Jamestown By Matthew Sharpe, Soft Skull Press, 2007, Hardcover, 320 pages, $25.
It takes a fair bit of effort to get me to buy a new book these days. I'm usually stuck on the net reading Wikipedia until my eyes bleed, trying not to lose my train of thought as I wallow in the knowledge tempest.
But Jamestown was different. I actually went to a bar to read it for the first half, and swung through the second like a literary Tarzan, except on a couch, flipping pages and reading positions like I usually flip through browser tabs. You see, I'm a sucker for the post-apocalypse. Road Warrior, A Boy and His Dog, Waterworld: yes please. I'm also a mark for revisionist history. Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle, Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder, any Star Trek episode where a back-in-time plot caused by a rift in the space-time continuum prevents the warp drive from being invented, all those I love. Not sure if the latter counts, but you get the idea.
Jamestown, put to page by Matthew Sharpe, an appropriate surname if ever there was, is a revisionist history set in a post-apocalyptic North America. Ding, ding, ding! Sold to the hardest bidder to capture, me, the minute I read a brief description that describes the story as an "ahistorical fantasia on a real event."
If you know your North American history, you'll recognize the basics of the story here, with a few minor alterations: New York City, playing the part of James' England, is rife with explosions and terror as driver Chris Newport navigates a heavily-armored bus filled with the Manhattan Company's finest to find a colony in the south to exploit for its natural resources. Rumors of non-polluted food away from the radiation of the north abound and the finest of NYC's post-nuclear-doom crowd are eager to exploit. They include Jack Smith, who doesn't give fuck-all for anyone but the mission and its grand purpose; John Martin, who has an unhealthy predilection towards losing his limbs; the skulking John Ratcliffe, whose mother Penelope is sleeping with the president of the Manhattan Company (Jim Stuart, get it?) in order to give him a lead on life; and Johnny Rolfe, the communications director of the voyage who communicates with his future love Pocahontas via text messaging and telepathy. And then there are the "natives" (as white as alabaster, but plum crazy from excessive drug use and liberal sex lives, not to mention expert marksmen with their arrows).
Nearly all the characters are historical analogies, some more literal than others, and all effective at, well, that's the question. As a work of fun-to-read, thoughtful fiction, it absolutely delivers. The prose is novel, and the pervasive sense of humor a revelation. You will watch these characters go through hell, but a smile will rarely leave your face, save for the moments when your jaw weakens slightly at the sentiments.
Sure the story has political merit, sure you can find the Iraq War in it and the violence of mankind and the transformation of greed and the beauty of love when it transcends our preconceived notions and and and...
And yet that isn't the point here. This is spot-on storytelling to interpret as you will, and its most important feature is the power and control that delivers it. Sharpe is close enough with his characters that he can afford to let them off the leash to go nuts, confident in his skills to reign them back in to finish out the story. Even when the seemingly impossible is happening (telepathy, killer zombie birds, gay people being accepted without being made exotic, etc.) without any decent explanation, you aren't taken out of the loop because you know and trust your guides.
Sometimes, usually after you've been laughing steadily for pages, Sharpe suddenly puts his blade in your guts to remind you that, though this may be an "ahistorical fantasia," you are still meat that feels things, just like the rest of the world. And when you laugh at the sickness of the future mired in the failures of the past, you're only laughing at yourself and the world you live in today.
That is talent, baby. I'm always happy when something is worth leaving the shell for. And now it's back to the Internet.
Paul Rice is a freelance writer and video game journalist with The Escapist Magazine (www.escapistmag.com). He lives in Seattle.
Jamestown By Matthew Sharpe, Soft Skull Press, 2007, Hardcover, 320 pages, $25.