James v. Martyr!
The 2025 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among 16 of the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 25 • SEMIFINALS
James
v. Martyr!
Judged by Aditi Khorana
Aditi Khorana is an internationally renowned author of critically acclaimed and award-winning Young Adult novels, including Mirror in the Sky (Penguin, 2016) and The Library of Fates (Penguin, 2017). Both are Junior Library Guild Selections and have appeared on many best book lists. Her debut novel is the subject of a TEDx talk, “Harnessing the Power of the Unknown.” She teaches Writing for Young People at Antioch University's MFA program, and also gives talks and teaches classes in the US and abroad on myth, narrative, and the creative capacity of language to shape our world. She is a Fellow at the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities and is currently adapting her debut novel for TV. Her work has been featured on NPR, the Los Angeles Review of Books, NBC News, BuzzFeed, EW, Bustle, Seventeen, and HuffPost. Known connections to this year’s contenders: None. / aditikhorana.com / Instagram
About a third of the way through Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, Arash Shirazi recalls something he learned as a child:
I remember… holding up a stone suspended in the air by a string… the stone was full of potential energy—potential energy, the names we give things!—and how when the stone is dropped all that potential energy gets converted into motion, into kinetic energy, action, something like that. And that transformation, potential energy into motion, is what makes stones powerful, terrible, how they can crush people. Sometimes I feel like that, like I’m walking around all stuffed up with potential energy, a stone hanging in the air with no knife sharp enough to cut the rope.
These words capture the spirit of the protagonists of both Martyr! and James by Percival Everett. As I read these novels, I actually felt the coiled, luminous power living within the subaltern identity, circumscribed by the indelible marks left by racist institutions (slavery, Imperialism, America—the list goes on). Maybe the ideal way to read these books is side by side—a compendium.
Both Cyrus Shams and James are driven by a hidden force that they sense could be successfully unleashed through the miracle of language. Words allow these characters to mark their existence, assert their sovereignty, subvert the status quo, alchemize concealed rage into life-altering choices. Most importantly, language defines the contours of their individual agency amid systems designed to keep them in the margins—or worse—subjugate and forget them.
Cyrus Shams is an Iranian-born American, a recovering addict, a suicidally depressed millennial orphan living in middle America. He is obsessed with martyrs. He wants to be one—or, alternatively, write a book about those who sacrificed their lives for something deeply felt—a work of art that will imbue his own life (and his death) with deeper meaning. James is a slave in the American South before the Civil War, catapulted to life from the pages of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. His first-person account of escape from the plantation makes for an engrossing read, the stakes of his every move apparent on each page. These characters are compelling—I would have followed them anywhere, and from the start, I was curious where they would take me.
James is a classic reluctant hero, on the run once he learns that Miss Watson plans to sell him to a man in New Orleans, separating him from his wife and children. Carried along the currents of river and circumstance (floods, a rattlesnake bite, losing his boat, losing Huck), a moment of respite returns him to language, the instinct that reliably allows him to assert his subjectivity and locate himself within his own story. “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here. My hiding place had become a safe place, and I stayed for longer than I imagined I would.”
I appreciated the irony in this idea—that James finds safety for the first time in his life while on the run. Words are a reprieve from back-breaking labor on the dismal plantation as well, but the transgression of being a literate slave carries its own risks, which he reflects on as he stands in Judge Thatcher’s library:
I had wondered every time I sneaked in there what white people would do to a slave who had just learned how to read. What would they do to a slave who had taught the other slaves to read? What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenuse was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled?
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And so a certain dualism of identity is enacted, and witnessing James navigate the perilous world around him was like watching a practiced tightrope-walker tiptoeing over a pit of alligators, with my heart in my throat. Thankfully, the plot was peppered with a good deal of humor to pull me from my terror, and a few times, I caught myself LOLing. Within the first few pages, James demonstrates the art of code-switching, carefully calibrated to pacify a white audience.He imparts his wisdom to the youth around him. “Papa, why do we have to learn this?” his daughter Lizzie asks him at the start of one of their routine lessons.
“White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” I said. “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior to us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior.’ So, let’s pause to review some of the basics.”
“Don’t make eye contact,” a boy said.
“Right, Virgil.”
“Never speak first,” a girl said.
“Never address any subject directly when talking to another slave.”
“Mumble sometimes so they can have the satisfaction of telling you not to mumble. They enjoy the correction and thinking you’re stupid.”
