Lion’s Blood is a
novel of role reversal in which Europeans have been subjugated into
slavery by a thriving Islamic-African culture.
Set on an American continent to coincide with our timeline’s
American Civil War, the novel is more successful as a novel than it is as
an alternate history.
Barnes tells the story of Aidan O’Dere, an Irish
boy who is taken captive in a raid on his isolated fishing community and
taken to the New World to be sold as a slave.
His quick thinking makes him the personal slave of his master’s
younger son, Kai, who tends to treat him more as a friend than as
property. Nevertheless, there
is always the undercurrent that Kai owns Aidan and can do with him as he
pleases.
This is where the strength of Barnes’s novel
appears. From the first pages, he
depicts the brutality of slavery, not only physically, but mentally.
Aidan, his mother, and his sister are torn from their homes after watching
his father and other villagers killed and placed in inhumane
conditions. Their family is broken up upon reaching the New World,
Barnes's country of Bilalistan. Although Aidan and his mother find
themselves at the estate of the kind and generous Wakil Abu Ali, governor
of New Djibouti, it is clear that their lives are not their own.
By
making Aidan's owner relatively benign, Barnes hammers his point that
slavery is always denigrating and horrible, no matter how kind the master
thinks he is. Kai considers Aidan his friend, but Aidan's actions
and words must always be guarded, because he knows that giving offense,
even inadvertently, may cost his life. Kai, who as far as slave
masters are concerned, is enlightened, still can not conceive of the
inhumanity of the institution, to the extent that he views a slave's life
as free since the slave doesn't have to worry about things like food and
ceremonial obligations. The reader is never deceived by this way of
thinking and Lion's Blood provides an excellent answer to
antebellum apologists.
Barnes
not only portrays the complex relationship between Kai and Aidan, but also
between these characters and others, including Malik, Kai's uncle and
combat trainer, Sophia, the sex slave given to Kai and desired by Aidan,
and Lamiya, the daughter of an empress who is promised to Kai's older
brother, Ali. None of these relationships, or others, are as simple
as stereotypes would make them out to be, and Barnes handles each of them
with aplomb.
Where
the novel works less well is its portrayal of an alternate world.
Barnes evidently sat down with a large number of associates to work
through the changes which have occurred since his world branches off from
our own following Socrates' decision to flee from Athens around 400
BC. Unfortunately, the exigencies of plot required Barnes to build a
world similar to our own nineteenth century social structure, resulting in
an Islamic-African nation in North America which practiced slavery akin to
that practiced by the European nation which actually existed. While
acceptable, it does strain credulity at times, and not just when Barnes
refers to historical figures such as Leonardo da Vinci or Amadeus
Mozart. However, if the reader accepts Barnes's basic world, the
plot, characters and message of Lion's Blood more than make up for
a few weaknesses in setting.
Although
not mentioned anywhere, it appears that Lion's Blood is only the
first book of a possible series. Barnes and his characters, Kai and
Aidan, leave loose ends at the end of the novel which beg to be wrapped
up. Furthermore, in the final pages Barnes introduces several
situations which indicate that the world of Bilalistan is set for a sea
change which will mirror the end of slavery in the United States around
the same time in our history.
