The Nation Thief by Robert Houston

Abstract

Reviews 93 The Nation Thief. By Robert Houston. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 241 pages, $13.95.) The filibustering William Walker loaded sixty adventurers on an old, leaky brig in May of 1855 and with considerable fanfare sailed out of San Francisco’s Golden Gate, bound for revolution-torn Nicaragua. His purpose: to bring stability, science, democracy, and capitalism to that unhappy land. Robert Houston’s latest book is an historical novel chronicling “General” Walker’s rise and fall. As we might guess in our far more cynical age, Walker, both blessed and cursed by visionary naivete, marched into a morass. And for all his manly efforts, fine phrases, and superior Sharps rifles, he and most of his men sank into it. With good reason, some critics look askance at historical novels. When all is said and done, they remain neither fish nor fowl, or rather they emerge as both fish and fowl, combinations of obligatory events and their authors’ imaginations. Yet, whatever one’s view on what can turn out to be unlikely creatures, strange pastiches, Houston brings it off in Nation Thief. He does this not by telling his story in a determined and unbroken narrative but by allowing the personalities involved to address the reader directly about their experiences. Thus we get a variety of reactions to the unfolding story. This ranges from the earthy and sometimes humorous perceptions of Chelon, leader of Walker’s Indian allies, through the frustrations of Guy Sartain, Walker’s black surgeon caught in a host of racial anomalies, to the pro­ nouncements of General Walker himself. As we know so well from Heart of Darkness, Walker will be compelled to become ever more the inhuman dic­ tator as he attempts to impose order on an ever darker, ever more chaotic situation. And thus we get not so much fiction chained to history as a series of portraits of people falling apart at their physical and psychic seams as their dreams and the world around them become unglued. Nation Thief is a story of loss of innocence, of high hopes going sour before the eyes of the hopeful. The characters stumble toward their grisly doom, storming cities only to lose them, trying to maintain their glittering dream of empire while the jungle and the cholera suck them under one by one. Only William Walker is able to keep his fantasy to the end despite the widening gap between illusion and reality. In this sense, in a book rich with ironies and contradictions, we see that his followers are sane people slowly going insane as they recognize the reality of their circumstances, while Walker, inspirational madman to begin with, maintains his stability by ignoring reality and clinging ever more dearly to the phantom of conquest. And so we have more than a series of deft psychological portraits in Nation Thief. As the characters pass before us in its pages, we witness a chilling morality play. Given our nation’s current designs on Central America, it seems especially appropriate to our times. PETER WILD, University of Arizona ...