Cyrus Shams inhabits two worlds as well: There’s the “flatness” of his day-to-day, his dead-end job as a medical actor at Keady University Hospital; the AA meetings he attends with people he thinks of as “fucking idiots” who would likely “deport him”; his roommate Zee who is in love with him; his ruminations about his mother’s “unspeakable” death on a flight that was blown up by a missile fired from a US Navy warship (based on Iran Air Flight 655, which the USS Vincennes shot down in 1988); and his father’s death after a lifetime spent working on an industrial chicken farm. He has friends and sometimes even lovers, but there’s a deep loneliness in Cyrus that draws his fascination towards those icons who dedicated their lives to fighting for humanity while standing apart—Joan of Arc, Bobby Sands, the Tiananmen Square Tank Man.
This makes for a darkly comical and yet also deeply earnest novel that is hard to put down, irresistible, really. Martyr! weaves the “flatness” of this everyday life with Cyrus’s dreamspace where he holds conversations with a range of characters including Lisa Simpson, Madonna, Batman, his mother. The narrative pulls the reader into a layered and complex past before Cyrus’s birth, imbuing Cyrus’s existence with imagined possibilities. Cyrus is a riveting character, haunted and seeking, realizing that substances and recovery are mere palliatives. What he wants—and desperately—is to find deeper meaning behind the day-to-day emptiness.
This quest brings him to New York to sit at the feet of the artist Orkideh who is staging her last installation, Death-Speak, at the Brooklyn Museum. She has recently been diagnosed with cancer and plans to die at the museum. At this point in the plot, the novel was impossible to put down. I literally walked into a wall with my nose buried in the book. Cyrus’s quest becomes incandescent—even spiritual in his encounter with Orkideh. We watch him unpack his years of psychic self-mutilation before a spellbound listener, who has her own gifts to offer. In my favorite scene in the book, Orkideh tells Cyrus: “Some centuries ago, all these Safavid explorers from Isfahan go to Europe—France, Italy, Belgium—and they see all these gargantuan mirrors all over. Ornate, massive mirrors everywhere in the palaces, in the great halls.”
Orkideh explains to Cyrus that the Shah learns of these mirrors and wants them for himself and so he tells his explorers and diplomats to bring these massive mirrors to him. Unsurprisingly, on the journey, many of them shatter.
“Instead of great panes of mirror, the Shah’s architects in Isfahan… begin making these incredible mosaics, shrines, prayer niches. I think about this a lot, Cyrus. These centuries of Persians trying to copy the European vanity, really their self-reflection. How it arrived to us in shards. How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments, and how those mirror tiles found themselves in all these mosques, the tilework, these ornate mosaics. How those spaces made the fractured glimpses of ourselves near sacred.”
These words somehow transmute all of Cyrus’s torment, all his despair, into something near sacred too, just like the Sufi poets he loves so much. The answers he’s always been seeking can’t be found in the western/Anglo vanity (and ensuing emptiness) of the world he inhabits. The torturous and confusing labyrinth he’s navigated his entire existence has meaning that only another artist and traveler—now nearing the end of her own life—can show him, by holding a mirror to his experience. The journey to commune with Orkideh isn’t the end of the book, though! There’s a plot twist that I won’t spoil, but ultimately there was a clear winner for me.
Can you tell that Martyr! was the novel that won my heart?
Advancing:
Martyr!
Match Commentary
with Meave Gallagher and Alana Mohamed
Alana Mohamed: Hello, Meave! This one surprised me—I thought James would take the win. Judge Khorana was moved by each novel’s use of language to define the self in a hostile world. How do you think Martyr! stacked up on this point?
Meave Gallagher: I just got done last week focusing on the inevitability of Everett without having read James, and in the time since, I did read it, and now I’m extra surprised. How did Martyr! beat out Beautyland and now James? I’m liking it less the longer I have to spend with it.
Alana: I’m not as displeased as you are, but I am surprised. What’s your beef with Martyr! here?
Meave: Oh, the main characters, again… Neither is perfect, but comparatively—since Judge Khorana does posit these novels as meant to be read together—Cyrus is a big spoiled baby, while James sacrifices himself over and over again, giving up the relative freedom of being a runaway to earn money selling the only valuable he has—his body—to try to buy his wife and daughter’s freedom. Cyrus can’t stop obsessing over himself, while James, as the judge quotes, “[wrote] himself into being.” Cyrus needs fewer words and more action; James is full of words he can’t safely express. I saw them as rather opposite.
