Jason's review of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea

Shining at the Bottom of the Sea
by Stephen Marche

Jason's review

rating:

status: Read in November, 2007

(My full review of this book is much longer than the excerpt posted below; find it at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:].)

There is of course a long and proud tradition here in the West of elaborate histories concerning made-up places; take JRR Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" series, as perhaps the most famous example of all. But now imagine that the made-up land in question is designed deliberately to mix with our real world, geography and history -- for example, that your particular made-up land is supposed to be a part of the British Commonwealth, just a part that doesn't actually exist in the real world, originally part of the British Empire in the same way that Bermuda, Jamaica and New Zealand became members of the Empire and then Commonwealth too. Imagine an island in the middle of the North Atlantic, one that became crucial in the 1600s for British sailors making their way from the Continent to America, and has been part of British hi...more (My full review of this book is much longer than the excerpt posted below; find it at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:].)

There is of course a long and proud tradition here in the West of elaborate histories concerning made-up places; take JRR Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" series, as perhaps the most famous example of all. But now imagine that the made-up land in question is designed deliberately to mix with our real world, geography and history -- for example, that your particular made-up land is supposed to be a part of the British Commonwealth, just a part that doesn't actually exist in the real world, originally part of the British Empire in the same way that Bermuda, Jamaica and New Zealand became members of the Empire and then Commonwealth too. Imagine an island in the middle of the North Atlantic, one that became crucial in the 1600s for British sailors making their way from the Continent to America, and has been part of British history ever since; a place where the citizens themselves are the same bronze natives like you find in the British Caribbean, but who have cultivated a culture at their island almost exactly like Ireland's craggy fishing coast, complete with Victorian lighthouses and big burly wool sweaters.

Picture that, ladies and gentlemen, and you're starting to correctly picture the latest mindblowing novel by the multi-talented writer Stephen Marche, the made-up literary anthology Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, which purportedly is both a folk history and a survey of arts concerning the exact kind of fictional North Atlantic British colony and later independent nation just mentioned. Known as "Sanjan Island" during its colonial period and "Sanjania" after independence, it is a place that shares many traits of other former UK colonies but that combines these traits in odd and unique ways; a remote island known mostly as a trading and military port for far-flung sailors, but more like Iceland or Greenland in makeup than the British ports of the South Seas, although with still as glorious and complex a history concerning their British overlords as any equatorial paradise.

In fact, turns out that there's a unique detail to Sanjania's history as well, one that makes it stand out among all of the Commonwealth nations......less

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Jason's review of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea

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