Fiction

Zachary Thomas Dodson

Bats of the Republic: An Illuminated Novel

Doubleday

Hardcover, 978-0-385-53983-8 (also available as an ebook), 448 pgs., $27.95

October 6, 2015

In 1843, naturalist Zadock Thomas sets out from Chicago on an urgent mission to deliver a letter from his employer to a general in the Republic of Texas. At the same time, sort of, in the post-Collapse, post-United States of 2143, Zeke Thomas’s grandfather, a senator, has just died and Zeke is next in line for the office, which is now determined by bloodline. Seven senators compose the governing body of the remaining seven City-States, a totalitarian surveillance regime where writing implements and private documents are illegal. Zeke’s grandmother gives him an old letter of his grandfather’s that has never been opened because the family is frightened the letter may cast doubt on the Thomas bloodline. Then the letter goes missing.

Bats of the Republic: An Illuminated Novel by Zachary Thomas Dodson, who also designed the book, is an inspired blend of historical fiction, dystopian science fiction, traditional mystery, spiritualism, love story, adventure, Texas history, and Mexican folk tales. History and the future come together in parallel narratives, the historical half rendered in sepia tones and hand-drawn illustrations, the future rendered in LED green and schematics. Dodson is skilled at switching between the two styles. The elaborate plot requires mental gymnastics and the pacing is sometimes uneven, but as the climax nears and the pacing accelerates, the two narratives race against the clock, facing each other on alternate pages with mini-cliffhangers skillfully placed at the end of each page.

Dodson creates imagery that is sometimes sweet, as when Zeke holds hands with his wife and her hand moves “around like a burrowing animal until it found a comfortable place,” and sometimes striking, as when he describes bats as “like little pieces broken out of the desert night sky.” Dodson engages in word play when Zeke refers to the City-State as “claustrotopia,” and in philosophy as Zeke asks, “Fight or flight or dream: How can I be free?”

Dodson could be addressing the current state of politics in the United States when Zeke’s father-in-law worries that “these city-states have begun to take on the air of a failed political experiment,” and Texas in particular with “fear-mongering” and the impression that “after its commissioning, this city-state was allowed to grow according to its own perverse idea of justice.” This is history as lesson and the future as a warning to mind the present.

Bats of the Republic is an astonishingly creative and beautifully bound and illustrated volume, complete with a traditional satin ribbon to mark your place. It puts me in mind of medieval monks creating codices that are works of art. There are hand-drawn maps, naturalist drawings of animals native (maybe) to the southwestern United States (including a jackalope and a chupacabra), family trees, identification cards, transcripts of phone calls, portraits, and a letter in a sealed envelope, to name but a few. I also learned that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who open the letter first and those who don’t.

While drawing inspiration from 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World, Bats of the Republic may possibly be that rarest of treats — something new under the sun.

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