What if early Viking explorers had set sail in 1000 A.D. from Greenland and traveled South? What if, over multiple generations, they had managed to sail past Canada and continued on, hugging the Eastern coasts of North, Central, and South America? Introducing the indigenous populations they encountered to Western technology, like horses and iron? And infecting their new friends with European diseases, leaving death and immunity in their wake? What would this world, no longer our own, look like?
In 2010, Laurent Binet gave us HHhH, an unapologetically meta debut that used the assassination of S.S. Officer Reinhard Heydrich by Czech soldiers (Operation Anthropoid) to examine the peculiar and complicated ways histories get written. It is a beautiful and meditative work of, and about, historical fiction. His follow-up, a literary farce, titled The Seventh Function of Language, contains some shining moments. But for readers without a foothold in contemporary French philosophy & literary theory, it quickly devolves into a slog through the tedious muck of the academy. If you need to google Roland Barthes, consider the game already lost.
Civilisations, Binet’s latest work of speculative fiction, is not only more accessible to readers outside of France but more interesting. It imagines an alternative history in which the early Vikings leave their mark on the New World. Written as an epistolary novel, it is structured around four historical documents, the first a Viking oral history that aggressively borrows from the Sagas of the Greenlanders and Erik the Red:
“There was a woman named Aud the Deep-Minded, daughter of Ketill Flatnose, who had been queen. She was the widow of Olaf the White, the warrior-king of Ireland. Upon the death of her husband, she traveled to the Hebrides and on to Scotland where her son, Thorstein the Red, in turn became king. Then the Scots betrayed him and he perished in battle.”
The tone is pitch-perfect, even when Binet switches gears. Sam Taylor, who translated the two preceding novels, keeps the prose playful and bright, moving effortlessly from one epistolary style to another. Whatever journey Binet chooses to take us on, we are safe in Taylor’s hands. Civilisations is a tour of Western history’s greatest hits – the voyages of Christopher Columbus, The Spanish Inquisition, the Reformation, the invention of the printing press, and the writings of Machiavelli. Binet even finds a plausible way to introduce a pyramid into the courtyard of the Louvre. His decision to renovate areas of the timeline rather than razing it to the ground is the smart (if safe) play — because readers love to be in on the joke, addicted to that hit of dopamine every time we successfully place a reference.
Case in point: Binet uses Jared Diamond’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs & Steel, as a jumping-off point. A Book-of-the-Month Club selection, it was translated into 25 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide. National Geographic adapted it into a PBS documentary. There’s some controversy surrounding the research, but Binet skims over the details, choosing to show rather than tell. Instead, he relies on his readers having read Diamond’s book or, at the very least, being familiar with the barest essentials of Diamond’s argument. By introducing immunity, iron, and ocean travel more universally into the mix, a range of possibilities and alternative outcomes open up — opportunities not just to accumulate more “cargo,” but for greater conquest.
Five hundred years after the Vikings, enter Christopher Columbus. In a series of fragmented diary entries addressed to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Castile, we read a very different story of discovery than the one we know. Columbus, in this timeline, fails even more spectacularly than in our own, unable to complete even a single round-trip voyage to the New World. Upon arriving in Cuba, he and his crew proceed to abuse the local population – kidnapping the men, raping the women and demanding tributes of gold from everyone they encounter. All roughly in keeping with what we already know. But with a few shifts, Binet begins reshaping the narrative and repositioning the pieces on the board. Unimpressed by the Europeans’ arrogance, King Chonaboa has the means and the motivation to punish the invaders and protect his subjects. He calls up an army of over a thousand soldiers equipped with bows and iron-bladed axes. They seize Columbus’ ships and supplies, forcing him and his men to flee on foot. In the end, the intruders are all captured and killed, except for their leader. Columbus is taken back to the court of King Cahonaboa, located on the nearby island the explorer calls Hispaniola and which we know as modern-day Haiti. There he is allowed to live peacefully among the Tainos at the whim of Queen Anacaoana, who finds him amusing. He tutors her daughter, teaching the child Castilian, which Princess Higuenamota will find unexpectedly helpful later in life. The explorer never returns home. He dies, sad and alone, still under the delusion that he had reached “the Indies.”
