The Carpet Makers

 
 

The Carpet Makers

by Andreas Eschbach

translated by Doryl Jensen

Tor

1995, reprinted 2005

 

 

The Carpet Makers is a German scifi novel from the 1990s that was translated into English a decade later. The structure of the book, and Eschbach's way of slowly expanding out and building up his narrative is unlike anything else I've read. It's kind of a masterpiece.
 

The title characters, the carpet makers, are artisans who create 'hair carpets,' an art form that is both central to the story and acts as a kind of metaphor or synecdoche for the power of the emperor.
 

A hair carpet is an elaborately patterned textile, about as long as a person is tall, and half as wide as it is long, intricately knotted, made entirely of human hair. It represents so much human labor that each maker weaves only a single carpet in his lifetime, starting when he is young, finishing when he is old, using solely the hair of his wives and daughters. He weaves for the glory of the emperor, who lives on another world. At the end of his life, he will sell the carpet for a large sum of money, so much that it will last his son his entire life, so that he can devote himself to the same work. Makers have many wives and daughters, and only one son who is permitted to survive infancy. This has been the tradition for longer than anyone can remember.

 

You learn this much in the first chapter, and if you're like me, you're already thinking about what kind of society is so stable that this practice can become a tradition for many generations, with prices that change so little that a single payment can reliably be spent over a lifetime. You're wondering about the power of an emperor who can compel this labor as an act of religious devotion. You're perhaps thinking that hair carpets seem both grotesque but also beautiful, and wondering about what it would mean to spend your entire life working meticulously on a single task. You're thinking about the technological inequality between the people who perform traditional handicrafts, and the emperor who rules multiple planets. Eschbach will spend the rest of the book slowly revealing the answers.

 
Each chapter is like a short story. They're all told in close third person, each following a new viewpoint character. Events or people from one story sometimes are heard about or have some influence on a later one. There is sort of an overarching plot, but also, the characters in each story are mostly concerned with their own lives and own problems. The bigger picture emerges at the margins.

 
There is a logic to the order of the stories, although it's more obvious in retrospect. We follow the route that hair carpets take, from the house of the makers, to being bought by a trader, transported overland to the port city, to being shipped off-world. At the same time, we follow the progress of a rumor, that the emperor has abdicated, that the empire is dissolved, that there's no one to make hair carpets for anymore. Tradition on this world is harsh, and strictly enforced. To disobey, even to doubt, means death. And so we also follow a trail of ruined dreams, human sacrifices to a draconian social order. The price of empire is payed in lives.
 

Once off-world, we eventually learn the origin of the hair carpet tradition, and what the carpets are ultimately used for by the immortal emperor. I don't want to say too much here. Learning more and more, and repeatedly revising what you think you know, is one of the pleasures of this book. Eschbach has crafted a tale that grows by the accumulation of clues and references. This is a thoughtfully told tale, and it inspires you to think as you read it, to work through the implications of everything you learn, and especially to attend to the human costs.
 

This is one of the most masterful and most unusual science fiction novels I've read. There's almost no action. The characters are all ordinary people, trying to live the best lives they can in a system that would grind them to dust for any act of heresy or defiance. But the scale and the scope of it all is nonetheless humbling. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes sociological science fiction.