by Michael Hingston
BIBLIOASIS
2022/$24.95/302 pp.
The used bookstore is one of the last bastions of strange coincidences and hidden archives—the dustier and more idiosyncratically organized, the better. So it’s only fitting that when Edmonton-based author Michael Hingston came across a copy of Javier Maria’s novel All Souls as he casually browsed Alhambra Books, neither he nor the reader could imagine that it would eventually lead him to a cliff on an uninhabited island in the Caribbean, bleeding, accompanied by the contested ruler of the same island’s imaginary kingdom.
Try Not to Be Strange takes on the magnificent feat of writing the history of a persistent and yet barely extant literary kingdom. I was mostly shocked by how unknown the story of the Kingdom of Redonda is beyond a select group of dedicated royals and disputed royals. It was “founded” in the late 19th century by the science fiction author M.P. Shiel, who had been “gifted” the small, difficult to access and mostly uninhabited island by his father, possibly as a joke and possibly as an attempt to enlarge the reputation of the family name. Shiel reluctantly—and then shrewdly—makes the story his own in his later life while trying to draw more attention to his writing, a blend of fact and faction that influences the strange road Redonda takes from there. Onwards through the decades, the kingdom is handed down in literary circles: each successive king is responsible for maintaining the literary archives of the previous king and advocating on behalf of the kingdom. The rulers have also given out any number of bewildering royal titles, including the Duke of Bonafides, Guardian of the Guano (the actual island is covered in bat and bird poop), and Viscount of Hue and Dye (for an artist who painted imagined citizens of Redonda).
Despite the many layers of absurdity, Hingston himself is a dedicated archivist and historian. He wakes early to participate in international auctions to spend his personal savings on the notebooks and scrap papers of the various Redondan kings. He sporadically but persistently commits years of his life trying to understand the twists and turns of an increasingly complicated royal lineage. Finally he visits the remote Caribbean island to try to understand how it exists as a geographical place and not just a conquered and contested territory in the minds of a sizable and ever-growing number of barroom poets and novelists.
The charm of the book, really, is the earnestness with which Hingston approaches the story. He painstakingly recreates and tries to understand the ramblings of multiple Redondan kings. He contends with all of the problematic characters and ideas and thinks them through. You could not ask more of a royal archivist—even if the kingdom is questionable to begin with.
Megan Clark is a writer and librarian from Lethbridge.
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