Don't Read `Mexico' For Its History

Mexico, with its vibrant history, has awaited a masterful storyteller to give life to that rich past for an American audience, and James A. Michener would seem perfect for the task. Unfortunately, "Mexico" (Random House, $25) is not so much a sweeping panorama, Michener-style, as the sweepings off the floor.

Set in the fictional city of Toledo, the story revolves around a bullfight between two rival toreros, but it also is the history of John Clay, a Mexican-born journalist who returns to his native land to cover the encounter. With the commingled blood of Spaniards, Americans and Indians pumping through his veins, it's through Clay's history that Michener attempts to tell Mexico's own.

And it is with this history that Michener fails completely. With so convoluted a knot to unravel, he prefers to gloss over large swaths of Mexico's past, only selecting occasional events for closer examination. Not only does Michener seem to have little understanding of the complexity of Mexican history - even worse, he often gets simple details wrong.

One character comments upon Aztec architecture in Mexico City in 1524 - three years after Cortes razed the city; in modern terms, this would be like admiring Japanese architecture in 1946 Hiroshima. Emperor Maximilian and Empress Charlotte are similarly slighted, with the latter also being insulted by errors in fact. One of history's great tragic tales is reduced to barely a footnote.

Saddest of all is Michener's treatment of Mexico's indigenous peoples. In the interest of economy, he lumps several native tribes into the amorphous, fictional Altomecs, depriving readers of any semblance of actual native history.

Yet it is with the Mexican Revolution that Michener's slipshod approach shows its worst form. Pancho Villa and Zapata barely rate a mention; instead, we are left with fictional rebel General Gurza. The reader can't help but agree with John Clay, when he reflects on that period: "I hope you've been able to make sense of all this, because . . . I was never able to."

Cut its 600-plus pages by half, retitle it "Matador," and Michener could have had a winner. He has a great knowledge of bullfighting, which he imparts with enthusiasm. In contrast to Hemingway, Michener views the ring not as an arena where man faces beast in a sport of death, but as an intricate art form.

Aware that most Americans find the sport barbaric, Michener coaxes the reader to see bullfighting in another light altogether. With great attention to detail, he imparts the long history of the art, where both bull and man face a contest of wills, nerve and intelligence in an ultimate dance of doom.

As "Mexico" stands, we have come to expect more from one of our great historical novelists. Michener is renowned for his ability to make history come alive and to render complicated events understandable. In "Mexico," he has done neither, and Mexico deserves better.

More rewarding is "My Lost Mexico: The Making of a Novel" (State House Press, $24.95), although it cannot be read independently of "Mexico." This brief book sets out the intriguing history of the novel, its gestation in 1961, Michener's rationale for laying it aside, and his manuscript's subsequent loss and rediscovery.

Michener includes many of his original outlines, notes and sections of unpublished text, as well as photographs of the people and places from which he would construct his story. He allows the reader into his own writing process and follows the book through numerous changes to its final form.

Most informative are the characters that various editors rejected, demonstrating that even famous authors are at the mercy of the blue pencil. Yet despite these major alterations, "Mexico" remains fatally flawed - and appreciably less than it could have been.

-- Jo-Ann Thompson is a Seattle writer.