johnson's agent pitched Pym:
"This book is Eddie Murphy does The X-Files."
"No, it's Philip K. Dick with a touch of The Corrections."
"Wait, I thought it was post-colonial Gothic stuff - Edgar Allan Poe meets Urkel from that old TV show..."..continued
Full Review
(767 words)
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(Reviewed by Jennifer G Wilder).
Uncharted expanses of polar ice are blank pages for science fiction writers to drool over, and many frozen landmarks spring to mind when trolling the genre.
What better place to locate creepy caves, secret lairs, and unexplained phenomena? A closer look through the early literature of science fiction reveals that polar inscrutability has stirred the imagination for many generations.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) opens with the letters of an Arctic explorer, Robert Walton, who comes across an eerie sight: "We beheld, stretched out in every direction, vast and irregular plains of ice, which seemed to have no end. Some of my comrades groaned, and my own mind began to grow watchful with anxious thoughts, when a strange ...
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Alice Randall, author of The Wind Done Gone and Rebel Yell
Pym reframes far more than Poe – it reframes everything American, from the whiteness of Ahab's whale to Detroit bus drivers; from DNA testing to tenure review; from the Gatsbyesque dream of romantic love to the dream of Utopia; from our fear of life to our love of death.
