Tag Archives: Imperialism

Loot: Imperialism Gets a Slap on the Wrist

Tania James’ Loot opens in Srirangapatna, Mysore in 1794. The French are its colonial rulers. Abbas is 17 and a gifted woodcarver. He’s sent to Tipu Sultan’s Summer Palace to apprentice with Lucien Du Leze, a brilliant French engineer and watchmaker. They create a wooden automaton depicting a tiger devouring a British soldier. It’s all good fun, and the finished marvel delights Tipu. Du Leze returns to France.

French rule is weak, and Britain’s East India Company invades with its army. The battle is bloody; Tipu is killed; the city destroyed and renamed Seringapatnam; and its precious artifacts are looted. The automaton is awarded to Colonel Selwyn, who sends it to his country estate in England. His wife collects artifacts taken from all the territories the East India Company had conquered.

Abbas has lost everything. He leaves for France, which is a long journey around the African continent. He makes it and discovers Du Leze is dead. Fortunately, Jehanne, Du Leze’s beautiful, half-Indian, adopted daughter, is alive. Romance buds, but they’re poor. Jehanne learns where the automaton is located, so she and Abbas travel to England to steal it and become rich.

Wow, Gladiola, this synopsis makes Loot sound like an exciting global adventure; historical fiction at its best. Yes, it could’ve been, but here’s the problem. James knows all the necessary elements of the hero’s quest. She mechanically checks them off, as if this is an exercise in a graduate-level creative writing program, but she’s created a heartless automaton, which is a shame because the story does have potential.

Abbas travels around Africa in 1802, but the horrors of the slave trade are fleetingly acknowledged. India is being looted, but imperialism’s greed gets a slap on the wrist. Literally. Loot is a card game Jehanne plays with Selwyn’s widow. When Lady Selwyn, who’s surrounded by all the treasures her husband looted, pulls the winning card, Jehanne reflexively slaps her wrist.

Imperialism’s misappropriation of cultural artifacts has been a hot topic globally for decades. Loot was published is 2023, but James barely mentions the issue, which is all the more surprising because Abbas is Indian and Jehanne is half Indian. Loot dutifully marches to its banal happy ending, but the reader is left with a nagging sense that this is a superficial novel full of missed opportunities.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Kazuo Ishiguro’s No Country for Old Men

Listen. Masuji Ono desperately wants to tell you something. He’s still relevant. Time has not forgotten him.

Ono is the beguiling narrator in Mr. Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World. The story opens in Japan in October 1948. The Americans are now in charge, and Japanese society is going through monumental changes. But Ono is focused on successfully negotiating a marriage for his younger daughter. His past may make that difficult. Or it may not. It’s unclear because few people seem to remember him these days. Post-war Japan is moving on without him, and he’s not too happy about that.

At the beginning of his career, Ono was an artist of the floating world – the “night-time world of pleasure, entertainment and drink which formed the backdrop for all our paintings.” He was ambitious. When the imperialists takeover, Ono abandons the floating world and (as he tells it) becomes the center of a group of artists producing “work unflinchingly loyal to his Imperial Majesty the Emperor.”

Ono seems to have had some influence during the 1930s, but Mr. Ishiguro is coy. He never allows the reader to discern how influential Ono actually was. Even in Ono’s self-serving narration, nagging doubts poke through. Ono may simply be deluding himself and as a result unintentionally misleading the listener.

The war allows Ono to excuse and justify his work for the Imperialists: “if your country is at war, you do all you can in support, there’s no shame in that.” Except there might be – especially when you betray friends and colleagues. However, Ono smothers this shame every time it tries to breath.

Despite his arrogance and evasions, Ono is sympathetic. His unflinching support for Imperial Japan did not protect him. His wife died, and his son was killed in a “hopeless charge” across a minefield. He has suffered and done so stoically. He loves his daughters and grandson. But he’s lost in this new Japan. He recognizes (somewhat reluctantly) that the “old spirit may not have always been for the best.” That’s an understatement, but it’s the only kind he can make.

Ono spends much of the story trying to convince the listener, any listener, that he was highly-esteemed at one time. And he may have been. Or he may have just been ordinary – a thought Ono refuses to contemplate. Mr. Ishiguro is a master of the unreliable narrator, and Ono certainly falls in this category. “I cannot recall any colleague who could paint a self-portrait with absolute honesty . . . the personality represented rarely comes near the truth as others would see it.” Is Ono describing a colleague or (unwittingly) himself?

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor