Thomas More's Magician, by Toby Green

The destructive nature of empire

Thomas More's Magician seeks to resuscitate part of Spanish colonial history, and place it parallel to the present. It is a sometimes dissonant but sincere fusion of satire, history and philosophical inquiry. Roping in Cervantes, utopian literature and Plato to his cause, the author - a historian, travel writer and sometime Green Party councillor - places a political manifesto inside this historical biography.

Thomas More's Magician seeks to resuscitate part of Spanish colonial history, and place it parallel to the present. It is a sometimes dissonant but sincere fusion of satire, history and philosophical inquiry. Roping in Cervantes, utopian literature and Plato to his cause, the author - a historian, travel writer and sometime Green Party councillor - places a political manifesto inside this historical biography.

Toby Green's subject is the 16th-century Spanish-born judge and (lay) bishop of the Mexican state of Michoacán, Vasco de Quiroga. In Mexico, Quiroga remains a hero. An enlightened humanist, he is one of the few figures from the early colonial period to emerge with his reputation untarnished by brutality and greed. Quiroga thought the indigenous peoples of Mexico were, indeed, human. While his brethren were indulging in mass rape and random slaughter, he established communal villages based on Thomas More's Utopia.

Green novelises Quiroga, situating him in the present tense, so giving immediacy and insight. Through Quiroga, he draws a vivid portrait of the social disintegration provoked by the Conquest. Interwoven with this story are contemporary chapters featuring our biographer/ historian as narrator. They are attempted fusions of Cervantean farce and Platonic inquiry in which Green seeks to outline What is Wrong with the World.

Satire has to be the most difficult of registers to set singing, and Green's attempts have more than a whiff of the jejune. As in Don Quixote, the characters the narrator encounters are not "real" in psychological terms, but function as signposts along the philosophical way. In contrast, Green's style in the chapters devoted to Quiroga and the Conquest is nuanced, devoid of clunky didacticism.

The book challenges the idea that utopian idealism is naive; Utopianism was founded on rationalism, Green notes. How then has idealism come to be "unrealistic" and discarded? Isn't this an invitation to the supine self-interest and moral collapse afflicting consumer society?

The author is a serious scholar with an intuitive sense of how currents of human sorrow course underneath the patina of "history". He condemns the legitimising character of imperial power. His satirical asides amplify this plangent lament and illustrate the rapaciousness of the world as it stands now, wherein for the Conquest of the Americas, we substitute economic globalisation. But this terrain might have been better mapped through a less showy narrative, rooted in Quiroga's story.

From this familiar discourse of the destructive nature of empire, Green teases a subtler message. Utopia might be "an emotional picture that has yet to cohere". Quiroga put his heart and values on the line in a brutal age; ours is characterised by emotional disengagement from the public realm. This is a complex line, but the author has not trusted the reader to get the message, shouting when he merely needed to speak to be heard.

The reviewer is an editor at the Latin America Bureau