t first it seems all right, it seems that The Carpet Makers is going to be a simple ride. In the first pages of Andreas Eschbach's stunning novel from Germany, a story does seem to begin, and despite a few warning signs of some dislocating heterodoxy in the nuances of his telling, we settle down, as humans do everywhere, and say to ourselves: It's going to be OK; if there's a story it'll be all right. So we begin to read, begin to respond to various cues that this young German writer's first book (originally published as Die Haarteppichknupfer in 1996) is an SF novel, set in a galaxy far away, just like home.
So. On a desert planet that is not Earth—only slowly do we realize that Earth will never be mentioned here, that The Carpet Makers is wholly detached from any link to Earth—we discover a worldwide society of human beings structured around the making of carpets, which are shipped off-planet on a regular basis to enrich the Palace of the immortal Emperor. This may sound a bit archaic, a bit European, a bit choked with extraneous meaning, a bit allegorical, but we let it pass.
Each individual carpet maker (we learn) is a paterfamilias who lives off money inherited from his father; he will have two or more wives, each with different-colored hair. When he is young, the paterfamilias will design the carpet that will take the rest of his active life to make. It will be woven from the hair of his wives; later wives will normally be selected for hair whose hue and texture befits the already-fixed pattern of the carpet. Female children also contribute their hair. The border of the carpet will be woven from the armpit hair of all the wives. Near the end of his life, the paterfamilias will give the completed carpet to his only son (only one son in any family being allowed to survive), who will then sell it at a central depot, living the rest of his life on the receipts as carpet maker for the Emperor, just as his father's father's father did, in a tradition extending back 80,000 years or more.
We learn most of this in the first chapter. We are introduced to the paterfamilias, Ostvan; to his son and heir, Abron; and to Garliad, one of his wives, who is pregnant—a time of great stress, as her child will be slaughtered if it is male. The situation is strange, but as readers of space operas and planetary romances and anthropological SF in general we are used to stranger scenes. And just as we might expect, we learn from Abron of rumors that the Empire has fallen, that the Emperor has abdicated. Ostvan says only, as though he were uttering a mantra of immobility: "The glory of the Emperor will outlast the light of the stars!" And he dismisses the rebellious Abron, who we guess will be our main protagonist as the tale progresses, the Rosencavalier who sweeps with a new broom, who brings light and love and meaning to the occluded world, who gets the girl. Meanwhile (we are still in the first, short chapter), Garliad has just given birth—tragically, to a son. Ostvan takes his ceremonial sword from the wall, for only one son may live. He goes upstairs and kills Abron.
More mosaic than fixup
The second chapter begins. We are introduced to a hair-carpet trader, who responds to rumors of the Emperor's abdication with another fixating mantra, like the brainwashed Raymond Shaw in Richard Condon's great Manchurian Candidate (1959):
"The Emperor? Is it possible for the Emperor to abdicate? Can the sun shine without him? ... " The merchant shook his fat head. "And why do the Imperial Shipsmen buy the hair carpets from me just as they've always done ..."
As the trader makes clear, this immobile, seemingly primitive society knows about interstellar flight; everyone knows that the Emperor is half a galaxy away—Eschbach has an irritating habit, shared by lots of non-anglophone SF writers, of describing any group of stars bigger than a breadbox as a "galaxy"—and that aeons have passed without change.
In this chapter, we are also introduced to Dirilja, the trader's rebellious daughter, who is in love with Abron. She is obviously a good second choice as protagonist. Predictably, she escapes a planned marriage and treks outcast through the world until she comes to Ostvan's house, where his wives tell her what has happened. At this point, Eschbach truncates another easy-as-pie foolproof beginning point. Ostvan's wives decide that Dirilja must become one of his spouses, even though he is now too old to penetrate her. She agrees.
The third chapter jumps decades. A teacher visits the Ostvan house. Dirilja is now middle-aged (and will never appear in the novel again). Ostvan's son, also named Ostvan, is beginning his life task. The teacher learns that a stranger—perhaps a stranded spacefarer—may be in the neighborhood. But before he can contact him, and maybe salve his deep immobilized anomie with news from abroad, an itinerant preacher out for revenge has him stoned to death.
