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(More customer reviews)With "Argall," Vollmann makes a triumphant return to his ambitious "Seven Dreams" series of novels, detailing the invasion of North America by Europeans and the legacy of violence and oppression they left behind. "Argall" deals with the British annexation of what they later called Virginia, and focuses on three colorful characters: Pocahontas, Capt. John Smith, and the sinister Sir Samuel Argall, who eventually kidnaps Pocahontas and introduces slavery into the New World.
As the voluminous notes attest, Vollmann has done his homework and gives us what is probably the most historically accurate version of the Pocahontas story. And he does so in an astonishing re-creation of Elizabethan prose. This isn't the elegant Augustan prose adapted by Barth in "The Sot-Weed Factor" and Pynchon in "Mason & Dixon"; this is the earlier, racier prose of the young turks of Shakespeare's day like Robert Greene, Thomas Dekker, and especially Thomas Nashe. As one of Vollmann's sources says of that era, "the whole style of the day was inflated--in writing and in living" (p. 707); hence Vollmann uses a suitably inflated style that captures the age in all its vitality and vulgarity. As both a historical novel and a linguistic tour de force, "Argall" is a magnificent achievement.
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