A war within a war for freedom

Perhaps the most tragic part of M.T. Anderson’s “The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves” comes in an author’s note in which Anderson considers the narrative arc of these two volumes and remarks that if “this were the fantasy novel it so much resembles, there would be a third volume” in which “shackles would fall from every wrist, and bounty would return to the land.”

Anderson, whose speculative novels include Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner “Feed” (science fiction) and “Thirsty” (horror), stays close to the historical record for the basis of this second volume featuring Octavian, a black slave raised as an experiment in comparative learning among the races by the Novanglian College of Lucidity in Revolutionary-era Boston. (I should note that Anderson and I have crossed paths at various times in our careers.) At the end of the first volume, which won a National Book Award, Octavian was on the run after surviving a “pox party” that had killed his mother and some other members of the college who were gathering in an attempt to inoculate themselves against smallpox.

In “The Kingdom on the Waves,” Octavian learns that the beleaguered British governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, has announced that slaves who fight for him will be freed. Octavian travels to Norfolk to fight for freedom for his people, well aware that he has become a traitor to his nation. He joins Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment and is reunited with Pro Bono, once a slave of the College of Lucidity who has renamed himself William Williams, and his mentor from the college, Dr. Trefusis, who is living well among the British.

Anderson treats the American Revolution with the gravity it deserves even while occasionally lightening the tone. In the first volume Octavian was subject to the whims of his masters. Here he is an optimistic and somewhat naive teenager fighting for his freedom. Even as he learns the cold political realities of the regiment’s situation, he is a teenage boy hilariously attempting to woo a girl by staring at her from afar. Dr. Trefusis also functions as Shakespearean comic relief. He is a lighthearted trickster who survives on his wits and desires intellectual stimulation above all else. Whenever he steps on stage the book leaps along.

Octavian’s and William’s stint in the Ethiopian Regiment is the heart of the book. Anderson captures the slow-slow-quick rhythms of the war and the tense interludes between actions as the foot soldiers’ lack of information becomes food for rumor. When the rebels take Norfolk and force the governor’s supporters onto ships sitting off the city’s shore where they are openly scorned by rebels on the docks, Octavian records some of the former slaves’ escape narratives which are at once familiar and heartbreaking.

The narrative of the Ethiopian Regiment and its challenge to this country’s memory and sense of self is the book’s vital spark. Just as World War II is seen as “the good war,” the War of Independence is often simplistically cast as good-hearted rebels shucking off foreign overlords. Anderson, while not taking anything away from hard-fought independence, looks deeper at the brutal economic and moral choices that underpin that story, forcing readers to confront its horrifying legacy and the cruelties this country countenanced during and after the Revolution.

“Octavian Nothing” is presented as an account “by his own hand and other sundry sources,” a device that because it is a recording rather than a later recounting of events actually serves for the most part to distance the reader. Octavian’s anger comes through most strongly when Lord Dunmore has been defeated and Octavian witnesses the results for his people. And in the highly suspenseful penultimate section, Octavian returns to Boston to the house of Josiah Gitney, once the Master of the College of Lucidity, now ruined and barely alive. As Octavian writes out the narrative, the tension and distrust between the onetime experimenter and his subject is extraordinary.

Although the reader is given a smidgen of hope for Octavian’s future, readers are well aware of the events following the War of Independence. The white government of the nascent country waited almost 100 years to share their freedoms with the slaves, and that legacy continues to exact its price. Anderson’s powerful and unforgettable novel is a vital contribution to the ongoing national conversation on the subject and its effects on into the present day.