Alana: James is certainly the more heroic of the two, but I think this is part of what I meant when I said I’m never quite sure if Everett is punching up or down. James is a response to Twain’s racist caricature, but as I read the novel, I kept wondering why must an enslaved man have to be refined/erudite/noble to be worthy of redemption? Cyrus is a big baby—are we saying he’s spoiled because he’s lucky he wasn’t born enslaved?—but I do think that’s the more relatable condition.
Meave: Oh no, do I sound like I think Cyrus is spoiled because he’s not enslaved? This is hard to articulate. If I say, “Cyrus doesn’t appreciate his freedom to write and say whatever he wants,” then I’m indicting all of Iran, which is—presumptuous. Maybe it’s that he wallows in this semi-suicidal desire to martyr himself.
I don’t think James ever needed or sought redemption; to the modern reader, he didn’t do anything wrong. I read the code-switching lessons as a method of self-preservation: “It always made things easier when white folk could laugh at a poor slave now and again,” or “I acted like he hurt my feelings. White people love feeling guilty.” And when he’s writing, he refers to those who practice slavery as his enemies, “as ‘oppressor’ necessarily implies ‘victim.’” James has had to learn these lessons by studying those enemies, and knowing them better than they know themselves. If anyone’s punching, it’s James at the people who think they are above him.
Alana: I agree with you that if the criterion at play here is which character makes the case for the power of language in affirming a marginalized person’s identity in a hostile world?, it’s hard to say that Martyr! is the winner for the reason you state. I would have liked to see a more thorough breakdown of how or why Martyr! captured our judge. She comments on the humor in both, but Martyr! is “deeply earnest.” Does it read as earnest, being unafraid to reveal your character as a big baby? Is it that the inclusion of dreamscapes with Lisa Simpson, Madonna, and Batman add a sense of whimsy to the novel? (About which I wonder, how does that element match up to James’s fever-dream scene dunking on Voltaire and Locke?)
Meave: Judge Khorana interprets Cyrus’s mother’s broken mirrors parable as “the answers [Cyrus has] always been seeking can’t be found in the western/Anglo vanity (and ensuing emptiness) of the world he inhabits.” Judges just love that mirror analogy (parable?)! But I don’t know. In an article in ENQ: The ARRC Journal for Architectural Research, “Semiotics of Mirror-tile Artwork Decoration in Iranian-Islamic Architecture” (Sepheri, 2024): “In Persian literature, the mirror addresses honesty, purity, truth, and light, which artists have also used in Islamic Architecture. Mirror-tile artwork is purely Islamic art, including Islamic geometric patterns. It can be considered traditional and religious art in Persian literature.” But check out the photos of the art and make your own conclusions.
Alana: Interesting! So you weren’t convinced by the analogy? I’m honestly not familiar enough with Persian culture to have an opinion—but now I’m thinking about how Cyrus’s sponsor tells him he’s more American than Iranian.
Meave: In the same paper, Sepheri very Cyrus-ly quotes the 17th century CE poet Kashmiri:
Every part of my broken heart is the grass from
His lookThe Mirror, after breaking, is is the collection of
mirrors [Mirror-tiles].—Binesh Kashmiri (Azaimabadi 2012, 244 [Transl. Author]).”
Why isn’t Cyrus doing anything with his mirror tiles until he meets Orkideh? Can he name any greater causes than himself for which he would martyr himself? I wasn’t convinced Cyrus wanted to die-die; he talks about how a glorious martyrdom will give his life the meaning he feels is lacking, when he’s been carting around a sack of mirror-tiles for years and refusing to make anything new out of them. He has the material, he has the tools, he has the inspiration: Make some meaning!
Alana: I see your frustration with him as a character—could one say that’s proof of compelling writing in some way? Jk! I was less frustrated with him because I’ve known so many Cyruses in my life, talented boys who were seeking something and were careless with themselves in ways that sometimes seemed fun and sometimes caused me to think, “How have they survived this long taking all these risks?” And mostly, they didn’t survive for that long. I wished, reading Martyr!, that they were still alive so that I could loan them this book.
