The following includes light spoilers for Andreas Eschbach’s The Carpet Makers. The story’s mysteries are left intact but the second part might rob you of some of the impact of reading the story fresh.
What makes a good story? The True Literature types in academia have their citadels where they argue about how much middle class neuroticism, abstract symbols of the imagination, and whale semen constitute a Great Novel but the closest thing to consensus in genre fiction is that you have to convince a stranger to part with their hard-earned money and feel like they got a good deal. I’ve been thinking about Andreas Eschbach’s The Carpet Makers on and off for the last five years and I’m starting to think that I like it.
The Story
The Carpet Makers is a wild ride complete with carpets woven from hair, vast interstellar empires, body transplants, planets lost in wormholes, grumpy eunuchs, and more.
We start on a single world, a desert planet, where the men raise large families so they can spend harvest the hair of their daughters to weave elaborate carpets. Each carpet, the work of a lifetime, is sent to the spaceport to be done with as the immortal emperor dictates.
Word comes that the emperor has finally been killed after a reign of 100,000 years. The new president, his successor, arrives shortly thereafter to learn more about this planet which it turns out was hidden from the rest of the empire by the emperor. Odder still this isn’t the first mystery planet discovered since the emperor’s death.
Why did the emperor set all the industry of this planet to manufacturing hair rugs? It takes time for us to get an answer. Every chapter changes context and zooms further and further out to reveal more of the galaxy as Eschbach shows us the immense machinery and human drama created to process the rugs before giving up the secret.
How It Works (Some Spoilers Follow)
On my first reading, I was put off by the story’s frequent perspective shifts. After 6 or 7 rapid context changes it’s hard to stay invested in yet another minisode with characters unlikely to show up again later. (It’s worth noting that Eschbach is German and the version I read was a translation. Did it lose a rhythm and poetry that might have been more compelling in the original? I have no way of knowing.) By the end of the novel I felt a little put out by the lack of character continuity and was ready to toss it in the stack for redistribution.
What was the author trying to do though? I think the answer comes in a scene at the end when the new president pieces together the mystery of the carpets and wins the grudging respect of the emperor’s most loyal servant who takes him to a cavernous room filled with filing cabinets and pulls out a large folder detailing the entire saga of the carpet makers that was set into motion tens of thousands of years ago and then forgotten.
The president looks through the folder in growing comprehension and then, looking around the chamber in confusion, asks what’s in the rest of the cabinets? The eunuch looks at him and says a single word, “History”.
It’s a haunting moment because we’ve covered an enormous slice of time and space, seen ghastly horrors and terrible machines created to enforce the will of the emperor, and, just as we feel our perspective encompassing the full scope of it, everything we’ve learned is reduced to a single footnote in an immense history. For a moment the reader feels the weight of that history pressing on all sides.
I still have issues with aspects of the story that didn’t work for me but a lot of them probably aren’t relevant to what the author was trying to do. He wasn’t trying to write a story about the Return of English Magic or the Inner Life of A Small Town In Maine. He wanted to create a sense of awe at the weight of history and the depths of eternity.
So is it a good story? I’ve been dissecting it and arguing with myself about whether I like it for half a decade which is more than I can say for most novels so I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth. Maybe you will too.