t first, Arslan is just another name in the news. Just another violent Middle Easterner in the media's ceaseless ebb and flow of violent Middle Easterners. Then, one day, principal Franklin Bond looks out the window of his Midwestern grade school and sees foreign soldiers in the streets of Kraftsville, Ill. The U.S is no longer untouched by the violence halfway around the world. Gen. Arslan has conquered America.
Arslan secures Kraftsville with terrifying efficiency. He fills the grade school with soldiers, turning every student into a hostage. He kills one teacher and rapes another, and also rapes a male eighth grader, making examples that are clear to every man and woman of Kraftsville. He enforces a bloody curfew. He billets a soldier in every house, and massacres the entire household when its assigned soldier is killed or hurt, even if no one in the house is responsible. And he cuts Kraftsville off from the rest of the world.
Arslan billets in Franklin's house and puts him in charge of Kraftsville. A patriotic, Christian American, Franklin finds himself collaborating with the conquering Muslim enemy. If he doesn't do what Arslan wants, everyone in Kraftsville will be massacred. There is no hope for Franklin, for Kraftsville or for America.
Then, Kraftsville receives a shortwave radio message from an underground resistance movement. ...
Timeless and never more relevant
Released in 1976, M.J. Engh's first novel, Arslan, immediately earned its author an impressive reputation. Her titular antihero, a Turkestani warlord, conquers the Soviet Union, Communist China and the United States with barely a shot fired. It's a flabbergasting inversion of the world-power natural order. Indeed, it sounds like the plot of a melodramatic power fantasy about an unbelievable evil empire, toppled by some Luke Skywalker anointed to save the universe. As a result, readers may assume that Hunt Morgan, the molested youth, is destined to lead the rebellion and destroy the villain, with Franklin Bond serving as his mentor. Franklin becomes Hunt's mentor; but there the resemblances to an immature power fantasy end.
Though Arslan spans many years, and ranges from Illinois to Bukhara and Tokyo, Engh doesn't write about the clash of armies, the vast sweep of imperial events. Instead, she focuses on one small town and two Everymen. Alternating Franklin and Hunt's first-person voices, she demonstrates how conquered people really behave. Franklin cooperates with the enemy to save his family, friends, students and neighbors. Hunt develops a close relationship with Arslan in order to stay alive. And the townspeople, instead of empathizing with Arslan's adolescent sex slave, blame the victim and scorn him as a homosexual.
Engh's picture of life under a dictatorship is sharp, sympathetic and disturbing. And with Frankin's and Hunt's viewpoints, she doesn't only illustrate the effects of tyranny. She paints a vivid, fascinating, realistic portrait of a violent, intelligent, charismatic tyrant, and by doing so, makes Arslan's incredible empire completely and dreadfully convincing.
