“Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art” by Carl Hoffman

 

336 pages, William Morrow, ISBN-13: 978-0062116154

So, one day many years ago I visited my parents and, virtually from the second I walked in the door, my Dad shoved this book, Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art by Carl Hoffman into my hands and said, “Here. Read the first chapter”. So I did, and…DAMN.

So, a little background: Michael Clark Rockefeller was the fifth child of New York Governor and former U.S. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, the grandson of American financier John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the great-grandson of Standard Oil cofounder John D. Rockefeller; he disappeared during an expedition in the Asmat region of southwestern Netherlands New Guinea (which is now a part of the Indonesian province of Papua) under mysterious circumstances.

In Savage Harvest, Carl Hoffman claims to have finally solved this old missing persons case while also illuminating a people transformed by years of colonial rule and a culture that continues to be shaped by ancient customs – like, for instance, F*CKING CANNIBALISM. Combining history, art, colonialism, adventure and ethnography, Savage Harvest is a mélange work and a fascinating portrait of the clash of cultures that resulted in the death of one of America’s richest and most powerful scions.

In order to solve this decades-long mystery, Hoffman traveled to the jungles of New Guinea to retrace Rockefeller’s steps while immersing himself in a world of headhunters and cannibals (still doing their thing in 2013, so it would appear), a world of secrets, spirits, hidden customs and forbidden rites – like, for instance, killing a man, decapitating his corpse, cooking his head and eating his brains in order to gain something of his spirit. I repeat...DAMN.

While getting to know many members of the Asmat people – interviewing the elders of the tribe and discovering just what happened to his subject fifty-years before – Hoffman also sorted through many never-before-seen original documents. This after the exhaustive searches of the time uncovered no trace of Rockefeller – and the rumors that he’d been killed and ceremonially eaten, a gruesome tale that the Dutch denied and the Rockefeller family disbelieved but that, according to Hoffman’s research, would appear to be all too true.

This is an enlightening and disturbing book to read – and for any of my bleeding-heart liberal friends who insist on moral relativism and the basic equality of all cultures, I challenge you to read the first chapter of Savage Harvest and not thank God that you weren’t Michael Rockefeller.

“The Diaries of the Family Dracul” by Jeanne Kalogridis

“Covenant with the Vampire”

324 pages, Delacorte Press, ISBN-13: 978-0385313131

“Children of the Vampire”

301 pages, Delacorte Press, ISBN-13: 978-0385314121

“Lord of the Vampires”

347 pages, Delacorte Press, ISBN-13: 978-0385314145

The Diaries of the Family Dracul by Jeanne Kalogridis is a prequal trilogy to Bram Stoker’s Dracula in which much of that original tale is reimagined. The books – Covenant with the Vampire, Children of the Vampire and Lord of the Vampires – were all published in the late 90’s and, as far as I can tell, didn’t make much of an impact, culturally speaking. This is rather surprising as, all things considered, they are well-written and engaging, with characters that are not two-dimensional and a plot that holds together well, even if Kalogridis rewrites whole parts of the original Dracula in the third book (the ending of which…how do I say it…SUCKED).

Covenant with the Vampire truly feels like what Stoker may have written himself is he had taken up Dracula’s tale in the decades before his original story. Like in the original, Dracula is a lord living in Transylvania and the story is told, again like the original, through the diaries of various family members, particularly his great-nephew who arrives from England with his pregnant wife (also a great diary-writer) and his sickly niece, who has been stuck with him here in Transylvania (none of them know he is a vampire, of course). There is much historical detail and flavor here to go along with the creepier aspects of the original story: we have wolves, mysterious specters of the hero’s dead little brother, superstitious peasants, crucifixes, murdered babies and a vampire who is about as evil as you can get rather than dashing, erotic or pitiable. Covenant with the Vampire pays its dues and gives complete respect to the characters created by Bram Stroker (I find that many novels dealing with vampires are simply watered-down imitations of the character Stroker created more than a century ago). Dracula is the ultimate nemesis, but recently he and his kind have become glittery, loving, self-sacrificing…seriously, he’s a bloodsucking fiend who needs to be destroyed. Nothing good can come from “loving” something that sees you as food or that has lost its basic humanity, as modern writers have forgotten.

