Kalimantaan: A Novel - Hardcover

Godshalk, C. S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805055339 ISBN 13: 9780805055337

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 1998

Synopsis

Discover an astonishing new literary voice, and rediscover the art and magic of storytellingThere are some stories so strange yet full of heart that they are told and retold in the bars and backwaters of the world. This is one of that rare breed--a story of bizarre achievement and singular love.

A hundred and fifty years ago, a young Englishman founded a private raj on the coast of Borneo. The world that resulted, boasting stone quays, great swaths of lawn, three Christian churches, and musical levees, eventually encompassed a territory the size of England, its campaigns paid for in human heads.

It is the story of Victorian social mores superimposed on one of the most violent cultures on earth, of pockets of terness amid extreme brutality, and of a remarkable tribe of fugitives, missionaries, and romantics drawn to this remote outpost of the world.

The deeper story resides in the realm of the heart. It is about love in absurd conditions, the tenacity of it as well as our ability to miss it repeatedly and with perverse genius. In the end, it is about love enduring when nothing else is left.

About this title

About the Author

C. S. Godshalk, who lives north of Boston, began Kalimantaan while working in southeast Asia. Her short fiction has been widely anthologized, her last two stories selected by Mark Helprin and Richard Ford for Best American Short Stories. Of one, Joseph Coates in the Chicago Tribune said, "a small Flaubertian masterpiece, alone worth the price of the book."

Reviews

At the height of the Victorian Empire, a young officer of the East India Company carves out a small raj for himself on the forsaken island of Borneo in the Malaysian archipelago. Creatively using historical models in her vivid debut, Godshalk constructs her imaginary imperialist with painstaking local research and well-paced prose that unfolds in evocative vignettes. Gideon Barr braves dreaded pirates, insidious disease, monsoons and bloody reprisals from the native headhunters and the Chinese merchants who resent Britain's trade leadership. In a short time, with swift brutality, he manages to establish a thriving entrepot of English society based on the trade in rare spices and metals, opium, the "currency of heads" and "youth disposable as water." Godshalk's point of view shifts restlessly, from Barr, as he writes to his dead mother, to those who join him in his megalomaniacal pursuit, including his dangerous cousin and "dark counterweight," Richard Hogg, who will carry out his own ruthless expansion in the territory as the rajah's deputy. Yet Godshalk finds her steady narrative strength in the voice of Barr's 18-year-old English bride, Melie, through whom we are able to absorb the rich, sodden beauty of the archipelago, the startling diversity of its inhabitants and the humanity in the "phenomenon" of Barr himself. Godshalk's use of native names and words (too few are found in her glossary) helps bolster the illusion of an extraordinary, vanished world?though some less intrepid readers, frustrated by swimming pronouns without fixed antecedents and careless anachronisms in the speech of Godshalk's English people, might lose heart during this otherwise gorgeous, ultimately doomed journey. 50,000 first printing; author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Brilliantly colored but baggy debut about a 19th-century British adventurer, the eccentric figure who inspired Conrad's Lord Jim, and his kingdom on the north coast of Borneo. The strange tale of Rajah Gideon Barr starts with his mother, who left him in England to be raised by relatives while she went to the Far East, only to die without ever seeing him again. First apprenticing himself there with the East India Company, Barr returned to the region with his own ship, eager to carve out a niche but vague as to how to do it. Sent by the British on a suicide mission into pirate-ruled waters off Borneo, he confounded everyone and established a beachhead after putting down a local insurrection. A mix of shrewd dealing and brute force enabled him to expand his territory rapidly, aided by visits from his friend, the Admiral of the British fleet in the area, and by the permanent presence in inland forts of a motley collection of loners, fellow adventurers each with his own reason for serving in obscure regions. So the Raj was born, and as it matured, the trappings of civilization arrived: gardens, churches, and wives. Rajah Barr took an English girl, a cousin, to wife, even though he had already taken up with the bewitching former spouse of a slain Borneo prince; in spite of the coolness in the marriage, Barr's bride cast her own spell on the natives. Meanwhile, despite outbreaks of cholera and losses to the nearby headhunters not yet ``pacified'' by Barr's ragtag troops, his unlikely kingdom persisteduntil the long-suffering Chinese, taxed to the limit for the opium trade, lashed out. An unwieldy catch basin of a novel, desperately in need of firm editing. Even so, Godshalk offers many moments of pure fire and beauty. (First printing of 50,000; author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

A tour de force that took more than 20 years to complete, C. S. Godshalk's novel about the rise and fall of the early British ruler of Kalimantaan, Gideon Barr (on whose exploits Conrad loosely based Lord Jim), is one of the finest examples of literary historical fiction anywhere. Barr was one of those nineteenth-century adventurers who happened to be in the right place at the right time: he set out to explore and survey the South Seas but wound up ruling a private raj on the north coast of Borneo, to the consternation of the Dutch, among others. Godshalk conveys a powerful sense of remoteness through vivid descriptions of flora and fauna, while her characters--the usurped Dyaks and Malays, the wild young British men and their womenfolk, the "memsahibs" --are resurrected as willful, passionate, and proud beings. Notable among the latter is Barr's wife, Amelia. More than 20 years his junior, she acclimates to her husband and his fiefdom in a gradual process of familiarization and tragedy that draws the reader in and makes the whole place alive once again. Frank Caso

The folks at Holt are raving about this first novel from Codshalk, whose short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories. Her hero is a young Englishman who founds a private raj on the coast of Borneo in the 1800s.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805055339
• ISBN 13: 9780805055337
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 480