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A review by jialber
Begin the World Over by Kung Li Sun
adventurous
challenging
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
I had not gotten beyond the back cover of Kung Li Sun’s Begin the World Over before I was stopped by a phrase the publisher used to describe the book. It was said to be a “counterfactual novel,” and, as with much else about the story, that very deliberate word choice begged for a nuanced exploration. Why choose counterfactual over, say, historical fiction or alternate history (not to mention allohistory or uchronia)? I think I understand the choice, but before I unpack the term counterfactual and explain why that may be the most important descriptor for Begin the World Over, I want to touch on a few of the many other merits of the book.
Although this is a first novel, the author’s plotting and pacing are satisfying and brisk. For that reason, my initial urge was to blaze through the book. But the author writes with such simplicity, clarity, and elegance that I often lingered over paragraphs of prose for the sheer pleasure of it. This accomplishment is all the more significant because Kung Li Sun is a lawyer (as am I). Happily, that part of legal writing training devoted to infinitely nested dependent clauses didn’t take.
Though counterfactual on certain critical elements in the story, much of the narrative is firmly grounded in history; every named character but one (Mary) is taken from historical records, and many of the events of the story are consistent with what is known about them. The delight therein is that, as the plot unfolds and new characters are introduced, Google becomes a rich appendix. Google is by no means necessary to understand and enjoy the book, but the pleasure of its detours and amplifications meant that I spent more time Googling than in the novel’s text. I wound up with a far deeper knowledge of late 18th-century history than could have been delivered in ponderous interior explanatory text.
An example of such rewards is the story’s central character, James Hemings (brother of Sally Hemings). Hemings serves an “adhesive” function. He connects characters that otherwise might stand alone and so exposes the phenomenal diversity and depth of the slave revolution that began in Haiti.
Hemings the historical figure was enslaved to Thomas Jefferson at age 9 and grew to become an accomplished French-trained chef while still bound in servitude. I found not only a wealth of online material devoted to James, but his history has also received book-length attention from several authors. My side trip into his life was itself almost book-length.
A collateral benefit of having a chef as a central character proved to be a glutton’s worth of food description and history threaded throughout the narrative. As with so many other facets of the book, that too was stuffed with scrumptious detail. More than once, I found myself hungry after reading a passage.
Now on to the word that I fell for: counterfactual. A popular sense of the word “history” is that there exists a single, eternal, and immutable truth about past events. In this imagined universe, historians uncover such “objective” truth and then simply tell what happened. There is a school of historiography closely aligned with that view—objectivist history—and it derives from the musings of, among others, Ayn Rand. Amazingly, that association has not yet condemned it. An ongoing debate pits objectivists against a variety of “relativist” schools. One counterpoint to the objectivist approach to history arises from…you guessed it…counterfactual history.
The counterfactual label is sometimes applied to fiction, as with Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Tower. But counterfactual narratives are also used by historians as tools to illuminate the types of choices that were available at the time significant events occurred. A principal proponent of this method is British historian Niall Ferguson. He uses counterfactual scenarios to illustrate his objections to determinist and objectivist versions of history and to make the case for the importance of contingency. Historians such as Ferguson try to show that a few key changes could have led to a significantly different world today.
Begin the World Over fits that mold precisely. It imagines that the slave rebellion begun in the West Indies by Black and Indigenous insurrectionists spilled over into the United States and redefined democracy in that age.
In some senses, it is the goal of objectivist history to relate what went “right.” U.S. history is often offered as a tale of what went right, but right from the perspective of wealthy, white, CIS, male, plantation-owning slaveholders. By that narrative, the United States emerged from the minor difficulties of slave revolts in a just-right, city-on-a-hill condition.
That dismissive view continues to be reinforced and narrowed further still, as we can see from the headlines. All manner of interests, from legislatures to Moms for Liberty, are crowbarring complex and nuanced historical narratives into a “truth” that suits their political interests. By those lights, slavery was a benevolent institution, leaving its beneficiaries with marketable skills rather than scars from the whip. And gender identity and sexuality are now (and, according to such advocates, have always been) binary absolutes, only black and white, with no room for a full spectrum. Those falling elsewhere on the spectrum stay in the dark back passages of history, out of view and beyond consideration.
Such tightly constrained narratives leave huge blanks in the histories that result, such that powerful possibilities and important personalities go unseen. Truths that still bear on us get lost, and we are all the poorer for it.
Begin the World Over was built to remedy some of that. James Hemings lived a queer life, right under the nose of Jefferson…and was not only tolerated but celebrated. The gender-atypical Prophetess, far from being relegated to some backwater, led an important matriarchal Indigenous society wherein truths were uncovered and decisions were made collaboratively. The power inherent in that collaboration was what enabled the spread of revolution. And it still threatens the political heirs of slaveholders, as we see from the energy devoted to minimizing so many organizations trying to effect change.
