The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing Traitor to then Nation
"Octavian Nothing places unnecessary demands on reader and teacher alike"
(Original Covers)
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing is an arduous and complex novel from the mind of popular young adult writer MT Anderson. It is the story of a young boy, Octavian, who is raised by a collection of scientists and philosophers at the Novanglian College of Lucidity in colonial America. Life at the college is pleasant until the young and curious Octavian enters the forbidden room at the college to discover he is the scientist's greatest experiment. Octavian learns he is the subject of a study to determine whether or not African Americans are the same as other white colonists or a different species all together. As tensions rise between the colonies and their British oppressors, the college comes into financial hardships and so becomes controlled by a group of men who have a lot riding on the results of the college's experiment. The new directors of the school are bound to do whatever is necessary in order to determine that Octavian doesn't pass the test. Although Octavian knows that the impending war could result in American freedom, he wonders whether or not it will result in his own freedom?
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing explores racism, scientific ethics, the confusion of growing up and the tumultuous times leading up to the Revolutionary War in great depth. While Octavian Nothing is clearly a well written and stylized book, and contains many sophisticated literary elements, in the end, its main character's lack of an emotional connection to the reader makes the book laborious to read . It's clear that Octavian's emotional distance, a result of his being a scientific experiment, helps further the authors emphasis on the ethics of science. Unfortunately, this leaves the emotionally unattached reader not really caring if anything happens Octavian Nothing by the end of the story, not to mention in the second volume of the series. In the end this novel seems more like a novel of ideas than of remarkable plot or characters, which doesn't always lead to an immersive read but a thoughtful read. The teacher needs to think carefully about the type of readers and the needs of the reader before assigning this novel.
Publishers Weekly
Slave to Science
Courtesy of Jack Coggins/From “Bushnell’s Submarine”
In Bushnell’s Submarine(Scholastic, $16.99), Arthur S. Lefkowitz tells the true story of the American Turtle, a submarine that attacked a British warship (unsuccessfully, as it happened) in 1776.
THE ASTONISHING LIFE OF OCTAVIAN NOTHING
Traitor to the Nation. Volume I: The Pox Party.
By M. T. Anderson.
351 pp. Candlewick Press. $17.99. (Ages 14 and up)
Readers’ Opinions
The hallmarks of Anderson’s style are a sharp ear for adolescent voices, a sometimes perverse sense of humor and an interest in the corrosive effects of groupthink on the average human’s ability to behave ethically. His new book has all those qualities, but represents a striking advance in terms of both technique and literary ambition.
The novel is set in the 1760s, in Boston, where Octavian and his mother — a West African princess named Cassiopeia — live in the quarters of the Novanglian College of Lucidity, a near double for Swift’s preposterous Academy of Lagado in “Gulliver’s Travels” (1726). The college is a breeding ground for the kinds of pseudoscientific theory about differences between whites and blacks that make for queasy reading. Yet mother and son are treated well. Dressed in silks and expensive white wigs farmed from the heads of Prague pensioners, Octavian and his mother perform duets — Octavian plays the violin, his mother the harpsichord — and exchange syllogisms over dinner.
Uneasily aware that not every little boy has his excrement weighed daily and tallied against the food he ingests (nor do most black boys in colonial Boston enjoy lessons in Latin, Greek, music and mathematics), Octavian solves the puzzle of his treatment with the help of the college’s slave Bono (short for “Pro Bono” — his mother was pregnant when the college bought her, meaning it got two slaves for the price of one), who tells Octavian that he and his mother are not royalty but slaves.
Behind a Bluebeard-style forbidden door, Octavian discovers a chart of classifications of the races of men, an engraving of his naked mother (“Plate XVII. Pubescent female of the Oyo Country in Africa”) and volumes of data that reveal to him that he himself is the experiment. Octavian is being provided with a first-class education to help the collegians determine his capacity “for the acquisition of the noble arts and sciences” and divine whether he and his people are “a separate and distinct species.”
Despite Octavian’s genuine desire to prove his abilities, the results of this experiment have of course been predetermined by the prejudices of the experimenters (whose conclusions about the inferiority of the African echo beliefs held by real historical figures like David Hume and Thomas Jefferson, as Anderson points out in an afterword).
Formally, Anderson perfectly captures the narrative style of 18th-century books. The title page of “Octavian Nothing” presents Anderson (like novelists from Daniel Defoe to Samuel Richardson) as merely the editor of a compilation that relies on Octavian’s testimony, printed ephemera and newspaper excerpts, scientific articles and private letters. The chaotic early days of the conflict that would come to be known as the American Revolution unfold as a backdrop to his personal history, and the intensity of the violence Anderson depicts may be too intense for some readers.
One of the most disturbing sections concerns the “pox party” of the subtitle, in which a select group of New England notables accept the college’s invitation to undergo inoculation against the smallpox raging through the colonies — a house party that will include games of whist and dancing, and “a glass jar full of contaminate matter from the pox-sores of the dead.” Such parties were popular at the time, despite the risk of disfigurement or death. In this case one of the inoculation’s unintended victims is Octavian’s mother, her decline and death described in absolutely gruesome detail.
fter his mother’s death, language fails Octavian; Anderson gives instead his scratched-out passages of attempted description — a nod to Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” and an eloquent way of expressing his pain. Indeed, Octavian’s only flaw as a narrator may be the extent to which he has taken to heart the college’s lessons of lucidity, making his voice less immediately engaging than Anderson’s earlier teenage narrators.