Children of the Vampire continues the story and Kalogridis’ style is still absorbing, with believable characters that come to life and an engaging storyline. Although warned in this book’s Prologue of Kalogridis’ decision to align her book more-closely with that of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I still found the result to be interesting as the author reinterprets many of the happenings from the original work. Perhaps she did so because the legend is by now an established one and that may have played somewhat of a role in Kalogridis’ writing and prevented her from taking too many artistic liberties with the same. Oh, she is still present, make no mistake, for there is some of the most raw and unadulterated witty writing that I had read in a long time. There is also great detail in Vlad the sadist’s favorite pastime of torture in quite gruesome and vivid detail, so be warned. Children of the Vampire is a weaker book than the first in the series as parts of it drag on and on, especially in the middle. Overall it felt like what it was: the middle book of a trilogy, with the author moving the characters and plot lines to where they need to be for the last book. There are some metaphysical elements which start out interesting, but I got a little tired of pages and pages of them. But Kalogridis isn’t afraid to broach any subject or write any plot twist, and I was never exactly sure what was going to happen, so the unpredictability was nice.

Lord of the Vampires is the last book in the trilogy and by far the weakest. It certainly was ambitious for any author to write a series of prequels to Dracula that eventually overlap with the main book. All of Kalogridis’ extensive research is on display in the series, and the first two are excellent (though definitively noncanonical) attempts to flesh out the story behind Stoker’s magnum opus. Several passages have been lifted and rewritten from Dracula which, in and of itself, isn’t a bad thing as Kalogridis attempts to fit her reworking of Stoker’s story into the original, often with interesting results as we see familiar scenes from different perspectives (one of the brides’ anger at Harker calling her “illspelt” was classic). Oh, and the Countess Elizabeth Bathory shows up, as she is wont to do in any other author’s take on the Dracula myth. For the most part, as an ending to the trilogy Lord of the Vampires is a good book, wrapping up all of the storylines and providing closure for all characters. The writing is a good mix of horror, suspense, thrill, mystery, gore and some even darker subjects is a winning combination. However…the conclusion in which one of the characters becomes a different type of vampire spoilt so much of the story for me. I won’t give it away, but it seemed like Kalogridis wanted a happy ending for her undead brood and it sounded a very false note.

The Diaries of the Family Dracul was, then, an excellent trilogy and a clever reworking of one of literature’s most enduring characters. While the ending leaves much to be desired, I won’t let that take away from the overall quality of the series.

“Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire” by Jason Goodwin

 

368 pages, Henry Holt and Co., ISBN-13: 978-0805040814

In his book Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, Jason Goodwin elegantly combines a deft historical summary of the Sublime Porte with the buoyant prose and idiosyncratic focus of a travel writer. While ostensibly in chronological order, the book is in fact organized thematically, as Goodwin leaps from one topic to another to try and delve into the psyche of this long-lasting though long-perished empire. Because of this eclectic organization, Goodwin is able to take the full measure of a realm riddled with paradox: a Turkish empire whose shock troops were Balkan Slavs and a bellicose state built through war that often governed its conquests with a light hand, a necessary approach given the plethora of faiths, cultures and nationalities that fell under Ottoman rule. For its time, it was a rather benign and even tolerant lordship, especially compared to many of the other states then in existence.

Before the Ottoman Empire became the Sick Man of Europe, it was, at its height, a society that was both civilized and tolerant, again relative to other nations around it and, it must always be stressed, so long as Turks and Islam remained on top. One shining example of this trait is when the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 they were warmly received by the Sultan in Constantinople, Belgrade, Salonika and Sofia (as second-class subjects, to be sure, but tolerated in a way unknown to them in their native Spain). In Goodwin’s telling, this is due to the essence of an empire that built itself on militarism and a proud nomadic past, demonstrating convincingly that these shaped Ottoman interpretations of Islam and, so, affected how it could impact their rule on Turks and other Muslims to people of different races and faiths, from Osman’s modest beylik through six centuries of an empire that spanned three continents and 7.6 million square miles.

