The Gold Eaters starts out as an adventure tale: Ready to prove himself worthy of his newly bestowed adult name, a 13-year-old Peruvian fisherman, Waman, runs away from his village home to sign on as a deckhand on an ocean-going trading ship. Shortly into the voyage, the ship is captured by raiders – a so far luckless scouting trip led by Francisco Pizarro – and in addition to the much needed supplies and coveted riches, Pizarro and his would-be Conquistadors take the young Waman with them as a hopefully trainable interpreter. After some months of Spanish lessons, Waman is brought along as Pizarro makes first contact with an Incan village, and after seeing for himself the wealth of gold and silver that the natives possess, Pizarro forces Waman to accompany him back to Spain in an effort to secure royal backing for a full-on assault against the Incan Empire. Although the point of view shifts between several characters, this is primarily Waman's story and we follow him back and forth across the ocean as he unfavourably compares the squalid Spanish society to the idyll he had once known; watch through Waman's eyes as the Spanish and Incas clash towards the tragic ending we are familiar with. It sounds like an adventure tale, but ultimately, plodding and superficial writing creates too thin a storyline on which to hang so much fascinating history, and the result is pretty boring.
Author Ronald Wright is known for several nonfiction books that he has written about South America and I have no doubt that he put together a factual timeline (he does acknowledge in an afterword that historical accounts about Peru can be vague and contradictory, but I certainly defer to his expertise). And, as Wright has also written some other historical fiction, I understand his desire to flesh out dry historical facts with human elements, but it just doesn't work here. I didn't learn anything about how Waman felt, there was nothing urgent about the violence that is witnessed, and although there is promise of a love story (from the dust jacket: “Only then can he be reunited with the love of his life “), theirs was the farthest possible from a romance – this story is dry, completely devoid of juice. I knew enough of this time period to have heard of the kidnapping of Emperor Atawallpa and the betrayal by the Spaniards after he paid them a ransom of one storeroom of gold and two of silver, but didn't realise that he was Emperor only after smallpox (thanks to the Spanish) had wiped out much of the royal family and Atawallpa had wiped out the rest: filling in the history of this time makes for a rewarding experience. But after Pizarro and his Vicar decide to betray Atawallpa, his dispatch takes a sentence or two: and I would argue that making a scene like that come to life is the point of writing historical fiction; if I wanted just the facts, I would have picked up Wright's Stolen Continents (which I probably will do anyway). Interspersed with the plodding writing are some attempts at lyricism that felt out of place here:
The mist has fallen below the terrace. They are standing under a deep-blue vault still lit by the last stars. Slowly, Waman turns full circle. The town and the valleys around are smothered by a billowy white surf. He and Candía are alone among volcanoes rising from this sea of cloud like jagged figures wearing icy caps and robes. Among sleeping gods.
The sun leaps from behind a ridge, changing the surf to smoke and fire. Not the gelatinous red sun of the desert, but a blazing sphere of gold in a sky so clear the eye, if it could look, might see the eternal firestorms raging on the solar face.The last sentence of that passage, in particular, strikes me as nonsensical. Also, frustratingly, much of the action takes place off the page and even important events are given no more prominence than a passing line about the effects of inbreeding among the Hapsburgs or the patterns woven into Peruvian cloth. Even Pizarro's eventual death, despite there being several early sections from his point of view, is merely noted in passing after a jump of eight years. And having sections from a Spanish point of view doesn't create any kind of understanding for their motivations: to a man, they are rapacious and boorish with foul breath and lice infested beards; each one of them ready to sink a knife in your chest if there's gold to be found there, ready to split open stout housewives to warm their frostbitten feet. Not to say that the Conquistadors were justified in their slaughter and subjugation of the natives they met, but fiction is an opportunity to look into their brains and create some understanding, if not forgiveness, and this boat was totally missed; if they're all ignorant monsters, you never get that “I wonder what I would have done in that situation?” moment.
I was intrigued by the comparison between the Spanish and Incan Empires (the latter totally without poverty, the Emperor feeding the masses from his granaries in times of famine and providing massive public works for sanitation and communication), but when every detail of society is compared to the Incan advantage, it seems to deny the reader to opportunity to weigh the facts and draw her own conclusions
Like everyone in Cusco, they are divinely drunk. Not the private drinking of Spaniards but a communal drunkenness hosted by the state in honour of its gods and institutions.So, there's even a morally superior form of drunkenness. Check. Okay, all of this is to say that The Gold Eaters didn't work for me as a novel and it wasn't even a satisfactory vehicle for delivering the bare facts. Not a waste of time, but frustrating for what this could have been.
Although I complained about some of its drawbacks at the time, The Moor's Account did a much better job of getting inside the heads of the Conquistadors (and a fish-out-of-water interpreter, brought to Spain and the New World as a captive). And that's what so frustrating -- Pizarro's conquest of the Incan Empire is a much more interesting story than Narváez's contemporaneous exploration of the American Gulf Coast, especially because there were so few explorers with Narváez and they found no gold. If Laila Lalami could make that story come alive, I'm doubly disappointed in Wright for making his tale dull.
