1916, just before the Russian revolution. The fourth section moves even further back, to Vienna in 1809. Napoleon talks with Beethoven; Haydn is in his final years. This moment in time is the origin of the lead soldier – or is it? Mystery swirls around it.
These middle parts of Empires, while revealing much more of the historical depths that fascinate Earls, suffer from a lack of the immediacy that defined the first two sections. This is perhaps due to changes in style – after the seamless interior access the reader is granted earlier in the book, parts three and four are comprised of an interview transcript and diary entries, respectively. The Girdwood and London sections are so engaging, and we are so embedded and invested in these characters, that the shifts to new characters and settings break the spell. The effort to place these people and show us their anxieties would have been better suited to a much longer novel. Thankfully, the final section, set in Hong Kong in 2019, returns us to the characters from the first half.
But if Empires is uneven, it’s not fatally so. There are always new details to pick up and link back to the sections of the novel set nearer to the present. Earls’ writing is detailed but inviting, giving us access to the minds of characters grappling with the push and pull of life. With its emphasis on the need to read the world super-attentively, it leans towards the literary. Empires is not necessarily a challenging reading experience but the questions it asks are complex. Meditating on the way we imagine the past – its texture, colour and shape – and exploring how the past is subtly but profoundly ingrained in the present, this is a book that both provokes and entertains.
