What I Am Reading: "Gods of Jade and Shadow" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

In this active decade-long anniversary of the Jazz Age, I try to keep the spirit alive periodically with a book of the era. Usually it is a period piece, but in this case I went contemporary, and off of the usual Jazz Age beaten path between New York and Berlin. Gods of Jade and Shadow, published this year, is a fantasy set in Jazz Age Mexico.

The story is shaped around Maya mythology. It can even be seen as its own applied myth: the characters are very aware of how acting within the constraints of proper storytelling relates to the exercise of magical power. The main character, Casiopea Tun, is a young, mixed-race girl living a life of toil with her relations in Uukumal, a small town on the Yucatán peninsula, in 1927. She quietly dreams of a better life, of the big city and automobiles, in between working and enduring the spite of her grandfather and her cousin, Martín. Despite (or because of) her astronomical name and stargazing, she was born under a bad sign. One day, while the family is off enjoying a holiday and she is stuck working at home, she opens a magic chest by the foot of her grandfather's bed, and accidentally frees Hun-Kamé, a Mayan god of death.

Hun-Kamé had been deposed from his throne in Xibalba, the underworld, by his brother, Vucub-Kamé (the author's spellings are apparently slightly modified from their proper use). During the opening, Casiopea has a small shard of his bone (and thus of his essence) embedded in her hand; he must thus take her with him as he travels in search of his few body parts secreted elsewhere, and then to confront his brother for the throne. As time passes, he becomes more human due to his link with Casiopea, and she wastes away from the influence of a god of death.

Casiopea has an impressive ability to compartmentalize; and she easily comes with him, while continuing to display the same spirit of defiance that did not endear her to her patriarchal family. She is also able to set aside with minimal fuss her conservative upbringing as she goes into the big, modern city that she had secretly dreamed of. Hun-Kamé, meanwhile, goes from immovable and intimidating to more tender and understanding, while never losing sight of his mission. Her compartmentalizing and his instant familiarity with the modern world (he has been trapped for 50 years) prevents this from becoming a tedious fish-out-of-water comedy and lets everyone get on with the story.

They travel in pursuit of bodily reconstruction from Mérida, the capital of Yucatán, to Veracruz, to Mexico City, each step getting faster, more modern, more Art Deco and bakelite, urban Mexico imitating the customs of the United States. After a sacrifice of hair is necessary to conjure some ghosts, Casiopea even gets a bob. At the end of their trail to restore Hun-Kamé's body, their last stop is Tijuana, where they arrive at the Tierra Blanca, a massive resort casino that Vucub-Kamé has had built. Vucub-Kamé is more ambitious than his brother was; without human belief, the power of the gods has waned, and they have settled into a restful state. Vucub-Kamé, however, wishes to restore them to their bloody, human-sacrificial glory, and his casino is styled after an old Mayan pyramid, and is meant to channel the magic of the span of country between it and their base in Yucatán. This worked well for me as a plot point - Art Deco was in fact influenced by Mayan architecture and design; and the casino is modern and opulent, while incorporating the iconography necessary for its magical purpose. Vucub-Kamé explains the casino to his brother by saying, "well we couldn't exactly have a pyramid, could we? This is a modern adaptation." I was hoping that this exact connection would be made in a book about the Jazz Age and Mexico.

Anyway, architecture aside, Casiopea's gradually-worsening fears come to pass. She decides to save the world instead of get the boy (spurning a developing romance with increasingly-human Hun-Kamé), and thus must walk the black road of Xibalba and arrive at the Jade Palace before her shitty cousin, who has been recruited as Vucub-Kamé's champion. This road conforms to her desires, transporting her through its shadows to her requested destination. In this part of the story especially she does well to keep in mind that she is the hero in a mythological story: dealing with gods and demons who are not omnipotent, but must use their magic craftily, often in manipulation of humankind. Here and earlier she looks to the examples of the Hero Twins, slightly elusive mythological figures who had traveled into Xibalba and eluded its many dangers. They are another example of the duality present through the story: Casiopea and Martín, Vucub-Kamé and Hun-Kamé, and Hun-Kamé and Casiopea as they are bonded to each other and grow closer. However, as can be guessed from her rejection of romance and Hun-Kamé’s possible mortality, this is not a modern story about defying the gods and magic. At the end of the story, everything is restored to its supernatural order, and Casiopea is rewarded her happy, modern life that she dreams of.