Jan Jacob Slauerhoff - a romantic tale of adventure, seafaring and colonialism, told through an experimental narrative: I was beginning to yearn for a power that would take possession of me

Jan Jacob Slauerhoff, The Forbidden Kingdom, Trans. by Paul Vincen, Pushkin Press, 2012. [1932.]

A classic of early modernism The Forbidden Kingdom (Het Verboden Rijk) is the masterwork of Jan Jacob Slauerhoff—a romantic tale of adventure, seafaring and colonialism, told through an experimental narrative.
An intoxicating mix of time travel and adventure, The Forbidden Kingdom revolves around the Portuguese imperial outpost of Macao in China. Two men journey to the colony: the exiled sixteenth-century poet Luis de Camoes, author of The Lusiads, and a twentieth-century ship's wireless operator. With their overlapping stories Slauerhoff draws his reader into a dazzling world of exoticism, betrayal and exile, where past and present merge and the possibility of death is never far away.

The book interweaves three narratives, separated in time but linked by a common association with the 'forbidden kingdom' of China.
In this highly original novel Slauerhoff (1898-1936) reprises major themes from his poetry (erotic obsession, nomadism, persecution and confused identity) within a more ambitious formal framework. The book interweaves three narratives, separated in time but linked by a common association with the 'forbidden kingdom' of China. The first of these is the brutal and bloody founding of Macau by the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century. Second is the exile from Portugal to the Far East later in the same century of a minor noble and poet, Luis Vaz de Camoes, later author of the national epic of discovery Os Lusiadas (1572). Finally, there is the Odyssey through the Orient of an anonymous, almost Conradian, twentieth-century ship's wireless operator, drawn to Macau and China by the desire to merge either with Camoes' ghost or with the masses, and to be rid of the burden of his own identity.

Slauerhoff's novel, first published in 1932, is regarded as an important example of Dutch modernism. Vincent's translation presents a sophisticated form of double Dutch, as two parallel narratives slip back and forth, one concerning the 16th-century Portuguese poet Luis Camoes, the other a nameless 20th-century ship's radio operator who describes himself as "the most rootless and raceless person alive". Gradually, their trajectories are set on a collision course whereby Slauerhoff drops heavy hints they may be the same person. The second wave of Portuguese exploration is subject to pleasing irony: "The crews of criminals had been replaced with noblemen eager to make their fortune. This did not improve navigation." But it's a confounding read, full of false starts, chronological quirks and unreliable narrators. The radio operator passes the time "constantly reading a book on the history of the three empires, which had the advantage that you never finished it, since by the end you had forgotten the beginning". You lay this one aside understanding how he feels. - Alfred Hickling

The central figure in The Forbidden Kingdom is Luís de Camões -- the towering figure of Portuguese literature and author of the classic epic, The Lusiads -- but Slauerhoff isn't just loose with the historic record -- he completely reimagines it. In a time where historical fiction places such a high value on accurate detail this may seem jarring, but then Slauerhoff's novel shouldn't really be seen as traditional historical fiction (as also a game-changing second storyline that comes well into the novel confirms): Camões is a figure of convenience, and Slauerhoff feels very comfortable completely adapting a few facts of his life for his own purposes. Thus, while Camões did fall in love with someone at the royal court, was sent abroad, did stay in Macao, and was shipwrecked, the description (and often timing) of these events all differ markedly in the novel from what actually happened.
       The Forbidden Kingdom begins with a Prologue describing the fall of the Portuguese outpost of Lian Po in 1540 to the Chinese (presumably loosely based on the historical Tamao/Tunmen, from which the Chinese expelled the Portuguese in 1521) and the founding of Macao. Much of the action in the novel takes place in Macao, where the Procurador -- the Attorney General -- Campos has to deal with everything from the local merchants to the uppity Dominicans, who seem to have gotten their claws into his seventeen-year-old daughter (by a Chinese wife), Pilar. Campos sees his best course of action to be to marry her off to Ronquilho, who has long tried to win her over; Pilar, however, has other ideas -- which sets into motion events that lead Campos and Ronquilho to believe they can kill several birds with one stone (like getting rid of those annoying Dominicans) though in fact they are initially only partially successful in their efforts (specifically in bending Pilar to their wills -- and, indeed, even just in finding her).
       It is this Macao that Camões eventually makes his way to -- though it's a ways before he gets there. Camões' own story unfolds separately at first -- and is presented both by a third-person narrator as well as, in part, in Camões' own voice. Just twenty, he's a restless young man -- "I'm living now and want the world !" he exclaims -- and when he falls in love with the wrong woman at court -- the Infante's intended, whom he calls 'Diana' -- he gets himself "honourably banished" from his homeland. He has ambivalent feelings about Portugal in any case -- "The country is monotonous and melancholy, and so is life there"" -- and if he can't be with the woman of his dreams:

I want to forget everything, my homeland, my origins, but especially antiquity, poems and that woman.

       The young Camões sees poetry as his Achilles' heel -- both the reading and the writing of it. Even in his youth it was something he: "kept hidden and from which I hoped I would recover", but he can't escape it. On his long voyage to the East he works on his epic poem -- though since he winds up imprisoned below deck for most of the journey he actually sees nothing of the foreign countries they pass and has to rely on his imagination (and mythology) to create his work. His poetry is one of the few things he salvages when shipwrecked -- and it is his poetry that will eventually also betray the woman who helps him when he washes up on shore, a woman who looks like his beloved Diana, except for her eyes .....
       Well past the midway point of the novel, with Camões captured by Campos and Ronquilho in Macao and imprisoned yet again, there is an abrupt cut, another first-person suddenly popping up, announcing:

     In the autumn of 19... I was living half sick and completely destitute in a room on the top floor of a village hotel.

       The narrator, who remains unnamed here, is a ship radio operator; at this point he had just lost his position because the ship he had worked on had been shipwrecked, but he is destined to wind up back on board another ship, in the same position, again. At this point already he finds:

I was beginning to yearn for a power that would take possession of me

       He's hoping for a woman to be that power, but recognizes that's unlikely; instead, it's something rather different that takes possession of him -- and winds up complicating his properly doing his radio-duties. As becomes clear, this man in some way channels Camões. It's not a completely obvious and clear possession, but the two characters do, in a way, overlap -- more obviously as the story comes to a close, the radio operator in a way following Camões own path to China (into which Camões is eventually sent from Macao).
       Slauerhoff manages this transition from relatively straightforward historical fiction to metaphysical tale remarkably well, and to surprisingly strong effect. As Jane Fenoulhet also points out in her Afterword, much of the groundwork was already laid earlier on, as much of what Camões felt and said appears again, as an after-echo, in the twentieth-century sections. The text and the two storylines, as disparate as they seem, do not so much intertwine but rather merge -- though only at some levels. It feels very modern -- it's hard to believe this is a text from the early 1930s -- and even now, in a time where we have seen similar things pulled off in many contemporary works of fiction, is striking for how well it's done.
       As Fenoulhet also notes, The Forbidden Kingdom is the first in what was a planned trilogy; the second novel, Het leven op aarde directly continues the story (and gives a name to the radio operator), and certainly The Forbidden Kingdom feels a bit open-ended -- in part also because Slauerhoff seems to have just begin exploring the possibilities his dual-protagonist of Camões and the radio operator allows him. Nevertheless, it is sufficiently complete in and of itself to stand on its own. One wishes for more, but even just in these pages Slauerhoff has taken readers on a hell of a ride.
       Both a remarkable text and story, The Forbidden Kingdom is a very nice little discovery, long overdue in English. Recommended. - M.A.Orthofer