While Lords of the Horizons is steeped in orientalist apologia, it is not meant to forgive the Ottomans, but rather to capture the way they were perceived by their European counterparts and the atmosphere of much of its early historiography. It cannot be denied that, while war and superstition ruled Christian Europe, the Islamic Ottoman Empire thrived and glittered with mathematical, architectural and artistic accomplishment (at least for a time). Goodwin is great at describing how, for three hundred years before its final collapse after WWI, the empire survived even though it was perpetually on the verge of collapse, attributing the calcified empire’s sad decline not only to corruption and the rise of the West, but to the Turk’s prideful ignorance of the West, a vanity that eventually deprived the empire of the fruits of modernity. While its collapse may not have been avoidable, it could, perhaps, have been less painful.

Some people in other reviews I have read were critical of Goodwin’s ambitious narrative, pitched as it is at a popular audience and organized in a generally chronological order through a scattered arrangement and meandering pace. But given the Ottoman Empire for so many centuries attempted to hold time still, these topical chapters, moving through time slowly forward while attending to aspects such as The Cage of the prison that became the seraglio, Hoards as to the immense if misplaced wealth of the empire and Shamming regarding the corruption of the state all appear to have been wisely chosen. And as good as Goodwin is at blending political, cultural and military affairs together, his work is distinguished by stylish writing and a sharp eye for just the right anecdote (the epilogue, built as it is around the fate of the empire’s famous stray dogs, is perhaps the best example of an informative and yet moving piece of writing).

There have been other, more exhaustive books on the Ottoman Empire – Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire by Caroline Finkel comes to mind, reviewed on October 12^th, 2012, or The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire by Lord Kinross, reviewed on April 20^th, 2015 – but few have been as esoteric and, thus, insightful as Lords of the Horizons.

“Mapping the World: A History of Exploration” by Peter Whitfield

 

263 pages, The Folio Society

If you’ve never heard of Mapping the World: A History of Exploration by Peter Whitfield it might be because you already own New Found Lands: Maps in the History of Exploration, of which this edition is a reissue. This version, put out by The Folio Society, is stellar (as you’d might expect), printed on buckram paper with a dedicated slipcase. But it is much more than that, for while your typical exploration narrative can be a tale of adventure and endurance, a technical account of navigation and seamanship, or a political history of the overseas empires that were built up in the wake of the explorers, Whitfield took a different approach by focusing on the maps that the explorers themselves used and revealing how both the explorers and their patrons understood their expanding world and their place in it, what they were seeking and how they thought they could achieve it, and how they integrated new knowledge into their evolving world view.

The maps in Mapping the World present the geographical ideas of the time, making plain the power that came with increasing technical and geographical knowledge. They also serve as evocative and poignant reminders of the limited knowledge of these explorers, for up until very recent times (as these maps show) there have been areas of the world remaining to be explored and new found lands to discover. This lavishly illustrated book progresses chronologically, starting with the explorers of the ancient world, covering the East, the New World, the Pacific, Australia and the Modern Era. It will enrich our understanding of the voyages of discovery undertaken over the past 2000 years and will delight any map or history lover (like me). I’m very pleased with myself for renewing my Folio Society membership in whatever year this book was offered and am glad that this ornament to exploration now adorns my bookshelf.

“Legends from the End of Time”, by Michael Moorcock

347 pages, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1565041899

 

Over the course of the mid-to-late 90s, White Wolf Publishing produced this massive omnibus collection of Michael Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion” stories, a recurrent aspect in many of his tales. Legends from the End of Time was the thirteenth in this series featuring a variety of characters, and includes the tales Pale Roses, White Stars, Ancient Shadows, Constant Fire and Elric at the End of Time. Now, if you read Moorcock’s The Dancers at the End of Time (reviewed on July 30^th, 2024 – and shame on you if you didn’t), then I really can’t say what your reaction will be to this volume, seeing as it is mostly a continuation of that earlier work. While the stories work as stand-alone tales, you really lose something in their telling if you are not at least a little familiar with the backgrounds of these characters from Dancers.

