A small pleasure, some might think, to stand upon a horse’s head. To those doubters I would say, “Imagine yourself to be the last hummingbird west of Chile, caged and uncaged at the whim of others, powerless, blown about like a feather, and then tell me what is a small pleasure and what is not.”
A friend said, breathlessly, that I had to read Last Hummingbird West of Chile, and when I saw that its author, Nicholas Ruddock, lives in the next city along the highway from us, I was even more intrigued. And I certainly thought that it began with a bang: set in an English manor house in 1832, there’s an initiating frenzy of births and deaths and schemes and secrets. When the timeline then skips ahead nineteen years and a young man renounces his vast inheritance, vowing to make his living upon the open waves as an ordinary seaman, Ruddock adds in colour and danger — shipwreck, slavers, tigers, and assassins! — from around the world (mostly to the good), but he also adds in constant commentary on the evils of colonialism, capitalism, racism, and the patriarchy (fine observations, but made without subtlety or nuance; told, with only glimpses of show). Still: a totally readable historical adventure story, and while it does have some interesting flourishes, I’m looking forward to learning what my friend thought I’d get from this.
So what, I thought. (We) had nothing to fear. Unless we broke rank and confessed, he would never know. He would never know unless walls and floors and the night itself could talk, and only my grandfather believed that possible. “I have heard the trees whispering to each other a thousand times,” he said, “and never do they sound the same.”
After dangling the laughable possibility of the walls and floors identifying a pair of murderers, the narrative goes on to give voice to a wide range of narrators, human and otherwise (we hear from a coral reef, a feral pig, a giant white oak transformed into the stern of a frigate; despite the many POVs, the plot revolves around Andrew — the young aristocrat who went to sea). The storyline is completely linear — with each narrator taking up the story where the last left off — and throughout it all is Zephyrax: a three-year-old ruby-throated hummingbird, separated from his flock due to errors in avian leadership, who meets and then accompanies Andrew on his travels around the globe. And while I appreciate that the hummingbird serves as a sort of objective observer of human activity, I couldn’t quite buy into these observations, or the voice, as his own:
• Fly on, Zephyrax, zoom at speed. I dropped to one hundred feet and entered what appeared to be the poorest quarter. A few citizens were leaning over the seawall, pouring fecal matter from wooden slop-buckets into the harbour. Babies cried, women cried, men cried or shouted. Enough, Zephyrax. I returned to the wider avenues. There, at intervals, box-like carriages on horizontal poles were being carried at a trot by quartets of dark-skinned men. White hands tap-tapped from curtained openings. We were in Asia, I understood, but racial privilege seemed unaltered, identical to that of Brazil or the Carolinas.
• I pondered the coincidence that there were “Indians” in North America and “Indians” in India, yet they were culturally and linguistically worlds apart. Someone must have made a mistake, historically, to give them the same name. Or, alternatively — more likely — white people made up the name for the North Americans. Looking at darker skin, they saw nothing worth differentiating. “Let’s call them all Indians, whoever they are,” they said, and so it came to pass.
• He was too hurried, thoughtless at the speed of his movements. If women were anything like female hummingbirds, I thought, then go slower, Andrew, go slower, bury your head in her neck, and whisper, whisper to her.
With the narrator changing so frequently (passages range from a paragraph to a few pages), and with assassins, perverts, and ne'er-do-wells threatening at every port-of-call and outpost, the storytelling was quick and compelling: even if I didn’t completely surrender myself to the conceit, I did want to know how everything would end. And: it does end.
If I could complain about the formatting: the following (a little spoilery) is copied as found, with the dialogue and narration all jumbled together —
”Well,” I said, “I asked for this, and now I know what my husband truly is.” I reached for a teaspoon without shaking. “Nothing will be easy now. By marriage I have passed all of my possessions into his hands. He could throw me under his carriage, run me over with impunity.” “I doubt he would go to such extremes,” replied Emerson.” “Your wife and Miss Albertson,” I said, “have already concluded that he has tried to kill my father and brother. Why should he stop at them?” My footman did not bat an eye. He advised me to visit my London solicitor, to ascertain my rights. I had already thought of that of course, and I would do so. “We’re not leaving London, Emerson,” I said, “you never know, we might even run into Andrew on the street. It happens in novels, it might happen to us.”
(Am I the only one who cringes at “It happens in novels, it might happen to us”?) Anyway: there was much to like in the historical colour and globe-trotting adventure, something a bit ham-fisted about the social commentary (I agree with Ruddock’s observations, but found little artistry in their presentation), and as my friend was a bit breathless about Hummingbird (and I see it is well-rated), I can only encourage others to make up their own minds about it.
