Let me begin by saying: This book was engineered in a lab to appeal to me. K. J. Parker’s Making History, encased in sixty-two pages, is a meta-narrative revolving around the story of history itself, and how historians shape the boundaries of discourses on the past. It is told through the lens of a linguist. Simultaneously, it imbues in the reader a humorous sense of mania. Short, introspective, and equal parts academic and philosophical history, this is a perfect day’s read.
Commencing in medias res, the narrator’s first claim is that history is like coal. Accumulated corpses collapsing under their own weight produce it; our view of history is a result of moments stacked onto each other. It is a static, agreed truth, described as “what actually happened … We believe (fondly believe) that if a thing’s true today it must have been true yesterday, and maybe even the day before. We can’t conceive of truth changing, evolving” (p. 9). All this makes the following line a severe punch in the ribs: “My job, at that time, was all about changing the past, and I was very good at it. I was a coal-carver, too, except that the objects I fashioned out of my raw material were exquisite, utterly life-like and convincing” (p. 9).
The narrator relays this job through other characters, and the chronology of the tale begins. First Citizen Gyges, a dictator who seized power four years prior through a coup, and who is actually Prince Gugu, summoned without notice the top scholars from the University to the palace (really it was more a kidnapping, given a platoon of guards “hustled” them through the back streets in steel armor and brown capes instead of red [p. 10]). Within the palace, we get our first taste of historical revision. As these top researchers approach Prince Gugu—I mean, First Citizen Gyges—the narrator notes a series of portraits with a cunning resemblance to one another. When the narrator finally meets Gyges, he realizes what the game is:
They all looked like him, but with a heavy hint of evolution … nobody would ever know, and the House of Gyges would have its ancient and distinguished ancestry graphically recorded in paint and limewood board, irrefutable proof … where does it say that a family tree has to start at the roots and work its way up to the branches and leaves, rather than the other way around? (p. 12)
This is horrifying. Gyges the dictator deploys disinformation and false lineage to cement himself as a white blood cell in the region, rather than a cancer who overthrew the government. This reminded me of an anecdote an old professor of mine once shared: Ancient Greeks used to build their family reputations by tracing their “lineage” back to famous gods and heroes, which has been the case throughout history; one present example, the British Monarchy, traces its ancestry to Woden, the Anglo equivalent of the God Odin. The commonality of this technique across place and time is fascinating, and its presence here demonstrates the author’s awareness of the methods regimes deploy to legitimize themselves.
Squished into a tiny room barely big enough for Gyges, the researchers, and six “colossal” guards, Gyges reveals the task to them, but we learn about it primarily through professors’ reactions. Equally bemused and dismayed—while they’re being tailed by Gyges’s agents—the professors bemoan the impossibility of the task. In fact, one of them, Polyclimnus, only a few hours later “went to the bathhouse, where he borrowed a razor from the barber, had the attendant run him a nice hot bath, and opened the veins in his wrists” (p. 16). Just as dramatic but not as suicidal, the narrator plans to escape by checking out valuable books and withdrawing all his funds—but, curiously, his account has been frozen due to a lawsuit. The narrator realizes that, again, he’s being followed (p. 16). Gyges will not be trifled with.
The author’s deliberate delay in revealing Gyges’s challenge keeps the reader guessing. When it finally happens, I recall saying, aloud, “Oh, you’re done for. Your goose is cooked, buddy.” The narrator informs us that Gyges is searching for a way to provoke war with the Ana Strasoe, in order to distract his citizens from how awful their lives are. The Ana Strasoe have arable lands and silver, Gyges says, and “would probably be happier” as his serfs instead of Freemen in their conscript army; but those damned Ana, “in spite of being barbarians and therefore dumb as dog shit by definition” won’t throw the first stone (p. 17). Gyges’s genius plan is to offer a pretense for war by making the researchers “discover” the ruins of one of five cities, where a “godlike people” lived until they were destroyed by the barbarian ancestors of the Ana. The “civilized” people, of course, are ancestors to the Aelians, whom Gyges lords over. The historians are going to build a city from Gyges’s imagination, and they have nine months to do it.
