The Boatmaker

Benditt’s well-crafted debut ferries readers from Small Island, “a tiny rock at the end of the world,” to the bustling capital of a kingdom referred to only as the Mainland. The novel begins as a wondrously strange, grim portrait of an isolated community, then becomes a leaden allegory about the history of money and the fear of a fast-approaching modernity (a reference to the “humming telegraph wire” suggests the story takes place sometime in the late 19th century, on an alternate version of earth). After a frequently drunken woodworker dreams of a blue wolf that carries him across the ocean on its back, he is inspired to build a boat. The taciturn man sails away from his home, whose inhabitants keep “running accounts [that] stretch back over generations, connecting everyone,” and eventually reaches the Mainland, where he attempts to decipher its more modern economy. There, he finds that the king’s costly modernization program, which is financed by the Jewish House of Lippsted, a Rothschild-like banking empire, has engendered the rise of a messianic group espousing anti-Semitism. The novel credibly depicts the conspiratorial energies let loose in this fictional, debt-ridden kingdom, but it never quite recaptures the spellbinding intensity of the opening section, set on the barren but imaginative Small Island. (Feb.)