(2 of 2)
So were his convictions—at first. But friendship with the agrarian conservatives confused and incapacitated him. When Washington relieved him of his post he was glad; gladder still when his conservative friends won in Islandia's parliament. Later on, he even took up arms in Islandia's defense, and won what was rarely offered a foreigner: an invitation to spend his life there.
Slow-paced, lucid, and almost without temperature, the tale of Lang's and Islandia's crisis is effortless, fluent reading, spun out in inexhaustible detail. Nowhere on its surface, does it really take tough hold of what it is talking about. But between the lines, and somewhere beneath the full consciousness of its author, it is powerful and revealing in a sense that such fantasies as More's Utopia, Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson could not be.
Those books, products of the youth and prime of an age, blazed with hope and energy. The product of modern time, Islandia is vivid chiefly with the desire for complete escape from the actual world. It tries to make that escape so detailed, so palpable, that it will outrealize reality. It also tries to anatomize (and to dream solutions for) those pressures which have made escape so desirable.
In his career as consul, his personal relationships, and his cloven allegiance toward the U.S. and Islandia, John Lang is forever tortured by indecision and emotional tepidity. He is confused between the ethics of a cultivated New Englander and the ethics which are assigned to Islandians. As Lang says to the American girl whom he ultimately marries, "those who are free of pressure can be sure."
What those pressures were, he seems never clearly to have known. But they were sufficient to bring on fears of responsibility, headaches, moments of amnesia. The psychiatric amateur will recognize them as symptoms of that disease which has afflicted nearly every great symbolic modern hero since Quixote-Panza and Hamlet: schizophrenia.
Islandia is what painters would call a trompe-l'oeil, on a vast scale. It is a remarkably ingenious mural, curious, pleasing to any idle eye, and mildly allegorical. It is also a manifesto, illuminating if unintentional, of modern psychological defeatism.