I had one unconventional history tutorial as an undergraduate long ago. Sitting in a chair in a depressing basement classroom during wintertime, the tutor, instead of engaging on material discussed during lectures, was asking what-if questions. What if, instead of what happened in the history books, things took a different turn. What if Germany had won the Second World War? What if the Mongols did not sack Baghdad? What if Imperial China had not attacked Burma?
Some novels used what-if as its speculative root. Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle tries to imagine a victorious Axis and the reality of living in a Nazi and Japan-occupied America. And more relevant to the subject of this post, Faisal Tehrani’s 1515 explores the question, what if Malacca had defeated the Portuguese invasion in 1511.
The novel 1515 (first published in 2003) can be a little bit confusing because there are multiple storylines of the same characters that run parallel to each other. It is almost like employing a parallel universe trick as a device, but it is not. If I could attempt to describe the novel succinctly (and if I understood it properly), 1515 is a story of two what-ifs on top of actual history arising from the main character’s bouts of amnesia.
One case of what-if has Malacca fantastically ending up conquering Portugal. That brings my mind to a game where that is possible: Europa Universalis IV. But that possibility requires an expert with deep knowledge of the game’s mechanics as defeating Portugal as Malacca is not easy. I suspect only playing a Native America tribe or any southern African nation is harder than playing a Southeast Asia civilization in that game.
It is a game but Europa Universalis IV tries to simulate history as closely as possible within its own rational logic. In contrast, 1515 requires a heavy dose of magical realism to enable Malacca win the 1511 battles and then to invade Portugal successfully on the other side of the planet. In Faisal Tehrani’s novel, Malacca wins because its military leaders could fly with krises in hand and with Koranic verses incanted as shield against Portuguese bullets.
That reminds me of the feeling I had while reading Salman Rushdie’s Victory City. But maybe that comparison is inappropriate because Rushdie’s magic has a more comprehensively big role in its world: a great city gets made instantly out of the ground with deities interacting with humans directly. That kind of magic. This is unlike 1515 where its magic is more down to earth and less all-encompassing.
Maybe, in terms of the casualness of magic, the magic in 1515 is more akin to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It is the flying kung fu type of superhuman feats, with a tiny dose of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I use the term magic here but maybe I mean something else altogether. But magic is never really the point of the novel and that is something other people have written about earlier.