The novels of Wu Ming (Chinese for "anonymous" or "five people") might be the best ever written by a gang. Most efforts of this sort have been intent on producing bad novels – Naked Came the Stranger? The horror, the horror! Wu Ming, on the other hand, squeeze every potential for incisive, rabid adventure they can out of the popular novel. Their books sizzle with a kind of lefty jazz: they're linguistically and culturally hip, historically astute, with a heart worn challengingly on the sleeve.
54, set in postwar Italy, was filled with rollicking, stupefying conflations of fact and fiction. Manituana, on the surface, is a straighter story: that of educated, enigmatic Joseph Brant, leader of the Mohawks during the American revolution; of his sister Molly, who "dreams with great strength"; and crucially, the loss, for humanity, of the confederation of the Six Nations. After the French and Indian wars, there was a time of cooperation between native Americans and the English – William Johnson, head of the Indian Department, hoped there was "room for everybody" in the beautiful Mohawk Valley. Wu think of this time and place as "Iroquireland" – an all too brief shading of tribes from the old and new worlds. They tell this sad, salient story as that of the violent dismemberment of one polyglot society by another.
"Manituana" means the Thousand Islands of the St Lawrence river, in legend a paradise, the birthplace of the Mohawk tongue. Wu's narrative is particularly concerned with language: Mohawk, the Dutch and German of old New York, the talk of Cockneys and of the Court of St James. Shaun Whiteside's brilliant translation of the many voices and ventriloquisms of this novel is slick and savvy (despite one's doubt that a woodpecker, though an omniscient Mohawk spirit, knows the word fo'c'sle). Wu deftly explore the collision of Indian and European languages: "In the language of the Empire, every cause was followed by a consequence . . . on the contrary, the language of the Mohawk was full of details, run through with doubts refined by constant adjustments. Each word stretched and expanded to capture every possible meaning." These are arresting pictures of how Joseph and Molly Brant's minds must have worked – rich in Mohawk images and energy, shrewd with western ideas. Along with languages, superstitions collide: what, after all, is "civilisation" but the superstitions that make you comfortable?
Manituana unspools mesmerisingly like an old Hollywood movie, ducking the common mishaps of the historical novel – there is not a single longueur. The descriptions of American abundance are worthy of Washington Irving, with a fall chill punchy as a stanza of Longfellow or a Remington painting of woods. The story is governed by the Indian sense of time, always returning to the reckoning of autumn. But events develop and are communicated at surprising speed: messengers are hunted bloodthirstily through forests, and in Molly Brant's powerful, ornate telepathies Brant and his comrade Lacroix learn the fate of their people before it occurs, although Brant refuses to accept it.
As in 54, violence (and it's appalling) is a natural but also a supernatural force. Lacroix's prowess with a tomahawk is described with the flavour of an antique children's book, but to this Wu add the unthinkable mayhem of a computer game: "The shot cleanly detached his head and sent it flying . . . panic stopped him shooting straight and he found his guts between his feet, his hands groping to try and keep them in . . . When the tomahawk broke his arm with a dry sound he froze, staring at the limb that dangled from his shoulder . . ."
Brant was complicated, a Freemason and a slave-owner (facts soft-pedalled by Wu for their own purposes, but then who remains a hero until his dying day?). By the time the war turned in favour of the colonists, he'd become "ubiquitous", in Wu's word, intent on fulfilling, against his will, a hero's destiny. On the warpath against Europeans he'd previously counted as neighbours, he'd become "the most hated Indian since the days of Pontiac". General Washington ordered that the people of the Six Nations be captured, their villages and crops destroyed.
But in 1775, Brant still believed the English would save the Indians. He travelled to London for an audience with George III. This part of the novel heaves with historical observation and play: like a crazy scene in a Gillray, theatregoers at Drury Lane are astonished to hear Lacroix supply a missing line in Romeo and Juliet. The backstabbing of the court is brutally anatomised; Wu's favourite evil businessmen are described in the most hackle-raising way. Their lickspittle tabloid journo is also nauseatingly up-to-date. An enterprising band of thuggish East End "Mohocks" send a letter to Brant movingly describing the anguish and oppression of the London poor in terms similar to his own, and ask to be recognised as the Seventh Nation of the Iroquois. And at a lavish party in Brant's honour, some waggish Italian pyrotechnicians grab a chance to make fun of the English: a Georgian "mansion" bursts into flames, and from it emerges a stark, Masonic pyramid, chilling sign of the whispery capitalists and their plan for America – the plan that won, of course.
Wandering around London, which disgusts him now he has seen the whole of it, Brant comes upon a poor family so weak with hunger that they cannot bury their little dead son. The Mohawk chieftain lends his strong back to dig the grave, only to be roundly abused by this bunch of ingrates for being a Catholic. Wu have now out-Dickensed Dickens, and when you read this novel, you will become aware of a faint buzzing noise. That will be James Fenimore Cooper, spinning in his grave.
Todd McEwen @'The Guardian'