 

Evidently taking time-off between grandiose Epics, Moorcock here offers a five-novella collection of stories that all take place in the oh-so-delightfully decadent End of Time that he introduced in his first collection, The Dancers at the End of Time. It pains me to say it, but getting through this collection was, most of the time, a trial, and I can’t put my finger on just why that is (it also explains why I haven’t individually reviewed the tales in question, like I did for Dancers; I just don’t have the heart, it would seem). These five stories all take place in the same time and setting that Dancers did and during the voyages undertaken by Jherek Carnelian and Amelia Underwood away from the same (thus, neither character really features in any of the tales, apart from one character or another referring to them now and then).

 

The stories themselves take some work, especially seeing that Mavis Ming – a very boring, very real (sadly) character that is difficult if not impossible to warm to – is at the center of so much; it’s as if she were the most-annoying character on a reality TV show who was then given her own spin-off show for no other reason than to desperately try to make her more relevant. It must be said that, in comparison with much of Moorcock’s work, Legends from the End of Time displays a lighter (dare I say, humorous?) touch; one reviewer even described this work as “Woodhouse crossed with Brecht”; don’t know about that, but anyway…sadly, the turgid writing style rather limits whatever lightness there may be, so that the farther you go in the collection the more you feel like you’re running a marathon through knee-deep mud in iron-banded shoes.

 

And all the while I kept reading and dragging myself through book after book, like the demented treasure-hunters on Oak Island, absolutely convinced that with the next book, the next page, the next paragraph I would strike gold – but sadly, all for naught; not even the Fireclown was a godsend, seeing as it was a distortion from the original series. The whole time I read on through some sense of obligation; I mean, Legends from the End of Time is book thirteen out of fifteen, and I’ve come this far, haven’t I? While the whole Eternal Champion mythos is present in a limited form in this work, this book is more of a side-hustle for Moorcock, a kind of literary attachment to his other, more grandiose books with their linked-but-separate stories and mythos. Many characters from those other works appear but, really, these stories really just feel like filler.

 

Except for Elric at the End of Time, which has the honor (?) of being the last Elric story written by Michael Moorcock (although we all know that isn’t true, don’t we?). In this story Elric arrives at the End of Time (having accidentally ejected himself from his native plane during a sorcerous battle; happens to us all, right?) and naturally assumes that he has ended up in the realm of Chaos. He has the misfortune of landing in the middle of a vast sculptural installation by Werther de Goethe, the Last Romantic: a giant skull in which a desert and a snowscape represent “Man’s Foolish Yearnings…His Greed, his Need for the Impossible, the Heat of his Passions, the Coldness which must Finally Overtake him” (the capitals are all Werther’s, which should give you an idea of how pretentious he is). Moorcock’s vivid imagining of the sybaritic society at the End of Time and the prose inflected with late Victorian aestheticism and comedy really works in this story, so different in tone from the other works found in this particular collection. It’s also fun to see Moorcock send up his own creations with genuine affection; the juxtaposition of Werther de Goethe’s innocent Sturm und Drang and Elric’s own heartfelt anguish is irresistible.

“And After the Fire”, by Lauren Belfer

 

464 pages, Harper, ISBN-13: 978-0062428516

Berlin, Prussia, 1783. Amid the city’s glittering salons aristocrats and commoners, Christians and Jews, mingle freely despite simmering anti-Semitism; here Sara Itzig Levy, a renowned musician, conceals the manuscript of an anti-Jewish cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, an unsettling gift to her from Bach’s son, her teacher, a work with a disturbing message that will haunt Sara and her family for generations to come. Berlin, Germany, 1945. At the end of World War II, American soldier Henry Sachs takes this same music manuscript from a seemingly deserted mansion. New York, America, 2010. Henry’s niece, Susanna Kessler, struggles to rebuild her life after a devastating act of violence on the streets of New York City; when Henry dies soon after, she uncovers the long-hidden music manuscript and becomes determined to discover what it is and to return it to its rightful owner, a journey that will challenge her preconceptions about herself and her family’s history while granting her an opportunity to finally make peace with the past…

