THE TESTAMENT OF YVES GUNDRON

A brilliant debut skillfully blends creation myth and folk tale with subtle criticisms of both depersonalized technological advancement and the kind of insularity that breeds and overvalues both tradition and ignorance. Barton’s ingenious tale takes the form of an autobiographical document written by the eponymous Yves, a farmer in the landlocked village of Mandragora, which initially seems—by virtue of place and personal names—to be located somewhere in eastern Europe during the late Middle Ages. But, we soon learn, the land beyond Mandragora’s neighboring mountains lies across a body of water from Scotland; the period is actually an approximate present time when US Navy aircraft fly nearby; and Mandragorans compose and perform elaborate chants that imitate the structure and content of blues songs. Yves’s “testament” recounts, in a beautifully manipulated voice whose semi-formal cadences have a faintly antique ring, his serendipitous “invention” of the harness, which instantly alters his own and his neighbors’ lives—changes quickened when a young American anthropology student, Ruth Blum, arrives, bonds rapidly with Yves’s family, stimulates further “Inventions” (such as the four-wheeled cart and the paving of roads), and falls in love with Yves’s chaste and contemplative brother Mandrik le Chouchou, himself a traveler who, like Marco Polo, had returned home with glorious tales about the prosperous cities of the Orient. The story of how Mandragora (another word for mandrake, the plant reputedly capable of inducing a soporific state) “progresses,” from primitivism through (rudimentary) mechanization to a sobered comprehension of (in Ruth’s words, about her own civilization) “what we’ve strayed from, what we once had and have since lost” is powerfully conveyed through a flexible narrative that’s a pitch-perfect imitation of first-person historical reconstruction, complete with (often very amusing) footnotes and comments from Yves’s “editor.” A commanding and extraordinarily accomplished debut.