There are 17 more chapters. In chapter four, a carpet maker's life is ruined when his house burns to the ground. In chapter five, a pedlar woman finds the spacefarer, who leaves her quickly. In chapter six, we learn the the spacefarer, disobeying his survey fleet's standing orders, has landed on one of the hair-carpet planets—round about here we learn that there are thousands of them, all identical—to reconnoiter in person. He sounds a bit like a protagonist, but he's soon captured and disappears, pretty well for good.
I won't continue chapter by chapter, but it's pretty clear something very strange and—synopsis cannot convey the flavor—enthralling is going on here. It is crepuscular, it tastes of ashes; but each new chapter enchains us again in Story. Though it shares some characteristics, The Carpet Makers is not an example of what I used to call—before everybody's (excepting only its originator, A.E. van Vogt) hatred for the term finally got through to me—a fixup, a novel-length assemblage of previously written stories. A good fixup induces a salutary vertigo in the point of view, jostles readers into the co-creative task of filling in the gaps between dizzyingly disjunct segments, and in the best examples generates a sense that through the gaps and vortices something like a diorama of something rich and strange may come to view, a peephole epic of a SF world laid out in segments, a kind of voyeur's glimpse of the savage jolting prompts of time passing. The Carpet Makers hints at this affect at points, but in two ways significantly differs from the mosaic: first, the stories embedded in the text are never standalone, and never finish; which means that, second, Eschbach's novel, like Gene Wolfe's Peace (1975), is about not Time but Death: because stories that do not conclude kill time dead. Both novels make us read on in the hope that something will finish, that we will not be left behind, that the clock will tick; both novels leave us there, staring at a blank face, until their very last words grant what might be called tintinnabulation (see below).
A story that will never end
It is a metaphor to say that a story that will not end has a blank face. With The Carpet Makers, it is also a literal description of the heart of this book, though Eschbach never actually makes his point in so many words. (That is part of his strength: that his book is so open, because its individual strands are so familiar and seemingly storyable; and simultaneously so shut, because, at a really very fundamental level, he doesn't tell us what he's doing.) The most obvious unspoken silence, like the visibility of the Purloined Letter, irradiates almost every page: It is the silence of the hair carpets themselves, their utter silence as art. Beyond mentioning certain geometrical patterns, which are never in fact described, Eschbach very carefully refuses to describe the carpets at all. For thousands of years on thousands of planets, whole cultures have ruthlessly focused their cultural/economical energy on the making of carpets whose human/aesthetic import is nil: for they are not pictorial, as tapestries would be, which means they weave no tale; nor do they present any non-pictorial iconography, of a sort that might embed a clue, or a tale, or a faith, or a memory, or an augur; nor do they, when assembled in their thousands, convey any global sense or sensation, beyond (in some of the characters) disgust. The novel may leave the carpets behind for much of its length—there is a great deal of plot for the reader to unpack, plot whose ultimate implications are quite extraordinarily cruel—but the facelessness of the carpets governs every page. The Carpet Makers is—like the carpets it does not describe—woven into the shape of a carpet it does not describe.
The strangest thing about this novel, after the savageries of cultural despair it slowly unpacks, is how deeply enjoyable it is. Part of this aesthetic joy comes of course from surprise: Time and again, the reader is jerked out of true by yet another death of yet another potential story-bearer; time and again, some inchworm advance toward climax promises us that there will be a final revelation of backstory (which indeed comes) adequate to explain this punished universe; and time and again, when we least expect it, a close homage to a classic American SF writer (Isaac Asimov, Van Vogt, Wolfe and others) will jolt us into realizing how conscious Eschbach is of the generic roots of any tale set in a galactic Empire—and of how deliberately he has transgressed the tropic lust of genre stories to come out right.
But if we stop here we risk a real unfairness to The Carpet Makers. The hopscotch chapters of the book have taken us a long way from the carpet makers whose detailed lives thrum beneath every distant page; much has been exposed, of Emperors and rebels and long cruelty; and it is only in the last few pages that we return to the place we started. We are in the house of the younger Ostvan, who is continuing to weave heatdeath carpets out of the dead hair of wives. The revelations of the book as a whole hover over him, a whole world of change about to tintinnabulate in his soul. Listen to the bells! But he refuses, refuses. Finally the knotting needle slips in his trembling hand, he wounds his carpet. The last sentence of the novel is "Then, finally, the tears came."
It is a miracle of change. It melts the book, it brings us face to face with a human face at last. "Not I, not I," said D.H. Lawrence after coming through World War I:
Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
