A journey across the dividing lines of American society
In the antebellum Wild West, two teenagers eager for an excuse to run away take a job as horse-riding couriers. This job isn’t like delivering the regular mail: riders are sworn to an extreme level of secrecy, the route is haunted with hungry, spectral apparitions, and the horses never seem to grow tired even after covering a week’s journey in a matter of hours. Operating in parallel with the Overland service, the Nightland one uses its own, secluded stations, hidden at the edge of visible reality. As it turns out, there’s a whole other world alongside this one, and the creatures that inhabit it don’t like the rapacious westward expansion of settler civilization.
Not unlike the huge political rift that will lead to the US Civil War, and which lingers like a shadow over the entire plot, there’s a deeper rift forming between humanity and nature, and both forms of opposition emerge from the same rotten desire to possess, to snatch and claim and draw property lines around that which should have been free. Our two protagonists will find themselves in the middle of an ideological dispute that might break the world.
Fittingly, these protagonists have experience walking between two lives. Ben is a former slave who can pass for white, while Jesse was assigned female and wears male clothes. An important part of their inner development will involve learning to empathize with each other’s struggles despite them not being neatly comparable. There’s a recurring theme of mutual incomprehension taking the form of a cosmic wound, of the land itself suffering under the artificial divisions that humans are so accustomed to carving between one another.
The Nightland Express pays special attention to this theme of otherness and the ways in which the dominant settler culture fails to engage with the perspectives, the concerns, or even the basic fact of the existence of the inhabitants of the lands it seeks to take. When our protagonists ride through the hidden regions of the Nightland, the description highlights the effect of unfamiliarity: the same landscapes appear forbiddingly terrifying at first sight, yet endowed with a unique beauty in later encounters. The book’s prose conveys both sensations with a striking expressive strength.
There’s a fascinating idea implied by the antagonist’s secret plan to protect the spiritual realm from the depredations of settler culture. Without spoiling too much, the book seems to be making the point that, before Western civilization embarked on its invasion of other regions of the world and started suppressing their various spiritual traditions, it inflicted that violence on itself first. According to this idea, the reason why the West seems less connected to its own spirituality is that it first committed colonial epistemicide against itself. So the question at the core of the book’s plot is whether colonized lands can avoid becoming similarly alienated from themselves.
The events of the ending don’t cascade into the large-scale restoration of relations that one might hope for, mainly because the timeline has to roll into our known history (and there’s that pesky Confederacy that needs to be destroyed), but the last we see of our protagonists has them set on a trajectory of healing. The broken order created by colonization will take a long time to repair, but the repairing is happening, both in the visible and the invisible realms.
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.
Reference: Lee, J. M. The Nightland Express [Erewhon, 2022].
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