As a child, Octavian says, he was taught the importance of observation: “precise in notation, acute in investigation and rational in inference.” These lessons could be grim — for example, when the men of the college pet a dog and then drown it to see how long it takes to die, or feed alley cats and then drop them from a scaffold to determine “the height from which cats no longer catch themselves, but shatter.” Octavian’s own battle between rage and reason is resolved on the side of reason, possibly at some cost to the reader’s ability to identify with him.
But the story digs deep under one’s skin despite that aggressive self-distancing. Anderson’s imaginative and highly intelligent exploration of the horrors of human experimentation and the ambiguous history of America’s origins will leave readers impatient for the promised sequel.
Courtesy of Jack Coggins/From “Bushnell’s Submarine”
In Bushnell’s Submarine(Scholastic, $16.99), Arthur S. Lefkowitz tells the true story of the American Turtle, a submarine that attacked a British warship (unsuccessfully, as it happened) in 1776.
THE ASTONISHING LIFE OF OCTAVIAN NOTHING
Traitor to the Nation. Volume I: The Pox Party.
By M. T. Anderson.
351 pp. Candlewick Press. $17.99. (Ages 14 and up)
Readers’ Opinions
The hallmarks of Anderson’s style are a sharp ear for adolescent voices, a sometimes perverse sense of humor and an interest in the corrosive effects of groupthink on the average human’s ability to behave ethically. His new book has all those qualities, but represents a striking advance in terms of both technique and literary ambition.
The novel is set in the 1760s, in Boston, where Octavian and his mother — a West African princess named Cassiopeia — live in the quarters of the Novanglian College of Lucidity, a near double for Swift’s preposterous Academy of Lagado in “Gulliver’s Travels” (1726). The college is a breeding ground for the kinds of pseudoscientific theory about differences between whites and blacks that make for queasy reading. Yet mother and son are treated well. Dressed in silks and expensive white wigs farmed from the heads of Prague pensioners, Octavian and his mother perform duets — Octavian plays the violin, his mother the harpsichord — and exchange syllogisms over dinner.
Uneasily aware that not every little boy has his excrement weighed daily and tallied against the food he ingests (nor do most black boys in colonial Boston enjoy lessons in Latin, Greek, music and mathematics), Octavian solves the puzzle of his treatment with the help of the college’s slave Bono (short for “Pro Bono” — his mother was pregnant when the college bought her, meaning it got two slaves for the price of one), who tells Octavian that he and his mother are not royalty but slaves.
Behind a Bluebeard-style forbidden door, Octavian discovers a chart of classifications of the races of men, an engraving of his naked mother (“Plate XVII. Pubescent female of the Oyo Country in Africa”) and volumes of data that reveal to him that he himself is the experiment. Octavian is being provided with a first-class education to help the collegians determine his capacity “for the acquisition of the noble arts and sciences” and divine whether he and his people are “a separate and distinct species.”
Despite Octavian’s genuine desire to prove his abilities, the results of this experiment have of course been predetermined by the prejudices of the experimenters (whose conclusions about the inferiority of the African echo beliefs held by real historical figures like David Hume and Thomas Jefferson, as Anderson points out in an afterword).
Formally, Anderson perfectly captures the narrative style of 18th-century books. The title page of “Octavian Nothing” presents Anderson (like novelists from Daniel Defoe to Samuel Richardson) as merely the editor of a compilation that relies on Octavian’s testimony, printed ephemera and newspaper excerpts, scientific articles and private letters. The chaotic early days of the conflict that would come to be known as the American Revolution unfold as a backdrop to his personal history, and the intensity of the violence Anderson depicts may be too intense for some readers.
One of the most disturbing sections concerns the “pox party” of the subtitle, in which a select group of New England notables accept the college’s invitation to undergo inoculation against the smallpox raging through the colonies — a house party that will include games of whist and dancing, and “a glass jar full of contaminate matter from the pox-sores of the dead.” Such parties were popular at the time, despite the risk of disfigurement or death. In this case one of the inoculation’s unintended victims is Octavian’s mother, her decline and death described in absolutely gruesome detail.
fter his mother’s death, language fails Octavian; Anderson gives instead his scratched-out passages of attempted description — a nod to Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” and an eloquent way of expressing his pain. Indeed, Octavian’s only flaw as a narrator may be the extent to which he has taken to heart the college’s lessons of lucidity, making his voice less immediately engaging than Anderson’s earlier teenage narrators.
As a child, Octavian says, he was taught the importance of observation: “precise in notation, acute in investigation and rational in inference.” These lessons could be grim — for example, when the men of the college pet a dog and then drown it to see how long it takes to die, or feed alley cats and then drop them from a scaffold to determine “the height from which cats no longer catch themselves, but shatter.” Octavian’s own battle between rage and reason is resolved on the side of reason, possibly at some cost to the reader’s ability to identify with him.
But the story digs deep under one’s skin despite that aggressive self-distancing. Anderson’s imaginative and highly intelligent exploration of the horrors of human experimentation and the ambiguous history of America’s origins will leave readers impatient for the promised sequel.
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