Meave: I’m don’t believe I knew anyone who committed suicide, or fatally overdosed, or even died before age 60-somthing. I’ve pined over some live-fast-die-young women before, though more teen Courtney Love than Amy Winehouse (RIP, my queen). I wouldn’t recommend Martyr! to any of them. Maybe “Good Luck, Babe!”
Alana: Ha! When you ask about what Cyrus might rebuild—are you asking because the end left you unsatisfied? I’m not particularly interested in what he’d do in the future. I’m more invested in Martyr! as a tale of (sorry!) the redemptive power of love. Sooo corny, I know! I’ve been feeling like a cornball lately. 🤪
Meave: Here you are with redemption again. Sure, let Zee and Orkideh redeem Cyrus with their enormous love for Cyrus, who Judge Khorana calls “riveting… haunted and seeking…. What he wants—and desperately—is to find deeper meaning behind the day-to-day emptiness.” Again, I think Cyrus needs to make meaning out from his own life, whether or not he falls in love. Though of course the premise of James imbues his life with meaning from the jump, so I don’t think the comparison is really fair.
Alana: I would say Cyrus falling in love with Zee or learning to love his mother allows him to make meaning of his life! But that’s another reason I would have liked to see Judge Khorana expand her analyses—keeping the focus tight on Cyrus seems like a disservice. A lot of the story seems to be with his mother. Her pursuit of love contributes to Cyrus’s great wound but her story also unlocks something in him that he’d never had access to before.
Meave: Hidden histories always do that. For example, did you know the most famous carpets are Armenian-made, or based on Armenian techniques? The Imperial Safavids “deported” some 100,000 Armenians to Iran to boost its GDP, and they of course brought their carpet-weaving skills with them, and were the only carpet-weavers allowed to use silk. And I’m sure you can guess why people call them “Turkish” or “Persian” carpets today.
What I’m getting at, I think, is that this concept of “Europe,” the authorship of a work of art, the way Cyrus’s life is swallowed first by his addictions and then by his obsession with Orkideh—when does he start feeling like the author of his own life? At the end, when he “makes it official” with Zee? When does he pull out his goddamn shards and start assembling?
Alana: I didn’t know that about Armenian weavers!
Meave: Imperial countries always take credit for something native and once exclusive to specific cultures/geographies, like the Van cat, or rock and roll.
Alana: Cyrus’s pain (and self-pity) is so shaped by US policy, tied to his Irannianness, where might the novel have gone if it entertained a wider view of Iranian imperialism and its consequences? Something tells me the Cyrus we know for most of the novel would have still found a way to fold this into his self-pity, too. The ending, though, gave me the sense that to “become the author of his own life,” he needs to experience life unmediated by addiction or language or politics. Which sounds trite—I guess it either works or doesn’t.
Meave: You and Judge Khorana can skip off into the sunset, making mirror-shard art and telling Cyrus what a great poet he is. I maintain my earlier point about mirror shards.
Alana: Well, I never said anything about liking Cyrus’s poetry! But I see your point—perhaps the ending is a cop-out. Despite personally liking Martyr! more, I would have had a tough time passing it on over James.
Meave: I’m still sulking over Beautyland. Adding James to Martyr!’s body count? Controversial.
Tomorrow is the second and final match in the semifinals. Kevin and John will be warming our chairs in the commentary booth, as Judge Sammy Loren chooses between The Extinction of Irena Rey and Margo’s Got Money Troubles. Talk about a heartbreaker. Good luck to the gentlemen!
Kevin Guilfoile: Speaking of me, I need to drop in here because we have some movement in our Zombie rankings. James has enough votes to place it in the top two, which I love, but that means we have to say goodbye for good to Beautyland, which honestly breaks my heart a little. If the Zombie Round were held today, All Fours and James would be our drama daemons.
Today’s mascot
Here are today’s mascots, nominated by Ian, who tells us:
Our clowder of cats keeps things forever interesting. All are rescue cats and have become the most amazing companions to each other, and their human servants. Several have food names that came with them, and I have never been one to force a name change on a pet, so here we are.
I cannot spend more than 10 seconds before one is on my lap when I am reading one of the fine tomes competing in the ToB this year, perhaps nibbling on a corner or adding a dog-ear to a page as if to suggest I might want to set the book down and pay more attention to them.
None of them seem to care which novel wins. Mostly, they want me to get the damn book out of the way so they have more room to stretch.
If you’re interested in nominating a pet as a mascot for this year’s Tournament of Books, contact us for more details. (Please note, this is a paid program.)