Lorna Scott Fox

Village names in the Mexican state of Chiapas read like a rosary of Indian aspirations and frustrations. There’s Liberty, Solitude, Hope, Sigh, Alliance, Future; Triumph lies not far from Revenge. As poet and stage-manager of the three-year-old Zapatista insurrection, the EZLN leader Subcomandante Marcos can’t have been unaware of the resonance of choosing poor, forgotten Reality as his base in the eastern part of the state. ‘We are together in Reality … dreaming is both possible and necessary,’ Marcos announced confusingly at the close of July’s Intercontinental Encounter. ‘To find anyone to answer your questions,’ I was told on New Year’s Day by a ski-mask (as opposed to a rank-and-file bandana), ‘you’d have to be in Reality.’ I was certainly in the wrong place, at Oventic rather than La Realidad, misled by assurances that I would find the local leader, Comandante David; I was stranded where not much was happening for the third anniversary of the uprising. But was I the only one who was not ‘in Reality’?

The fake Spanish dancer Lola Montez, née Eliza Gilbert, had one of those lives which make us aware of unlikely simultaneities. Operetta clanked against Western as she toured the gold-towns of the American West and Australia with a skit called ‘Lola Montez in Bavaria’. It was a farcical whitewash of her most infamous hour, when as a fake countess she had rocked an Ancien Règime court in the Year of Revolutions. The play consisted of five scenes: ‘The Danseuse’, ‘The Politician’, ‘The Countess’, ‘The Revolutionist’, ‘The Fugitive’ – the last being the real story of her life. Hounded out of theatres, countries and continents, she was always on the run and always bounced back, expiring with one finger on the Bible in 1861.’’

The first thing the literary world noticed about Dale Peck was his youth. Now 28, he produced the harrowing Martin and John (attractively published in Britain as Fucking Martin) at 25. Why do we expect so little of the (not all that) young? Peck’s sophistication needs no excuse or applause on those grounds. There is something far more remarkable about him within the youth consensus itself, and that is his death wish – or that of his fiction. It’s an uneasy distinction in this case, as his two novels deliberately flaunt their processing of personal experience to give us multiple redneck fathers, dead mothers and their avatars in the trailer homes and desperate suburbs of Long Island and Kansas where Peck grew up. A narrow but inexhaustible set of elements is folded over and over into the narrative, rolled into flakes of raw life streaked with story-telling, and scattered incompletely, like the body of Osiris, across both books.’

He was a middle-aged had-been, returning in a flurry from his entrada into the Spanish Main with a crop of tall stories and a bag of glittery sand, to the yawns of Queen and country. More favoured courtiers sneered that he’d never been to Guiana at all. This repudiation persists, leaving Walter Ralegh as little more today than the cloak-and-pipe fellow who was dropped for the Earl of Essex. His other colonial fiasco (the North Carolina settlement which vanished without trace in 1586) is only slightly more remembered. Britain was never seriously to colonise South America, and there never was an El Dorado in the form Ralegh sought.