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The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Book 6
Orson Scott Card
Tor, August 2004
$7.99, Mass Market Paperback, 340 pp.
ISBN 0812564626
Orson Scott Card picks up where he left off in the Tales of Alvin Maker series, a fantastic look at what America could (and probably should) have been. Card painstakingly creates an alternate history combining folk magic, Native wisdom, and remarkable characters. The series is well researched and well written, and The Crystal City is no exception.
The Crystal City finds Alvin Maker in Nueva Barcelona (New Orleans, still under Spanish Rule) on an errand for his wife Peggy, a powerful Torch. Peggy has a knack for keeping Alvin out of harms way, and routinely sends him to far away places for apparently no good reason. Alvin, the seventh son of a seventh son, and a powerful Maker in his own right, has his own knack for finding good reason to help people, no matter where his journeys take him. Peggy has seen a terrible war in the futures of every American, and Alvin can only assume that he is to help find a way to prevent it. This will prove quite a task in the racist and caste-ridden climate of the South.
Soon Alvin, with his fifteen-year-old brother-in-law Arthur Stuart in tow (a character that is pleasantly too big for his breeches) is busy stopping a Yellow Fever epidemic, helping to prevent a war with Mexico, and trying to find a way to transport five-thousand runaway slaves across Lake Ponchartrain. The eventual character development of Arthur Stuart is rewarding, and Card gives a peek into Alvin’s private life, when he finds his way home to sort a few things out with his wife.
The main setting for The Crystal City is New Orleans. Card’s picture of a pre-Civil War New Orleans is meticulous in detail, and is a grave reminder of our own true history. The Crystal City goes beyond the issue of slavery; he shows us the struggles of the French under Spanish Rule, of the Spanish trying to hold the Mississippi River from the ever advancing English, and of the few free blacks who could not find safety with any social group. Native Americans play a vital part in this series. They hold the entire western shore of the Mississippi (or, Mizzippy, in Alvin’s world) from settlement by outsiders, and Alvin’s friendship with their head shaman Tenskwa-Tawa continues to impress.
Several historical characters make an appearance in The Crystal City. Alvin makes an acquaintance out of one Abraham Lincoln, and each change the paths of the other’s destiny in their own subtle ways. Jim Bowie is also found wherever the trouble is, and given his troubled history with Alvin Maker, the results of their encounters are quite satisfying, and bring a bit of comic relief to a troubled time. Two of the most memorable new characters in this volume are Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel, who run a children’s home in Nueva Barcelona. The names these characters don are completely real and believable in Card’s world, and also allude grandly to two of my favorite childhood characters, Rocky and Bullwinkle. These references to the people and events of the world we live in, is what hooked me on alternate histories in the first place. They allow the reader to feel more a part of the story, and connect easily with the characters. After all, Card has George Washington beheaded in Book 1, and has Alvin dream the plot to The Lord of the Rings in another. What fan of fantasy could not find that alluring?