Next up are two brothers, Huascar and Atahualpa, fighting over who will rule the Inca Empire. Narrated in the style of a history book, reminiscent of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire or some tome on the British kings & queens, part three has been written long after the events discussed took place. Huascar is victorious, and Atahualpa is forced to run. Choosing exile over certain death, he and his followers flee East. In Cuba, Atahualpa picks up Princess Higuenamota and rebuilds what remains of Columbus’ fleet. From there, they set sail for Europe. After a few missteps, Atahualpa conquers large swathes of this new “New World” by embracing those who have been religiously persecuted and historically disenfranchised. And by committing the odd political assassination. He establishes a lucrative trade route between his brother’s empire and his new kingdom – trading wine for gold. So ringing in the age of the Inca and the Empire of the Fifth Quarter:
“And so, the Fifth Quarter entered a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity. And although it didn’t last, it is good to remember it as an episode of happiness in the history of the New World. Besides, who knows how long that harmony might have endured, had not extraordinary circumstances arisen to bring it to an end?”
If Europe was colonized rather than colonizer, it seems what would occur is primarily a power shift, with the same old injustices acted out by different people. Instead of Luther’s Ninety-Five Thesis, The Ninety-Five Theses of the Sun are found nailed to the church door in Wittenberg. The Inca himself individually answers the Twelve Articles of the Alsatian/Swabian Peasants. (Generously conceding to the majority of the demands, though with some conditions of his own.) Women don’t fare much better in Binet’s timeline than they did ours. True, a few token females achieve positions of power — notably, Princess Higuenamota, who, despite being a brilliant ally and cunning diplomat, spends most of the book walking around naked or in bed with famous men. Other than a few diplomatic dispatches and letters to Atahualpa, her perspective on the empire she helped shape is noticeably missing. The Fifth Quarter isn’t a utopia. Binet’s goal seems to be to give his readers a story that’s quirky, fun, and a bit of an adventure yarn. In that, he succeeds. But it does seem strange that all the same familiar figures rise to prominence despite the radically altered circumstances surrounding them.
Binet still engages in the literary games he enjoys, fully committing to the conceit that this is, in fact, a collection of historical records. Although historians are tasked with imposing order on random events while acknowledging (however tangentially) the underlying chaos, there are moments when he takes it too far. Everything tends to come together too neatly in this parallel world from which chaos and chance are excised. There is a cumulative effect on how the plot elements fit together and a manipulated inevitability at odds with our understanding of reality. Objectively, some of this can be attributed to hindsight. Binet is presenting the reader with a version of already familiar events.
Nor has he ever been shy about his preoccupations: history and the nature of historical narratives. So it’s rather charming that this exploration and reworking of 500 years of world history have been written as a prologue, of sorts, to the invention of the “modern novel.” Binet ends Civilisations by reimagining the life of Cervantes and the very different course it might have taken. It’s the one section where he truly embraces the unfamiliar, and it is a joy. The writer knows his audience. Because who, other than the avid reader, the lover of literature, cares about the fate of Don Quixote?
And we do care. Civilisations is a bit of historical fluff – more circus than bread – that falls short of the genius of Binet’s first novel and the ambition of his second. And, yet, I can’t help but think that this is what he intended all along. Binet has shown us that he possesses the rare ability to write wherever on the literary spectrum he chooses. This time, he’s presented us with a novel that is silly and fun and clever, in all the predictable ways. And as the world we live in grows more chaotic, we can acknowledge there’s nothing wrong with that. Film and television do it all the time, so why not literature? Are you not entertained, the writer might fairly ask. Yes. Yes, we are.
[Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on September 14, 2021, 320 pages, $27.00 hardcover]