Review: Ambition, honor, and culture clash in the ancient Americas
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 1, 2011
In the 13th century, the massive Great Mound of Cahokia in the Mississippi Valley supported a huge city and the accompanying civilization. In the following centuries, this complex civilization would collapse. The Cahokian follows the unexpected life course of a warlord, Acoto, of this expansionist culture. The author examines cross-cultural familiarity in her exploration of the common human traits of ambition, attraction, and adaptation, but also provides something fresh in that the story spotlights a culture that has received little coverage in fiction.At the heart of the story is the aforementioned Acoto. A proud, ambitious man, he finds himself embroiled in political struggle that thrusts him far away from his home. The author uses him as the lens to explore both the Cahokian/Mississipian culture and the Native cultures of the Ohio River Valley. Acoto is well-developed, and the author does a fine job of presenting his motivations, justifying his actions, and making him sympathetic despite his  violent occuptation. This is a particular feat as though there are various struggles presented in the course of the novel, his various foes, depending on circumstance, are far from evil, nor their actions not understandable. The Cahokian also does a good job of presenting two very different Native cultures of North America, allowing the reader to understand their mindsets, and also showing how ambition is a disease of all civilizations. Good secondary character development helps in presenting both the sympathetic and not so sympathetic people of both cultures.I'm far more familiar with the Native groups of the west coast in recent centuries than the cultures of this time and region, so I can't speak to the total historical accuracy of everything in The Cahokian, but the fine level of detail certainly brought a strong verisimilitude to my reading experience. The novel seems well-researched. There are a few portions where, to my knowledge, the author has to fill in details, as our understanding of the Cahokian/Mississipian culture isn't as extensive as it perhaps should be, but none of it rings false, and it all fits in well with the more directly grounded elements.While this extensive, at times educational, level of detail does a good job of taking the reader into the time and mindset of these ancient peoples, it also contributes to some of the weaknesses of the novel. There's a flagging tension in the second act as the book focuses more on cultural exploration. Depending on your tastes, this may not bother you, but it made portions of the second act feel slow to me. Even though the detailed discussion of the cultural differences was justified by the circumstances presented in the book, there were just a bit too many scenes where Acoto and others sit there and discuss the differences in their respective cultures. Thus, at times, it came off as more pedagogical than engaging. While such scenes were interesting from an educational standpoint, they damaged the pacing of the novel.Similarly, there is such a thing as too much attention to detail, particularly linguistic detail when writing a story in a language other than the one used by the characters in the story. As someone who spent a number of years involved in linguistics and translation, I understand the urge of linguistic accuracy, but fiction is a different sort of beast. This sort of problem was a minor issue when it came to the rendering of certain Native names and places. There is a skill to rendering names from foreign languages in a story meant for general consumption. A reader otherwise unfamiliar with the language should be able to at least approximate all the sounds use. Several words were rendered partially with non-alphabetic symbols whose meaning was never defined or made clear. The overall result is that this fidelity to phonetic accuracy ended up being distracting more than enlightening.Acoto, as a warrior and a warlord, is involved in more than his fair share of battles. One might question the relative tactical disparity sometimes displayed by others in comparison to Acoto, but all the battle scenes had a nice tension about them and successfully communicated both the excitement and fear of battle without being overwhelming or fixating on violence for the sake of violence.Overall, anyone interesting in a story about a man learning more about himself as he bridges two ancient Native North American cultures would be served well by picking up The Cahokian.Rating: 3.5 StarsJ.A. BeardMy indie, my tea and me