I noted a ways back ago that I’d come across Argall, by William T. Vollmann, in my peregrinations and snatched it up with greed.

I read the book in about four sittings; it’s Vollmann’s crack at the Pocahontas story. It’s also one of his Seven Dreams, seven books that undertake to re-envision the encounters between Native American and European cultures that underpin our current culture here in North America.

The other books which have been published are The Ice Shirt, The Rifles, and Fathers and Crows.

The Ice Shirt relates the tale of the Viking settlement at l’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland; The Rifles is about the encounter between the northern peoples of Canada and the twentieth century around 1900 via the story of the ill fated Franklin expedition (it should be noted that Vollmanns’ treatment of the expedition prefigures but inverts the publishing industry’s embrace of the later Shackleton expedition); and Fathers and Crows tells the story of the mission to the native peoples along the St Lawrence waterway by French Jesuits and the resultant sainthood of the only Native American saint, the Iroquois St. Catherine Tekakwitha (which also has a counterpart in the mass media, the beautiful film Black Robe, a very different work, but lovely to look at and very useful for it’s meticulous visualizations of the pace and time).

I recommend all of these books, but my favorites to date are Argall and Black Robe. I intend a full-scale review of Argall, but, erhm, later.

Vollmann’s work is unique. He’s a very post-modern writer, injecting a first person authorial voice into the work at whim, incorporating drawings and personal reminiscence into the fabric of the novels. Despite this he is unafraid of the traditional projection of the writers’ voice into his characters, and I swear, with each book his control of the language become more assured.

There’s a tension in his work, most clearly seen in the books he’s published that are not a part of Seven Dreams, between his moral repugnance and personal fascination with what I can only term squalor. This boundary between repulsion and fascination is where, for example, fetish sexuality lies, but Vollmann’s adoption of the boundary as the prime element in his work is, in my opinion, in most cases not sexual in nature. Even when he’s writing about sex and sexuality, it’s neither porn nor erotica, for me at least.

In Seven Dreams, this fascination takes on an added dimension, in that he assumes a demonstrable truth: the Native peoples he is imagining as well as the European persons who frequently left greater amounts of first-person documentation behind each had systems of moral behavior and considered their actions in relation to it.

The preponderance of the narratives we’re exposed to in American primary and secondary educational institutions and in the popular culture emphasize the savagery of one or another of the events, depicting the actions as originating with either an evil sense of values or none.

Vollmann’s efforts provide the opportunity to see how, in conflict, morality is simply lost, and at the same time how as humans our differing value systems may simply be impervious to reconciliation.

I do not know what further Dreams Bill intends to bring forth, but it seems likely that the conquest of Mexico is likely, and the defeat of the Indians of the plains may be another. In the case of Mexico particularly, it’s not possible, I think, to imagine a greater conflict of values.

Viv and I have been casting about, unsuccessfully, for the next read-aloud book to share in bed, after this past years successful journey through The Lord of the Rings . We tried some of my favorite literary SF and fantasy, which was an utter bomb – instead of trusting the book to provide the visualization of the alternate world, Viv would constantly ask me questions which I couldn’t answer about the props and settings of the specific book. By setting the story otherwhen, the authors of the genre left Viv behind. The (to me) overhwelming, not very interesting detail that is so beloved in Lord of the Rings, and which has been so lamentably imitated by countless lesser creators, appears to have provided her with a sense of place, a grounding for the fantasy epic that I largely prefer not to encounter.

Let me boil that down; in SF and fantasy, if I like it, Viv probably won’t.

Therefore, we’ve searched for material that Viv has enjoyed that I haven’t read and might enjoy. There’s been no luck there either, I think largely because of my omnivorous reading. We were taking a stab at Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire, a followup to the same author’s brilliant Wicked. In Stepsister, he reimagines the Cinderella story, locating the events of the story in Reformation Holland. Wicked is the story of the Wizard of Oz, retold from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West. Maguire’s a witty writer, but the nature of the projects is such that they are confections – I read Wicked in one sitting – and the bite-size nature of bedtime read-alouds is perfectly unsuited to a book that I know I can read in about three hours. Rather than enjoying the tale, I become grouchily impatient, and my heart rate rises as I realize how disinterested I am in the characters and literary devices of the narrative.

I had begun a 1938 prose translation of The Iliad, (by W. H. Rouse – I suspect the edition I had in had may have been an abridgement) optimistically describing itself as free of flowery language (If only Steinbeck had finished his Arthur!). In the event, it has not proved free of flowery language, and the antique paperback edition I was reading it in robbed me of whatever pleasure was left. Having very much enjoyed a brilliant, moving stage adaptation of The Odyssey a few years ago here in Seattle, and vaguely recalling that the production drew its’ language from a recent translation of the book, I learned that both The Iliad and The Odyssey version I’d seen used as the basis of a play were available by the translator, Robert Fagles, and that the versions had indeed been at the center of some adulatory hoo-hah when originally released.

So I marched on down to Bailey/Coy and picked ’em up. Viv, on seeing this, remarked, “Let’s read these books out loud!”

I was taken a back for a minute, as I’d been greedily looking forward to reading the books myself. However, woman’s wisdom here, as in so many things, proves superior. Are not these compositions intended to be read aloud?

I can’t wait.