Amazon.com Review
Set in an unnamed country, in a village called Mandragora,
The Testament of Yves Gundron appears to be one thing but ends up being something else entirely. Narrated by a yeoman farmer, Emily Barton's debut novel opens with a description of daily life that sounds like something out of the dark ages:
Imagine the time of my grandfather's grandfather, when the darkness was newly separated from the light. Society was only a shadowy image of what it would soon become. This was Mandragora before my invention and all that it set in motion. People spoke to one another, but their habits of thought were coarse. People lived in fear. Our forefathers farmed, but with great difficulty; a man used a sharp stick to dig a hole for each seed, and furrowed his fields by dragging his fingernails through them and picking out each small stone. Often a whole spring passed in preparing the ground, and families went hungry or died come winter.
This is a world where carts have but one wheel, and horses choke to death hauling even light loads attached by a rope around their necks. Then one day Yves Gundron has a brainstorm and creates a harness that allows draft animals to pull the heaviest burdens without harm. Before long, his invention catches on across the village and leads to further improvements: ploughs; carts with two wheels and then eventually four; an increase in the crops farmers can take to market and sell; greater prosperity for all. So far Barton has succeeded in imagining what life must have been like somewhere in northern Europe sometime around the start of the first millennium, but wait! Throughout this bucolic narrative she weaves disquieting hints that all is not what it seems. Take, for example, the song Yves's wife, Adelaïda, sings one day:
Well, I love Yves Gundron,
Tell you Lord, I do.
Yes, I love my old man Yves,
Yes, indeed, it's true.
But the fact that he don't listen,
Lord, it makes this woman sad and blue.
A medieval Muddy Waters? The introduction of the blues into the narrative sets the reader's mind to reeling; the sudden appearance in Mandragora of Ruth Blum, an obviously modern anthropologist from Boston, Massachusetts, is the crowning confusion. It is she who supplies the plethora of footnotes that grace the pages of Yves Gundron's testament, and she who inevitably brings about the village's fall from grace. For Mandragora, like Shangri-la or Brigadoon, is a place out of time, an almost magical locale just across the water from Scotland and reachable by airplane, yet wholly untouched by the modern world--until Yves invents his harness and thus apparently invites a serpent into his Garden of Eden.
Barton's novel poses a difficult conundrum and offers no easy answers: before the invention of Yves's harness and the arrival of Ruth Blum, the villagers of Mandragora led hard lives but they were largely unaffected by greed, envy, or doubt. Once the village opens itself up to the outside, it falls prey to all manner of ills. Yves's celibate holy brother literally falls from grace and into Ruth's arms; Yves's wife, daughter, and neighbors come down with the flu, a heretofore unknown disease; more outsiders arrive in the village, "mad with questions" and sending "beams of light tearing through the countryside and our homes, which brightness strikes terror into my heart." This, it would seem, is the price of creativity, curiosity, ambition--whether or not the cost is too high is something readers must decide for themselves. --Alix Wilber
From Publishers Weekly
Few emerging novelistsAor experienced onesAcould handle the kinds of challenges Barton deftly accepts in this triumphant debut, a charming seriocomic fable about the seductions and dangers of progress. As it opens, the novel appears straightforward enough, the document of a medieval farmer who recalls how his invention, the harness, changed life in Mandragora, where plowing is a new development and 20 is the largest number people know. But Barton is full of gentle surprises, and what initially seems a historical account, prepared for publication by anthropologist Ruth Blum, soon evolves into something more fanciful. Yves's wife, it turns out, has a natural talent for singing modern-day blues, and his brother Mandrik le Chouchou, the local mystic, often describes his travels to "Indo-China." Such allusions seem peculiarly anachronistic for a rural medieval land, and in fact, this society is facing a shocking run-in with the future and all its frightening technology. The brilliant maneuvering and unveiling of this collision is one of the novel's most surprising pleasures. Editor and researcher Blum, despite her best intentions, cannot remain an objective observer for long; in her footnotes to Yves's text, a love story takes shape that confounds local tradition, and as she becomes an integral part of the Mandragoran world, a magical combination of past and future is woven through the tale. For all of her storytelling prowessAand this book is exuberant with storyABarton's real asset is her febrile imagination. Mandragora's quotidian routines are detailed so convincingly, and so lovingly that the reader starts to resent the encroaching future, with "its hum and its terrible energy," as much as Yves himself does. Barton's intelligent and amusing facility with idioms and speech patterns rooted in Middle English injects a dynamic historical feel into her truly visionary project. Agent, Eric Simonoff at Janklow & Nesbit. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
