You Won't Fool The Children Of The Revoution

I know, I know: more books.

But baby, it's cold outside. And nothing's on television.

I'm going to proclaim that The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party is the Best Book I've Read This Year. (I recognize that this would have more weight had I so proclaimed a week or so distant, but one can't help but address circumstances as they are.)

In fact, Octavian Nothing is in the running for Best Book I've Read This Decade. It's so good that I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how to communicate how good it is, because a lot of what I'll say about it below runs the risk of suggesting that this book is not, in fact, worth the time and money that it is so totally worth. I'll limit myself to ten points:

1. Octavian is a slave in late 18th century Boston, with the relationship between the American Colonies and their British rulers intensifying towards the eventual Revolution. He is indentured to philosophers who utilize Octavian as a test subject, to see whether "Homo Africanus" can be civilized in the manner of classical European education.

2. Though nominally a "slave," Octavian has a pretty cush life amid the opening chapters. Things get worse, in the manner of an adventure story or a Dickens novel, and yet as things get worse for Octavian, he learns more about himself, his own biography, and his lot in the world. Which means that you become increasingly invested in the story.

3. The book is largely narrated by Octavian in authoritative and neatly archaic 18th-Century American English, supported here and there by historical (but still, you know, fictional) documentation.

4. Somewhere after the mid-point of the novel -- a point that follows keen and alarming depictions of discrimination and torture (or what W. might call "Advanced Subjugation Techniques") -- something so devastating occurs to our narrator that he stops narrating his own book. And this is not done in a meta-textual Robert Coover/John Barth game-playing fashion, but seriously: your main character turns his back on his own story.

5. For a time, then, Octavian's story has to be taken up by someone else, and he appears for a while as an ancillary character in letters to home from a citizen-soldier in the burgeoning Revolutionary War. These letters are pitched perfectly into the florid and sentimental style common to American soldiers of the 18th and 19th centuries.

6. The writing, throughout, crackles with intelligence and a command of the era.

7. When you finish Vol. I, you'll want to have Vol. II on hand, which has just been released in hardcover. (In fact, it was a review of Vol. II in the New York Times Book Review that led me to discover Vol. I.)

8. You'll find both volumes in the "Young Adult" section of your local independently-owned bookstore. I'm not sure why this is a Young Adult book, as it as mature in its themes and concerns as any Old Adult book I've come across. I suspect it's marketed as YA because its author's previous books were YA, but this is about as far from Goosebumps and Judy Blume as I can imagine. (And the dated references to YA books of an earlier era should suggest to you my current ignorance of the genre. Perhaps descriptions of British Loyalists being tarred-and-feathered are common to those bookshelves nowadays, and perhaps I skipped the scenes in Harry Potter that deal with festering smallpox sores and the systematic debasement of human chattel.) In any event, the idea that this fantastic book is supposedly meant to be an adventure book for 8th graders makes it all the more astonishingly awesome.

9. If anything, upon reflection, strikes me as decidedly counter to the sort of literary fiction intended for old adults in this Young Adult book, it is the emergence of clear heroes. The villains, as one would expect in old adult books, are mostly complex -- they are villainous by aspect or intent. There is no Voldemort, only a backwards and immoral practice upheld by learned white men too eager for profit to recognize it's repugnance.

10. As Dr. Godsave once said to me about David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, you really should read this book so that you'll be the sort of person who has read The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing.