This is a novel with such an uplifting energy to it as it follows the adventures of a young woman caught in a time of bloody conflict and the formation of a modern nation. But it's also a clever and self-assured historical satire in the way it upturns patriarchal values in favour of those who are marginalized – especially female and queer individuals. “The Adventures of China Iron” feels like a comedy in the classic sense of beginning in tragic circumstances and ending with a joyous resolution. Set in Argentina during the political turbulence of 1872, the story concerns a journey of a heroine born into nothing; she is an orphan without a name, raised by a tyrannical woman and forced into marriage during her adolescence to the gaucho Martin Fierro, a heroic masculine figure from Argentine folklore. After giving birth to two sons she is cast aside by her famed husband and this is where the novel starts with this heroine establishing her own name as well as naming a stray dog who has become her only friend. She reclaims the name China from its dismissive/negative connotations (it's a Quechuan term for a lower-class girl or woman) and maintains her husband's surname of Iron, the English word for Fierro. From here she bands together with Liz, a Scottish woman travelling across country and Rosario, a cattle farmer searching for somewhere to set up with his herd. We follow their entertaining journey to find a home and establish a family that is “linked by more than bloodlines.”
It's great reading how China Iron becomes her own individual hacking off her hair and how this allows her to tread more easily between a masculine and feminine sensibility. I also found it moving the way she gradually establishes a sexual relationship with Liz to form emotional bonds and discover bodily pleasures which were previously denied to her. But one of the most powerful parts of her education comes in her new way of mentally mapping the world to understand the underlying national and economic conditions which result in social disparities. When drinking a cup of tea she comes to understand the “suffering that also travels in tea” and that in drinking it “we drink the broken back of the man bent double as he cuts the leaves, and the broken back of the man carrying them.”
This also informs what's happening in her own country especially when they come to stay with a Colonel who has basically enslaved a number of gauchos and tortures those who do not submit to the colonial powers. These are people whose labour is exploited because the attitude towards the gauchos is that “the only country they were going to get was the one they were building for the colonels and landowners”. Therefore it's no wonder that the narrative of Martin Fierro which depicts the abuse of the gauchos and their role in the country's independence from Spain was so desired by the people and he became a celebrated figure. But while doing so it also valorises a certain image of masculinity and relegates female participants like China to being little more than a footnote. So it's inventive how this novel rewrites this foundational text recasting the myth of Martin Fierro and how the epic poem came to be created.
I enjoyed how China's relationships with both Liz and Martin becomes more complex over the course of the story. But an issue I had was when China and her crew finally arrive at a community of Indians. The prose comes to feel so exaggerated in its lushness and overly romanticised. China believes that she becomes one of the Indians so much so that the narrative takes on a collective voice “we don't want to crush anything underfoot... Our rivers are alive and the streams are animals, they know that we live as one, that we only kill what we need to eat”. This idealized view of a community feels so over-the-top that it came across as ridiculously simplified when I'm sure the reality was much more nuanced and complex. I appreciate that the story was keeping to a more comic tone and it's refreshing to read a historical novel where queer individuals aren't fated to a life of misery or death. But, for me, the later part of the book undermines the power of the story thus far. Nevertheless, this novel is very clever in how it offers an alternative view of a nation's mythology and overall it's a very pleasurable read.
