Jamestown
Matthew Sharpe Soft Skull Press, 320pp, £12.50
ISBN 1933368608
Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the New World, celebrates its 400th anniversary this year. Matthew Sharpe's gonzo fictionalisation Jamestown shows the Virginia colony's founding in a blinding new ultra- violet light.
Sharpe moves the story from 1607 to a post-apocalyptic near-future. The boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan are engaged in a civil war that has left New York overrun by ninja-like assassins and the iconic Chrysler building in ruin. A coterie of Sun Tzu-toting business executives representing the "Manhattan Company" have set forth in an armoured bus for Virginia, where they hope to find food and oil for their war machine. There, the would-be colonists/occupiers encounter the "spectacularly ugly" natives, all marked with "an unnaturally reddish hue" - the effect of living without an ozone layer and applying too much sunscreen.
A key element of Sharpe's beguiling satire is to refashion the cast of historical figures into contemporary caricatures. Jamestown's leader, the soldier John Smith, has become Jack Smith, a pugnacious mechanic; Algonquian chief Powhatan is portrayed as a lethargic, fat patriarch; his daughter, the princess Pocahontas (nicknamed "Poke a Huntress", among other, bawdier, things), becomes a gabby, sex-starved "irreverent scamp"; her eventual husband, the tobacco farmer John Rolfe, serves as the book's narrator, Johnny Rolfe, the Manhattan Company's designated "communications officer", who is recording the events on his handheld computer.
Nearly half of the original Jamestown colonists were self-described "gentlemen" who knew little about surviving in the wilderness. Centuries later, the suit-wearing refugees are no different, derided by the natives as a "pack of weaklings" without "a single skill to live beyond their fortress town up north".
Unable to cope with their new circumstances, they turn on each other with knives drawn. As Rolfe writes early on: "Some great, quaint pre-annihilation philosopher described the movement of history as thesis, antithesis, synthesis, whereas I've seen a lot more thesis, antithesis, steak knife, bread knife."
Surprisingly, Sharpe hews to what details are known from the historical record - the most familiar of which is the saving of Captain John Smith from execution by Pocahontas. (In Sharpe's version, Smith is to be beaten to death with baseball bats.) But Sharpe's true agenda lies in refashioning not our mythologised view of history, but, instead, the English language the settlers brought with them.
While typing her journal on her own pocket computer, Pocahontas explains why she is recounting her story in English, instead of her native language: "I feel like if I were to lie or dissemble in English you would know right away because every English sentence goes by so slowly that you have this time to examine it and decide if it's true." Sharpe's prose demands such close attention: Jamestown is narrated through a postmodern pastiche of snatches of pop songs, frat-boy limericks and, in particular, a hilarious and bizarre exchange of instant messages between Pocahontas (whose online name is CORNLUVR) and Rolfe (GREASYBOY), much of it culminating in a barrage of cartoon violence.
In spite of its cerebral cleverness, Jamestown is also a sly commentary on contemporary affairs, particularly on the occupation of Iraq. But rather than being fashionably cynical, it offers a glimmer of hope. In Sharpe's gleeful depiction of the love story of Pocahontas and Rolfe, portrayed primarily through energetic IM exchanges, there is the suggestion that cultural differences might be transcended and life might yet persevere in the face of all-but-certain annihilation.
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