Small World, by Jonathan Evison

An intricate historical puzzle composed of multigenerational family dynamics and suspense.

Jonathan Evison’s Small World is quite large actually, encompassing four sets of ancestors and associated persons from many distant countries. The stories of the characters in the novel begin in the 1800’s, entwine with each other over two hundred years, and collide, astonishingly, on a train ride in Oregon in 2019. It is the crossing of paths by disparate ancestors and the coming together of their descendants near the end of the story that suggest the title of the novel.

A variety of protagonists populate Small World. Evison’s development of them is brilliantly done, not only for its detail but also for its clever and subtle juxtaposing of the circumstances of their lives and the hardships they endure, culturally and physically. Racism and prejudice abound, blatantly in the eighteenth century parts of the story and evasively by the twenty-first century. The ancestors set the stage. George (Othello) Flowers is a runaway slave in Chicago, Wu Chen is from China, a gold rush prospector and then shopkeeper in San Francisco, John and Luyu Tully are American Indians struggling to make a home in the Rocky Mountains, and the Bergen twins from Ireland are separated in a Chicago orphanage, Nora sent to be a servant in the home of a rich man, Abraham Seymour, who was once a Jewish orphan in England, and Finn adopted by the Vogels, German immigrants intending to be farmers in the Midwest. Their descendants complete the themes: Walter Bergin, a railroad engineer; Malik Flowers, a budding basketball star; Jenny Chen, a successful businesswoman; and Laila Tully, a young woman fleeing from an abusive man. The villains are well done: Don LoPriori, a chauvinist business owner; Warnock, a slave owner; Boaz, an abusive boyfriend; and Master Searles, the orphanage director.

Small World is divided into multiple stories that at the outset don’t seem to have a connection. Each story has its own protagonist and antagonist, some of whom cross over into other stories as the novel progresses, embedded into an intricate pattern of plots that near the end come together with all the descendants boarding the train in Oregon. The novel begins in 2019 with the beginning of the train’s journey, the Bergen’s descendant Walter being the train’s engineer. Thereafter, times and characters jump between the eighteen and twenty-first centuries. There are three sections in the novel: Golden, Fortunes, and Horizons. Within each of those are multiple subsections, each of which contains a piece of each character’s plot through a particular time period. These subsections are like pieces of a large puzzle laid out on a table to be assembled by the reader as the novel progresses. It’s an extraordinary device used by the author to create suspense and tension as the stories move forward and, on a macro level, to demonstrate how a family’s history, while often thought of chronologically, is understood emotionally and, frequently, subconsciously. Mistakes and tragedies are repeated in between jubilation and good fortune.

Readers of Small World will find it hard to put the book down. The author does a masterful job of revealing the stories’ elements in a fashion that creates anticipation. The settings for the stories are beautifully described, whether a ship’s hold, the streets of New York, the Iowa prairie, a view of the Pacific, or a raging snowstorm in the Northwest. The imagery makes the character’s emotions palpable. So many times the reader will weep for the world, as Nora Bergen does, and realize, as the author so shrewdly demonstrates, that in family history the end of one’s story is but the beginning of another.

For more about Jonathan Evison, visit his website at http://www.jonathanevison.net.