Book Review: The New Empire
The New Empire. Alison McBain, Woodhall Press, 4 October 2022, Paperback and eBook, 340 pages.
Reviewed by marssie Mencotti.
China, during dynastic turmoil, has overloaded another shipload of half-starved people from Beijing to the existing Confederacy of native and Chinese people living on the Western coast of the North American continent. The New Empire takes place in 1751 when no one knew who exactly “owned or controlled” the territory now called North America, but the English, Dutch, Spanish, and French have war parties chipping away at the native cultures and existing societies that McBain posits have lived there unchallenged. This alternate history begins with an existing cross-continental tribal confederacy managed by councils and spirit leaders called kuksui. One tiny slave, once a prince in Beijing and the emperor’s youngest son, Jiangxi, survives a harrowing ocean journey. At his very first slave market he is chosen and purchased by Onas, a renowned elder and kuksui of the Haudenosaunee and Mutsun tribes. This “New Empire” is still making its rules about slavery, work, and war. Jiangxi has much to learn about freedom, trust, and risk. This is the story of one child-man-leader who tries to understand what makes men slaves and yearns to find a path to break that chain. In Alison McBain’s vision we learn that there are steep prices to pay for the freedom to live and love.
McBain’s look at the convergence of magic, daily life, and humanity in the lives of enslaved men and women living in the new Confederacy is an insightful overview of the damage slavery can wreak even on individuals in the society who are tasked with keeping the newcomers enslaved. Once someone pays for another person, that person ceases to become a person and becomes property. McBain doesn’t just scan over these systematic debilitating issues but gives us the viewpoint of an intelligent child/man being schooled in logic and critical thinking by Onas, his master. Onas had dreamt of how he must teach this boy all he can. An untroubled infancy and early youth have given Jiangxi skills like reading and listening. It has not given him the judgmental and often deleterious opinions of his birth class but new opinions about freedom. Through this boy/man’s eyes, we observe the mind-crushing effect of enslavement and the strength it takes to escape the invisible chains. It is also accompanied by understanding the power that comes with being free enough to think things through and act upon them. The author also understands that those who stand at the forefront of new societal movements are rarely recognized and often punished. The seemingly factual details of the New Empire’s geography, language, transportation, religion, culture(s), and their daily tasks are constructed from a graceful interweaving of fact and possibility so that the reader feels that this Confederacy and its challenges may have existed. I found there was great beauty in the construction of a pathway out of slavery that Jiangxi assembled using his position as a freed slave and a person who not only lived as a prince, a slave and a freed man, but also used those experiences to become a reluctant but necessary leader. This is more than mere historical imagination; it is a tour de force in historical and sociological skill. The result of all the detail is that The New Empire is fully believable.
There’s just enough magic, mystery, and masks to make it plausible and probable that this is a course that history might have taken. This delicacy regarding constructing a historical time is careful not to offend the cultures that McBain blends to form her Confederacy. In tone, it is less like The Name of the Rose (Umberto Ecco), which aims to capture the essence of a time of secrets and puzzles. Instead, McBain’s book leans towards the Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood), as it fights against and yet abides by the rules of its fictional history, thus examining personal and societal freedom and slavery from within and without.
I found this a most enjoyable experience in looking at humanity through a very educated lens and believing this version of history as it lives on the edge of great change by encroaching European cultures that bring even more dangerous slave relationships to the Confederacy. And yet, it is the story of a boy coming of age and puzzling his way through complicated situations with hope and humanity. We as readers ride the wave of his loving and logical development and hope for the future of the brave New Empire.