THE FALL OF THE SAUDELEURS

A vengeful orphan seeks to rid his homeland of a cannibalistic despot in Knight’s historical novel, the final volume in a series.

Just off the island of Pohnpei rises the greatest architectural feat in all Micronesia: the “stone village” of Nahn Madol, a city of canals and artificial islets built of basalt crystals. For centuries, the city has been ruled by the Saudeleurs—dynastic kings of Pohnpei—but by the early 17th century, things have started to change for the worse. The reigning Saudeleur has just initiated a new law allowing cannibalism as a form of capital punishment. Ijokelekel, a fatherless boy raised to believe he was sired by a thunder god, flees the island in a stolen boat following the murder of his priestess mother. He hopes to find the legendary Ḷainjin, a foreigner who once visited the island, to convince him to come back and challenge the rule of the Saudeleur. He believes that having a divine father must mean that some great destiny is before him, even if he suffers from a general lack of experience. Ijokelekel survives storms, the open ocean, and the disputes of various island clans he meets along the way, eventually making it to Lae Atoll, where Ḷainjin lives. He immediately falls in love with Ḷainjin’s daughter, Kāmeto, and so he asks Ḷainjin for two things: help in bringing down the Saudeleur, and Kāmeto’s hand in marriage. Ḷainjin, for reasons he keeps to himself, refuses both of Ijokelekel’s requests, but when Ijokelekel and Kāmeto leave the island anyway, intent on launching a rebellion against the Saudeleur with other allies, Ḷainjin has no choice but to follow along and prevent his child from getting killed in the fray. Though it may indeed be Ijokelekel’s destiny to change the course of his home island’s history, it may not be his destiny to survive the encounter.

Knight’s prose glitters with Micronesian words, each explained in the book’s comprehensive glossary. While the terminology and familial relationships are at first difficult to parse, they help the reader acclimate to the rhythms of the setting: “Ijokelekel and Kāmeto planned their adolescent destinies, and thus, they strode hand in hand up to her mother’s house as her brother-cousin gathered a group that first carried the kapwor shell with a pole and then carried the proas and beached them on the strand.” The author isn’t afraid to make his readers work a little bit—seemingly 80 percent of the characters have names that start with the letter L—for the sake of achieving verisimilitude. As in the previous books of the series, the novel has an almost Homeric feel as it features small boats on long voyages, encounters with new peoples and customs, and stories of brutal battles and myths told at length around campfires. Knight forsakes some of the urgency of modern storytelling to set the mood for this far-off world, but that is hardly a bad thing (by this point in the series, readers will have decided what they think of Knight’s storytelling style). The book makes for a satisfyingly epic capstone for an ambitious and highly immersive cycle of historical fiction.

A fitting conclusion to a series of historical novels set in pre-contact Micronesia.