He introduces her to a mummy whom he identifies as an immortal spirit that controls the world, and using ventriloquism, tricks the hardened girl into believing him. She finds a moment’s reprieve, though, when she sees Rudenko shove off on a ship heading toward certain death on Seal Island, a prison community from which no one returns.įrom far away, a shaman named Lunasaq arrives to save the wretched slaves, and he takes Cidaq into his care. Itself a barren land, no one lives on Kodiak with any comfort – least of all a young girl among so many overworked men.

Even when she arrives at Kodiak, where the Aleutian men of her island have been enslaved, she is no better off. Men are horrible, especially her chief torturer – a hulk named Rudenko. As if it were part of the deal, she is used and beaten and discarded along the way. Then another Russian ship arrives on their island, and the women of the tribe pay passage for Cidaq to sail to civilization. From that victory they are able to make it through a year. But out of necessity they try, and with fourteen-year-old Cidaq at the helm of a kayak, they manage to harpoon a 19-ton whale. The spirits forbade women to hunt, so they are hopelessly untrained in providing food for themselves. The women are left behind to die in the harsh, interminable winters. Some hunters from Russia pillage an Aleutian tribe and take all of the men into slavery. It is about strength and radical faith prevailing over injustice and the limits of whatever truths we humans find “self-evident.” It’s not unlike the Grand Inquisitor section in The Brothers Karamazov, but I found it a hundred times more powerful.Ĭan it be recounted? Not quickly, but I’ll give it a shot:

But what I’ll always remember about the book is the tragic story of Cidaq. There is much to love about Alaska, including Michener’s carefully stylized prose, the detail that he paints with the widest brush in all of modern literature, and the way he manages to illustrate the complexity of even the most ancient human social dynamics. Later we meet humans like Tevuk and the benevolent priest Azazruk, but it isn’t for a hundred massive pages that characters with pronounceable names like “Captain Cook” are introduced.

Published in 1988, the story opens before the landmass exists, and the characters are given names like “Mastodon,” a mastodon, and “Matriarch,” a battle-ax of an old woolly mammoth. Is it because he’s too popular? Or because he had help with his painstaking geographical research? The critical disregard doesn’t bother me, though, except that I wish there was someone with whom I could chat about the most recent book I loved, Alaska. I can’t figure out why James Michener gets such short shrift.

Alaska michener review