When I assigned this book for the Fraser Public Library’s “Books on Tap” book club it put me in mind of Cloud Cuckoo Land (reviewed on September 7^th, 2023), what with its multigenerational tale of a work of artistry that transcended the ages and affected all who handled it in ways unimaginable to them. Whenever an author mixes real-life characters with invented ones, it can become problematic, as, along the way, they seem to forget that they did not invent them but that they actually existed and spoke and behaved in ways that do not conform to your story. But I didn’t get that with Belfer; her interpretations of historical figures, from Wilhelm Friedemann Bach to Sara Itzig Levy to all the others, acted – I think – the way in which the historical, real-life people would have in the situations Belfer put them in. More than just her interpretations, they were people whose motivations and purposes were spelled out, not by the author, but by the flesh-and-bone personas they really were; all Belfer had to do was plug them into her tale to make them live again.

But I do have some…issues with the writing. At times it has the feel of a juvenile romance, especially when Susanna Kessler (a stand-in for Lauren Belfer?) is being courted by two men at once; I mean, good for her and all, but the whole thing felt rather forced. Or when one character states that they prefer the Simone Dinnerstein’s interpretation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” to Glenn Gould’s feels rather like Belfer is showing off her erudition. Or again, when she brings up Beethoven’s Cello Sonatas it is strange that she references the Cello Sonata No. 3 in A major (Op. 69) with Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 4 in C major (Op. 102) when No. 3 stands alone, both musically and temporally, suggests the author may not know as much about music as she thinks she does. And don’t get me started on the out-of-left-field pro-abortion rant, or the Lutheran professor spontaneously turning atheist or her pointless dig at the “supposed” American melting pot…ah, enough; there’s enough divisiveness in  the world, I should have been spared it in an escapist novel.

And After the Fire was, then, clearly written and always interesting, although I can’t shake the sensation that it fell a little short in some way. The various plot strands are all neatly tied up without too much drama or passion and the various conflicts get resolved or die down until we settle down to a very peaceful ending. A good book overall, if not a great one.

“Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator”, by Roald Dahl, illustrated by Joseph Schindelman

 

202 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN-13: 978-0394924724

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator is Roald Dahl’s sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (reviewed last week) and continues the story of young Charlie Bucket and Willy Wonka as they travel in…the Great Glass Elevator. Originally published eight years after Chocolate Factory, Glass Elevator picks up with Charlie and family aboard the flying Great Glass Elevator after Willy Wonka has rewarded him with the ownership of his chocolate factory.

The Elevator accidentally goes into orbit and Wonka docks them at the “Space Hotel USA”. Their interception of the hotel is mistaken by approaching astronauts and hotel staff in a Commuter Capsule and listeners on Earth – including Nathanial Greene, the President of the United States – as an act of space piracy and they are variously accused of being enemy agents, spies and aliens. Shortly after their arrival, they discover that the hotel has been overrun by dangerous, shape-changing alien monsters known as The Vermicious Knids – sound familiar?! – who cannot resist showing off and revealing themselves by using the five hotel elevators (with one Knid in each of them) and spell out the word SCRAM, giving the group time to evacuate. As the group leaves, a Knid follows the Great Glass Elevator and tries to break it open, but to no avail, which results in the Knid receiving a bruise on its backside and hungering for payback.

I could go on…but I won’t. While Dahl’s two other books have stayed with me because of their inherent maniacal madness, Glass Elevator…hasn’t. Honestly, I had to look this thing up and read the synopsis before an inkling of the book reasserted itself in my memory. I guess because it just doesn’t have the emotive power of the previous books. As a work on its own merits it’s alright, but it seems to be trying too hard to recapture the madcap magic of its predecessor and, in so doing, fails all the more. It all feels rather as if Dahl is just going through the motions by putting his characters through one outlandish situation after another and introducing one outrageous character back-to-back; while all of this worked for whatever reason in James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it just doesn’t here. The magic is gone and the crazy hijinks are all just puff and powder.

Ah, well, we still have two Dahl gems to cherish.