Life must have been hard for those early American settlers. The
place now known as Jamestown, Virginia, was full of badass Indians with
sharp arrows and a language that white folk didn’t understand—not
to mention deadly microbes that could tear apart the intestines of any
unaware traveler. Now imagine setting that legendary American history
in the late 2000s. Sure, the natives still have weapons eagerly
awaiting launch, but at least there’s email!
Matthew Sharpe’s hilarious and shockingly violent novel
Jamestown not only gave me new appreciation for historical
fiction (it stars a totally loveable and linguistically spastic
Pocahontas—the ugly version, not the Disney one), but also slyly
mirrors contemporary issues of war and political machismo.
Sharpe has a cutting intellect, and over the course of four books
has become a powerful American voice with a skill for dense,
emotionally unpredictable sentences. The philosophy that bubbles out of
Jamestown is a dark and tragic one: Justice doesn’t belong to
the just (as Socrates said in Plato’s Republic), but rather the
one who draws the most blood.
There aren’t many nice guys in Sharpe’s 400-page, multi-voiced
narrative, and when they do show up, they’re usually dead soon after.
“The very first monologue that I wrote for the novel was from the point
of view of John Smith’s Indian guide… Smith tried to ward off his
captors by using this guy as a human arrow shield,” Sharpe says. “One
of the first things I thought when I was doing research was, ‘What
would that guy have to say?’ I mean, what a sucky role in history!”
Sharpe aimed to give a voice to the natives whose side of the story
has historically been underrepresented. Does that mean the “Indians”
end up looking like noble heroes? Actually, no. Some of the native
characters come off as bigger goons than the settlers. I wondered if
there’s been backlash from Native American readers. “I’m a little
surprised that there has been none, and I can only imagine that it’s
because no one from the Algonquian community has read it, or they’ve
read it and they don’t care. I realize I am presenting something other
than the politically correct version of the history, and that is not
only were the settlers violent mayhem makers, but so were the natives.
They were not necessarily peace loving.”