The narrative from here on follows the work and days of the narrator, whose specific task is to devolve the Aelian language. While explaining his thinking process, he deploys a maxim that hit like a train: “All languages start off complicated and get simpler.” I was told the same thing in relation to the evolution of Latin into the modern romance languages, and the narrator demonstrates his grasp of the fundamentals as he explains how he’ll reverse engineer Ancient Aelian from a hypercomplex language with three genders, seven persons—including the dual, oh the horror—seven cases, and several moods for tenses (p. 23).
We get several pages of metaphor on the rich development of language, which the narrator chastises, comparing it to not taking care of one’s things. Included in these tangents is a beautifully placed diatribe on the “truth of the Aelian” race—that, despite narratives and propaganda, the Aelians were nothing extraordinary, mountain dwellers on the border of a dead empire, who only found writing after warfare (pp. 24-25). It was hard not to read a similarity with the “West’s” obsession with being the successor to Rome, particularly Britain and the United States, whereby Classicists currently discuss ways of decoupling our research from white supremacists who yearn for a phantom of a time they know nothing about but think they’d be better off living in.
Watching the narrator construct a language in this way over several pages was in other words fascinating, and contained further academic truisms: “[W]e have literacy because an accountant needed an easier way to track things,” or the explanation the narrator gives for choosing clay as his medium instead of wood (wood rots), or developing an orthography from hieroglyphs into a cuneiform distinct from that of the Aelians’ powerful neighbours, the Sashan Empire (clearly inspired by several Near-East human civilizations).
More fascinating still is the moment in which the narrator approaches a strange ship, thinking nothing of it. He moves on until a merchant asks him, “Are you customs?” (p. 34), after which a conversation ensues and the narrator buys a jar of wine from the ship. He then returns home and tries to translate a royal decree into his fake language, and it contains the word “customs.” He realizes the merchant used his fake word for customs. They were speaking his constructed Ancient Aelian and he didn’t realize it.
Things grow progressively stranger from here, with more examples of the fake city having been made real. The art historian finds a thin bronze sheet, embossed with flowers—his art. Then there’s The Book of Kings, a mostly reliable, nine-hundred-year-old history book drawing on five thousand years of source material, which only the Sashan own. The narrator’s description underplays the significance of this book, which is more earthshaking than the Rosetta Stone. Most remarkable is that the narrator’s invented language is within the pages of this book.
To abridge this story: It turns out there is a real city where highly civilized people lived, and it was destroyed by savages who wished to appropriate the livery of those ancients for their own honor, and deploy it as a justification for war. The city was discovered by the Sashan long ago, and this entire project was a scheme they planted in Gyges’s head to justify killing off the Aelians. From its inception, the team of scholars has been working towards their own doom, all for the Sashan’s benefit. Every scholar involved in this scheme, except the narrator, dies by suicide—though whether it was truly suicide is up for debate. This tale returns to the question of truth at the end, and it is interesting to see the narrator challenge the foundations of historical narrative. He questions truth-seeking in pluperfects and pottery, offers alternatives to his own account, because history will debate the veracity of his chronicle.
Take, for example, the following truths: The Aztecs were cannibals and the Spanish, in destroying them, were liberators; West Africans were a savage and barbaric people with no history, and their enslavement was more a boon to them than their slave masters. Most people will know these propositions are untrue at face value, but these “truths” are believed by millions of people, and they sustain white supremacy. There are people of western European descent who cloak themselves in these tales, fabricate heritage trailing all the way back to Rome to justify their ancestors’ historical imperialism and colonialism, their participation in the slave trade and continued oppression of the descendants of slaves in the Western Hemisphere. If you stand so tall above others, you only feel the wind on your face, and never smell the shit you leave behind.
Here is my truth: This is one of the best, if not the best, novellas of the year. Its themes of historical fluidity, its keep-you-guessing mystery, and its academic voice make it one of the most depressingly prescient things I have read this year, given current circumstances. I can’t wait to see what K. J. Parker writes next—if that’s the author’s true name.