Sean's Reviews > Caravans

Definitely one of the lesser James Michener novels. An American embassy worker in Kabul, 1946 goes searching for a missing American girl who has run off with a Afghani. The book is vaguely interesting for its descriptions of an Afghanistan mostly untouched by Western influences, but little else. You're not going to remember any of the characters. There is exactly one gripping scene, when the protagonist witnesses a adulterous woman stoned to death by a mob in Kandahar. Also, the book has a fairly nuanced treatment of the Islamic mullahs, who are portrayed as the progressive element in Afghan culture - very unlike most modern depictions of the Taliban.

It is funny to think Michener was considered shockingly liberal by the standards of the 1950s. His books are completely retrograde by today's standards (ask my wife about how Michener treats his female characters). Literary qualities aside, Michener's novels (particularly the early ones) serve as a very interesting signpost in the development of Western thought over the past seventy-five years. This was what liberal, middlebrow literary culture looked like prior to the great cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. His books are totally free of the identity politics that dominates the cultural conversation today, for instance (he has "Caravans"' protagonist refer to certain practices in Afghan culture as "disgusting sodomy" without blinking - try finding a modern New York Times bestseller that does that!)

Moving on, one of the most interesting books Michener wrote was "The Drifters", which is about the emerging hippie and anti-war subculture in 1968 America and Europe. It's not a great book, but it is rather unique as a picture of the 1960s youth culture from the perspective of someone we would now call a member of the WASP Establishment (Michener was born in 1907, so was sixty-one at the time he wrote The Drifters). Although Michener was never a great writer, he was a pretty fair one, and attempted to record objectively what he saw as the new cultural consensus emerging from the death of the Establishment in 1960s America.

Post-Boomer generations in the West have grown up with that consensus, first expressed by the 1960s youth culture and then the subsequent rights movements - sexual liberation, feminism, gay rights, etc. Almost all literature produced since then either takes these ideas and assumptions for granted (or attacks them without quarter). For intelligent members of the Millennial generation, who have grown up in a world of rape culture, Whiteness Studies departments in universities, and Presidential proclamations celebrating GLBT Pride Month, reading Michener's books can help us realize that once upon a time, not so long ago, such cultural events would have been considered not just wrong, but totally unthinkable. Reading Michener's books, among others, can help us critically look at our own unquestioned assumptions about how the world should work.

That's a lot to take out of middlebrow novels like "Caravans", but since the plot and characterization is so thin, you might as well focus on their place in recent history rather than their actual literary quality.