In its ambition and drive to bring the past level with the present, The Gold Eaters resembles another extraordinary recent novel about disastrous first contact, Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda. The Incan dies under the name “Don Francisco de Atahuallpa,” a final indignity. Offering to baptize the heathen that he might “live forever in the Christians’ paradise,” the Spaniard lends the prince his own Christian name. Typical is the scene where Pizarro executes the foolish prince Atawallpa.
By having Waman share the narrative with the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, architect of the mayhem in Peru and Chile, he attempts to balance one of history’s most repercussive civilizational clashes.Įven so, the cruelty, greed and superiority of the Spanish are repulsive. A vivid storyteller, Wright is also a fine stylist, never more so than when alternating between shocking violence and tender intimacy. Set during the Spanish invasion of the Inca empire in the 1530s and based on real people and events, The Gold Eaters is an old-fashioned epic, driven by love and war alike. Coming from the author of Stolen Continents and A Short History of Progress, that is saying something. His third novel, and tenth book, may be his most expansive indictment yet of bloody-minded human nature, in particular European predation in the “new” world. So begins Wright’s latest exploration of how things fall apart, and empires rise and fall. As far as he knows, it is simply the Empire. Or even that that his country has a name. “But he has never heard of anywhere called Peru. It is apparently ruled by savages and brimming with gold.
Having sailed south from Mexico, the pirates are looking for country called Peru. Sickly, foul-smelling brigands keep him alive to train as their interpreter.
A teenager called Waman, having fled his village to taste life, is kidnapped at sea. Like many an adventure story, The Gold Eaters opens with pirates. Cover of Gold Eaters for book review MAC39.
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