A Tale of Two Cultures

I finished reading Caravans last night. This novel is different from all the previous Michener novels I've read. First of all, it is considerably shorter: only 336 pages. While it has many of the usual elements--relationship of the people to the land, the forward march of history through time, the triumph of ordinary people--it is a complex, psychological drama that develops through the relationships of a handful of characters at a specific time in history. The year is 1946 and the setting is a remote, isolated yet critically important region in Central Asia. The terrain is harsh: enormous, jagged mountains and brutal dessert plains that stretch for miles. In 1946, Afghanistan is at the crossroads of history, literally and figuratively. The protagonist is a young American named Mark Miller (a.k.a. Marcus Meuhler), a Yale graduate and U.S. navy officer, assigned to the State Department for a reconnaissance mission in Afghanistan. (Does this sound familiar? I had to remind myself that I was reading Michener and not Wouk!) The story is told from Miller's perspective, another departure from Michener's usual format. Miller's superior at the American embassy, Captain Verbruggen is impressed--"You've got brains." (p. 6)--and gives him a special assignment. Miller is to locate and retrieve Ellen Jaspar, a 24 year old, gifted American college student who has "disappeared" after marrying an American-educated Afghani engineer who takes her to Afghanistan. Her prosperous, influential parents who have connections to a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, want her back. Ellen is the epitome of the American beauty: tall, blond, flawlessly beautiful and poised. I imagined she resembled Grace Kelly. How could a woman like this disappear in a country where most of the population is ethnic Pastun or other Persian ancestry? Miller, assisted by an Afghani aid to the embassy named Nur Muhammand, or "Nur", embark on an agonizing journey through the Dasht-i-Margo or "plain of the dead" in search of Ellen. When Miller finally gets a chance to interview Ellen's estranged husband Nazrullah, the Afghani is mysterious and evasive, as are all of the Afghan people that Miller has to work with. This is a chronic source of frustration for Miller (and the reader!). Caravans is a story of an epic clash of cultures: the unabashed, myopic, provincial American vs. the enigmatic, methodical and often dogmatic Asian. All of the major characters in this story are complex and emotionally conflicted as they attempt to cooperate in the search for Ellen. To the American, the Asians are a race of violent brigands; to the Asian, the Americans are just "hopelessly stupid" (p. 328). There are two incidents of unimaginable violence that occur early in the story, one of which Michener claimed to be an eye-witness and the other he claimed to have viewed photographs taken of the incident. As horrific and grotesque as it is, corporal punishment is not exclusive to remote and primitive societies like rural Afghanistan, but is blatantly condoned even in sophisticated, civilised cultures in the west. This paradox is personified in the character of German physician and Nazi operative Otto Stiglitz (with no intentional reference to the famous American photographer Alfred Stieglitz). Altogether, I would not consider Caravans to be my favorite, nor one of Michener's best novels, it is Michener, so it's still a pretty darn good book.