The Carpet Makers

A desiccated and dusty planet where carpet weavers spend their entire lives hunched over a loom, weaving a carpet made of hair drawn from their wives. It takes a lifetime to produce a single carpet which is sold to line the Emperor's palace. The proceeds are passed to the son who will spend his life weaving his own carpet and so on through the generations.

In a single first chapter this entire system is outlined and explained with a beautifully strict economy of words. It's tightly woven (sorry) and was originally conceived as a standalone short story.

From here Eschbach pulls back the lens and each chapter introduces another character and furthers our understanding of this galaxy spanning system of fealty to the godlike Emperor.

I don't want to say much more. Each narrator is introduced and discarded and it's a credit to Eschbach that he is able to keep introducing new, fleshed out and realized characters without getting bogged down. The book is like a series of grim but wonderfully rendered and interconnected short stories.

I'm still not sure how I feel about the conclusion but getting there was so enjoyably readable.

On a distant planet the men sit making intricate carpets from the hair of their wives and daughters. Each carpet takes a lifetime to make and each man makes only one. His son follows in the same traditional art, designing and making his single carpet. The empire's space ships pick up the carpets and they are sent to decorate the palace of the Emperor.

Rumours start to circulate that the Emperor is dead and the empire is no more. But still the carpet makers continue their work. When a space ship lands on the planet the ship's crew knows nothing of the carpet makers or the carpets. People who have been to the palace say they have never seen such a carpet there.

Eschbach has given us a series of what seems like interlinked short stories, each one centering on a single character, but each one also adding to the narrative. He steadily builds his story through a sense of mystery towards the final revelation. There are so many possibilities for metaphor here, of weaving a story, of pulling together the loose threads, of only seeing a hint of the story (carpet) because we are looking at the back of it, and I will not fall into the metaphor trap.

The prose is easy to read and without the clumsiness that can sometimes happen with a translated work. Eschbach's imagination carries us through the occasional weirdness of the story, and through our times of wondering what happened to a character or two who seems to have disappeared from the story. His final revelation is one of total insanity and I was left wondering how this situation could even have been reasonable or possible. However, Eschbach made it sound very believable.