Violent to a fault
A TRAVELLER AT THE GATES OF WISDOM by John Boyne (Doubleday, $37)
Is there anything more irritating than a pukapuka that fails to deliver on an interesting premise?
A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom, by Irish writer John Boyne, is a novel told from the perspective of a series of unnamed narrators who are sort of the same person. It starts in Palestine in the year 1AD and each chapter moves to a different country and a progressively later time period. The “I” voice remains consistent and, although the settings and surrounding details change, the fundamentals of the narrator’s life story stay the same. From a purely technical point of view, A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom is well written, with the narrative maintained clearly despite the constant changes.
But — blimey. There is some seriously weird stuff going on here, including an almost animalistic view of human nature. The straight male characters exhibit a sexuality that is rapacious and violent to a startling degree. Readers should beware that
A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom contains a lot of rape, often portrayed casually as a simple fact of life. “My father loved women, all women, and was as indiscriminate with his favours as a dog in heat … on the rare occasions when his advances were rebuffed he assumed the woman suffered from a disorder of the mind and took her anyway.” The narrator is presented as an outlier to this horrific norm, patting himself on the back for never having raped anyone and even literally saying, “Not all men” to women who complain.
A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom is also profoundly fatphobic. Fat characters are dehumanised (“the Great Elephant of Bayt Sahur”), consistently inspiring disgust in those around them (“How could I love him? … he’s fat”). One fat male character forces his sex slave to dress as a bear so he can live out his fantasies of bestiality. Another rapes his own prepubescent daughter while chewing on a leg of lamb. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that when non-fat straight men rape, it’s just their natural virility; but when fat men do anything sexual it’s the vilest and most depraved act imaginable. I’m not sure which of those assumptions I disagree with more.
A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom has a good storytelling mechanic at its core but is ruined by some bizarre ideas and a particularly weak ending. Read something else.