Notes on Amatodate

For Theo, a long-time sufferer of my reading assignments.

The process of forming a story out of my fictional Amatodate Abbey has taken a long while. I am by profession an early-career scientist. The societal expectations on people like us are that we have to work our brains to the bleeding limit, and my internalized upbringing in the Chinese work ethic (that plague on the face of humanity) is partly to blame. I moderate my work life with physical exercise and musical pursuits. Unfortunately, writing a novel occupies the same mental niche as work, and so it has taken more than ten years to form ideas, settings, characters, and so on... since the first passages near to the end of 2009, when I finished my military service.

My time in Cleveland has somehow motivated me to write a lot more often than I had used to. It could probably have been that I am now subject to the pressures of survival that were absent in my life back home, and have had a clearer perception of human nature forced upon me. It could have been a set of private religious devotions and practices which precipitated out of events in my life in 2014 and 2015. In any case I now have some sort of idea about the story's direction and its main themes.

One of the main themes of the story (Little Ocean) is, disingenuously, about the nature of narrative itself. This makes it a story about stories. You may recall that Terry Pratchett's Discworld was quite literally shaped by the narrative of his universe's inhabitants; that the world was flat and borne atop the backs of four elephants and a turtle because that was what people believed. Little Ocean does not follow this variety of metaphysics, because the setting is in the real world and I am a believer in absolute truth claims. However, because the characters look back into the 20th and 21st centuries as in the distant past, we would be seeing our own history — especially events happening as we speak — mythologized, twisted, augmented with juicy and outlandish details in the minds of its characters. The people of the Little Ocean think about us in the same way that we think of the ancient Romans, Greeks, Persians, or Egyptians, and could mention our modern civilization all in the same breath as the other great, fabled, lost cultures. As in the present day, the embellished narratives drive the political conflicts that form the centerpiece of the Amatodate story, far into the future.

The conflict in this story is convoluted, although it starts in a pretty straightforward manner as a clash of religions, between Christians around the Laptev Sea Channel, and Muslims, who lived along the north coast of the Taymyr Peninsula. The Christian religious society of Amatodate lies in the hilly marches (the Griadines, or Mesogriadines) between these two feuding factions, who have been at war since a breach of a Soviet dam (the Krasnoyarsk High Dam) caused the flood which destroyed the capital of a multi-ethnic empire spanning both regions. Despite their religion, they fall foul politically to the Christian princes of the south by insisting on opening their sanctuary to war refugees regardless of religion, and for this travesty they are destroyed in the ensuing siege.

My approach to writing is to be focused on the character, rather than on the setting; I always have a murky view of the geography and the level of technology present in the story. The characters' personal stories are varied and disparate and are tied together the most strongly at the point where the Abbey was destroyed in cannon fire.

The first yarn, which came to me in 2016, involved the anti-romance of Jaromil Toyogarov and Irannika Yasin, estranged fiancés, whose story became the direct cause of the Abbey's destruction. Events in my personal life strongly influence this sub-plot, and I saw the unhinged, unrepentantly psychopathic Toyogarov as a subtle self-insert, a mirror with which I scrutinize my own fallen nature. Irannika, in contrast, is an idealistic, Jesus-struck creature afflicted with a sense of mission and a readiness to serve the poor in the war-torn Griadines. She takes inspiration from many of my friends from university days, who left the comforts of Singapore to join religious orders in far-flung lands.

That the Christian leadership of Taimiria, rather than members of any other religion, became the prime adversaries of evangelization will be a recurring point of exposition. Characters up to and including the Abbot of Amatodate are tempted to put temporal goals before spiritual ones, and any active implementation of Christian ideals are actively suppressed by the southern Princes. Neglecting to reflect upon our failures in the early 20th and 21st centuries is responsible for such relapse of crass tribalism and realpolitik in post-Christian societies. For a reference to these social evils, I only have to draw material from current events and popular discourse, which saturate social media every day this age.

At the same time, the redemption of fallen individuals is also frequently seen. The Abbot Musa, in the style of St. Moses the Black, was part of the group of bandits who destroyed the previous iteration of Amatodate, and slaughtered its members; he is redeemed when he is locked in the abbey and to burn with it until he agreed to become the Abbot and carry on the Abbey's social work. The Aspag, Makarios Niwa, is a Renaissance Man, a religious scholar who unearthed a trove of philosophical and scientific works of the post-Enlightenment and was so enamored of its ideals that he lost his faith and decided to return to the Lena, until a freak encounter with superstitious Taimirians led to him being proclaimed the local Bishop. This and subsequent events in Amatodate eventually coaxed Makarios Niwa back into a reluctant belief. As it happens, Flannery O'Connor is the best at writing about redemption, and so I take much inspiration from her works.

The physical and human geography of the story's setting is worth a mention. The sea level rises gradually, widening the Laptev Sea Channel, and opens up the southern inland to sea routes. This provides the geopolitical basis for the independence of the Southern Princes. The circumpolar current and the lack of Arctic sea ice links the societies on the Arctic coast and provides an important link for Taimiria to other localities. The people of Taimiria are descendants of a wide array of people groups, from the Chinese, the Koreans (Sarmyaks), and the Japanese, to Central Asians (Qarataimir), Russians, Persians, Armenians, Poles, and Greeks. Some ethnicities are familiar to the 21st-century reader; others are brand-new constructs. The dreadful irony of the civil war is the fact that the Taimirians on both sides of the conflict share very similar ethnic make-ups, but were made to become enemies through twisting the narratives of their ancestry. I take inspiration in this aspect from Sara Lidman's work Jernbanan, of which the plot is driven to a large extent by mundane (but still somehow hugely consequential) features of human and physical geography.

I am hopeless in writing a story with much detail and realism. My most comfortable style of narration seems to roll out in snippets and theatrical ejaculations, and would be quite incoherent in mediums outside of Noh theater. Supernatural themes are heavily explored here, especially in events that appear to us magical or miraculous (e.g. Irannika Yasin's body is never found after her death, or that people in Miriamyurt dream the same dream every night without thinking it strange). Where in a realistic setting these would be explained away with naturalistic causes, I would not even attempt to begin explaining them, and the characters will always be content just deriving the religious meaning from such events and nothing more. I am quite sure this flies in the face of some literary convention, but I also invoke precedence in the works of a certain Gabriel García Márquez, who famously made Remedios Moscote float naked into the heavens without the help of any sound science!

I intend to bring a lot of my upbringing to this work. I am not eager to make it a rehash of European or American works of fantasy or science-fiction; I think we have enough of those already. The entire fantasy genre just seems to me to be a fan-fiction collection of Tolkien's works, and writing anything similar to that corpus would be a colossal waste of my life. The alternative to take would be to lean on the collective wealth of the world's cultures and folklore. The settlement of the Russian Arctic, in the first place, lends quite easily to a mode of narration also employed in the Dreamtime of Aboriginal Australians or in the Landnámabók of medieval Iceland. The presence of one central locality and a multitude of characters would find a close friend in the Water Margins (水滸傳), a cultural treasure from Ming-dynasty China. Characters in this story are fulfilled by having their individuality subsumed by community, not by breaking out of it and finding their individuality. Finally, barring a relatively small European contribution to the admixture, the character themselves are unapologetically Asian, have Asian sensibilities, and have expressions of faith typical to Asians. In the present age, Christianity in the West is beating a retreat. It is time Christians of the East pulled our collective weight: and what would be a more fitting way for me to contribute, if not to write about us?