false 5 1 false false Sun Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Thu Jul 12 13:12:06 -0700 2007 Thu Jul 12 13:12:50 -0700 2007 IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE: I am personal friends with a number of staff members of Soft Skull Press, publishers of Jamestown, even to the extent of sometimes staying on their couches during past trips to New York. It should be kept in mind while reading this review.)

Is it just me, or has there been just a whole slew of high-profile, so-called "high literature" novels about the Apocalypse published in the last year? There's Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island, for example (which I've reviewed here in the past); Tatyana Tolstaya's Russia-based The Slynx (which I've also reviewed); Jim Crace's The Pesthouse (which I've kinda reviewed, or at least explained why I found it too awful to actually finish); not to mention Cormac McCarthy's The Road (which I haven't read...yet), plus any others that I'm forgetting or haven't heard of in the first place.

Whew! And now onto this pile you can add the insanely great Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe, which very easily is the best of them all, because it is in fact a whole bunch of different things at once: not just a political comment on the Bush administration and 9/11 that many of the others are, but also a new examination of a historical event from the point of view of what we traditionally have considered the "enemy," not to mention a slick and mentally dazzling tone poem at times that combines sophisticated rhyme and meter with the throwaway language of our modern instant-messengering times. And did I mention that it's slapstick-funny at points? And also dirty and sometimes fiercely politically incorrect? Yeah, it's that too.

So with all these things going on in one book, where do we even start? Well, probably with the most well-known thing about it, the gimmick that got it all its original press when it first came out -- that the novel is a literal re-telling of the Jamestown myth, the 1600s story of the very first permanent English settlement in North America, which has been embellished so much over the centuries that no one's quite sure what to believe anymore; but in this case under the setting of a post-apocalyptic America, one where a Road Warrior type group of stragglers have managed to take over a large chunk of Manhattan and form their own twisted combination of gang and corporation, who are just now starting to send exploratory groups into the radioactive wilds of Virginia, to start collecting such needed supplies as oil, trees, and uncontaminated food (if any can be found).

And let's just be honest...]]>