November 17, 2002
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
CHILDREN'S BOOKS;
Disorder at the Border
By Roger Sutton
THE HOUSE OF THE SCORPION
By Nancy Farmer. 380 pp. New York:
$17.95. (Ages 12 and up)
PARENTS of today's young adolescents might
remember when drug book meant ''Go Ask Alice'' or ''Angel Dust Blues'' --
cautionary tales of use synonymous with abuse. While Nancy Farmer's latest
novel, ''The House of the Scorpion,'' has as its setting the vast poppy farm of
a drug baron, it is unconcerned with the perils of addiction, and its roots
reach rather farther back into children's literature -- to ''Pinocchio,'' for
starters.
Matteo Alacrán is a clone, made from a cell
taken from El Patrón, the elderly (really elderly; he's 142 when the book
begins) undisputed leader of the Farmers, the men who control the sinister
borderlands of the United States and Aztlán, formerly Mexico. Although the law
states that a clone must have ''its'' (a pronoun the author uses with pointed
effect) consciousness destroyed at birth, Matt has his -- or are they El
Patrón's? -- faculties intact. He's going to need all of them to find out just
who he is, what he is and why he was created.
These are questions of literature, of course,
and like Collodi (or Spielberg, in ''A.I.'') before her, Nancy Farmer uses a
boy who wants desperately to be human to get readers to think about what that
means, and how far they are willing to expand their definition. Our empathy for
Matt is established from the start, when we meet him living in isolation with a
loving guardian, Celia, in the far reaches of the poppy fields in a cottage
that is cozy but nonetheless a prison.
When three children -- the first Matt has ever
seen who weren't on television -- happen by and discover him, Matt thinks he's
found friends, but only until they and, more important, their father, see what
is stamped on his foot: ''Property of the Alacrán Estate.'' The revelation of
Matt's existence and his condition to the denizens of the estate puts into play
the plot of allies (one of the children; his guardian, Celia; and a swaggering
bodyguard) and enemies (just about everybody else). El Patrón's loyalties
extend only as far as himself, but does his concept of himself extend to Matt?
It's a big, ambitious tale, and Nancy Farmer's
readers will be used to that; indeed, ''The House of the Scorpion'' is a
finalist for this year's National Book Award for young people's literature. Her
novels ''The Ear, the Eye and the Arm'' and ''A Girl Named Disaster,'' both
Newbery Honor books, are also large-scale stories in which children battle
inner demons and ferocious villains in a series of perilous adventures through
hostile but richly conceived landscapes. Assisting all of these children are
helper figures of folkloric dimension. Matt's is the bodyguard Tam Lin, in
legend a captive of the faeries, here a fugitive from Scottish justice who
serves as Matt's compass both moral and geographical, giving him the tools he
needs to escape his fate and find his future.
Tam Lin is a welcome benevolence in a novel
abounding in creepily gothic images: the cows gestating the clone embryos
(''their bodies were exercised by giant metal arms that grasped their legs and
flexed them as though the cows were walking through an endless field''); the
''eejits,'' surgically brain-damaged laborers and servants who perform the
repetitive tasks on the estate; a mindless clone screaming as its body serves
its purpose, organ transplant, while Matt watches and recognizes their
horrifying kinship.
The author ably keeps her elements in balance, so
that the Dr. Frankenstein moments never become gratuitous; in fact, the
unemotional narration at times seems detached, wary of lingering too long in
any one place. The best scenes are the ones for which we get to stick around
for a while -- when Matt is kept for months in a sawdust-filled pen like an
animal by a malevolent housekeeper, or later, when he escapes the estate and
finds himself in a home for lost boys. The first scene is harrowingly desolate;
the second has plenty of spirit and even some humor, as Matt finds himself
leading a revolt.
While the question of Matt's humanity drives the
novel, it gets answered and then dropped too easily; still, it's an enormous
credit to Farmer that the story, character development and theme grow all of a
piece. Details about how the Farms came to be, how Mexico became Aztlán and how
Matteo Alacrán Primero became El Patrón become part of Matt's story as well: we
learn them as he does, and his knowledge moves the narrative forward.
Although ''The House of the Scorpion'' is
nominally science fiction, its conventions are primarily those of realistic
fiction, with more than a whiff of the old-fashioned adventure tale, the kind
we rarely see these days outside the fantasy genre. Both critics and young
readers appreciate books about children in trouble, the former for reasons more
high-minded than the latter. Although adults like to look for the social lesson
in tales of dreadful circumstance, kids know that trouble is more exciting than
contentment. Ask Pinocchio.
Drawing: Detail of jacket illustration by Russell Gordon for ''The
House of the Scorpion.''
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