Reading Begin the World Over was like attending a semester-long seminar on using history to energize our collective sense of possibilities. In that sense, the book is an excellent fit and a leading light in the Emergent Strategy Series for which its publisher, AK Press, has become known.
Although this is a first novel, the author’s plotting and pacing are satisfying and brisk. For that reason, my initial urge was to blaze through the book. But the author writes with such simplicity, clarity, and elegance that I often lingered over paragraphs of prose for the sheer pleasure of it. This accomplishment is all the more significant because Kung Li Sun is a lawyer (as am I). Happily, that part of legal writing training devoted to infinitely nested dependent clauses didn’t take.
Though counterfactual on certain critical elements in the story, much of the narrative is firmly grounded in history; every named character but one (Mary) is taken from historical records, and many of the events of the story are consistent with what is known about them. The delight therein is that, as the plot unfolds and new characters are introduced, Google becomes a rich appendix. Google is by no means necessary to understand and enjoy the book, but the pleasure of its detours and amplifications meant that I spent more time Googling than in the novel’s text. I wound up with a far deeper knowledge of late 18th-century history than could have been delivered in ponderous interior explanatory text.
An example of such rewards is the story’s central character, James Hemings (brother of Sally Hemings). Hemings serves an “adhesive” function. He connects characters that otherwise might stand alone and so exposes the phenomenal diversity and depth of the slave revolution that began in Haiti.
Hemings the historical figure was enslaved to Thomas Jefferson at age 9 and grew to become an accomplished French-trained chef while still bound in servitude. I found not only a wealth of online material devoted to James, but his history has also received book-length attention from several authors. My side trip into his life was itself almost book-length.
A collateral benefit of having a chef as a central character proved to be a glutton’s worth of food description and history threaded throughout the narrative. As with so many other facets of the book, that too was stuffed with scrumptious detail. More than once, I found myself hungry after reading a passage.
Now on to the word that I fell for: counterfactual. A popular sense of the word “history” is that there exists a single, eternal, and immutable truth about past events. In this imagined universe, historians uncover such “objective” truth and then simply tell what happened. There is a school of historiography closely aligned with that view—objectivist history—and it derives from the musings of, among others, Ayn Rand. Amazingly, that association has not yet condemned it. An ongoing debate pits objectivists against a variety of “relativist” schools. One counterpoint to the objectivist approach to history arises from…you guessed it…counterfactual history.
The counterfactual label is sometimes applied to fiction, as with Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Tower. But counterfactual narratives are also used by historians as tools to illuminate the types of choices that were available at the time significant events occurred. A principal proponent of this method is British historian Niall Ferguson. He uses counterfactual scenarios to illustrate his objections to determinist and objectivist versions of history and to make the case for the importance of contingency. Historians such as Ferguson try to show that a few key changes could have led to a significantly different world today.
Begin the World Over fits that mold precisely. It imagines that the slave rebellion begun in the West Indies by Black and Indigenous insurrectionists spilled over into the United States and redefined democracy in that age.
In some senses, it is the goal of objectivist history to relate what went “right.” U.S. history is often offered as a tale of what went right, but right from the perspective of wealthy, white, CIS, male, plantation-owning slaveholders. By that narrative, the United States emerged from the minor difficulties of slave revolts in a just-right, city-on-a-hill condition.
That dismissive view continues to be reinforced and narrowed further still, as we can see from the headlines. All manner of interests, from legislatures to Moms for Liberty, are crowbarring complex and nuanced historical narratives into a “truth” that suits their political interests. By those lights, slavery was a benevolent institution, leaving its beneficiaries with marketable skills rather than scars from the whip. And gender identity and sexuality are now (and, according to such advocates, have always been) binary absolutes, only black and white, with no room for a full spectrum. Those falling elsewhere on the spectrum stay in the dark back passages of history, out of view and beyond consideration.
Such tightly constrained narratives leave huge blanks in the histories that result, such that powerful possibilities and important personalities go unseen. Truths that still bear on us get lost, and we are all the poorer for it.
Begin the World Over was built to remedy some of that. James Hemings lived a queer life, right under the nose of Jefferson…and was not only tolerated but celebrated. The gender-atypical Prophetess, far from being relegated to some backwater, led an important matriarchal Indigenous society wherein truths were uncovered and decisions were made collaboratively. The power inherent in that collaboration was what enabled the spread of revolution. And it still threatens the political heirs of slaveholders, as we see from the energy devoted to minimizing so many organizations trying to effect change.
Reading Begin the World Over was like attending a semester-long seminar on using history to energize our collective sense of possibilities. In that sense, the book is an excellent fit and a leading light in the Emergent Strategy Series for which its publisher, AK Press, has become known.