The House of the Scorpion
Nancy Farmer
Scholastic 2002: 380 pages
Image courtesy of BYU English Department
Some things are just glimmers in the imagination…today. But tomorrow they could form the basis of a brave new world where people of the future pay for the hubris and bad judgment of an earlier generation—usually the generation living at the time of the writing. The best speculative fiction rests on this premise, and an author must have a thorough and intuitive knowledge not of what will happen, but of what is happening now. If someone really understands what’s happening in the labs, boardrooms, and voting chambers of a society, it doesn’t take much more work to envision how things soon will be.
Nancy Farmer, a three-time Newberry Honor author, has created the world of our great-grandchildren with just such deep understanding. Her 2002 National Book Award winning novel, The House of the Scorpion, takes several scientific, political, and social issues of the early 21st century and weaves them around one boy…or perhaps it is more accurate to say “boy.” His name is Matteo Alacràn, and the status of his humanity is not resolved until the end, at least in his own mind. His story incorporates the all-too-familiar themes of cloning, embryonic stem-cell research, terrorism, illegal immigration, encroaching socialism, government corruption, drug trafficking, human enslavement, religion, poverty and privilege, dysfunctional families, and child-rearing.
This may sound like too many too-big themes for one young adult novel, but it’s not. In real life, people and issues touch each other, and this is the case in the life of young Matt. At the beginning of the novel, which takes place at some unspecified time in the future, Matt is six years old and living alone in an isolated house on an opium plantation. His only companion is Celia, the cook up at the Big House. The Big House is home to El Patròn, the drug lord who owns this plantation and is one of the most powerful men in the country of Opium. El Patròn, whose name is also Matteo Alacràn, is rich and powerful enough to have anything he wants, including clones of himself to use as he chooses.
Young Matt learns that he is one such clone.
In the world of the novel, clones are treated not as humans, but as pets at best. But El Patròn’s clone is a cherished piece of property, so Matt is simultaneously spoiled and abhorred by those around him. The result is a character who is deeply flawed but also entirely sympathetic, and the reader turns page after page in the hopes that the little bit of love Matt does receive, from the cook and a body guard and a young girl, will help him become the person he will need to be. If he is to be a person, that is.
About two-thirds of the way through, the novel takes an unexpected turn. It is a plot development reminiscent of the hobbits’ return to the ravaged Shire in Tolkien’s Return of the King, and sometimes leaves the reader wondering if this part was necessary to the resolution of Matt’s story. But like Tolkien, Farmer needed to show that the consequences of choices reach far beyond our own lives, and therefore so must the solutions. Since El Patron’s choices affected people far beyond the borders of Opium, so would Matt’s.
If Nancy Farmer’s vision of the consequences of our actions is in any way accurate, future generations will have a great struggle ahead of them. In The House of the Scorpion, Farmer shows how those battles might be won. Power, greed, and corruption may win some of them, but love, courage and hope win the war.
