Maximum pity

THE DROWNING ROOM by Michael Pye, Granta pounds 9.99

IF THE child who painstakingly reconstructs a village in miniature is a rough approximation of a future historian, the one who glimpses lighted candles moving in the window is already a novelist. Michael Pye grew up to be both, and in his recreations of 17th-century New Amsterdam - a huddle of traders and soldiers shivering and praying in a stockade on Manhattan - he has answered well these twin impulses of recreation and reanimation.

As a result of research for his biography of New York, Maximum City, his eye was caught by Gretje Reyniers, moneylender, fishwife and prostitute, whose inclination to lewdness, litigation, debt, assault, and a nice line in vigorous abuse guaranteed her enduring life in the court records of the early settlement. Unable to lose the image of Gretje, orphaned, exploited, widowed, stumbling through these dark and crucial moments of world history, Pye has transposed her into fiction, imagining a life before America and an existence between the handful of insults and affronts she left ringing in the ears of Dutch propriety.

The storytelling and the story are woven tightly together, allowing Pye to reveal Gretje's character in the manner of her relating, as she sits by the fire and plumbs her harrowing past for the benefit of two boys: Tomas, traumatised and mute, and Pieter, mysterious and threatening. The town is frozen as still and aching as Gretje's heart, for her lover Anthony lies dead outside, unburied, and the usual gang of hypocritical burghers, whose prurient interest in everything she does will of course preserve her for history, are plotting to have her taken off their backs for good.

However gruesome the story-within-the-story gets, as Gretje the child abandons her dying mother and deserts her dim husband in Amsterdam, having first dumped her child in an orphanage there, it crackles to keep them warm. At its best, Pye's language has the persuasive coarseness of Lawrence or Ivor Gurney, a strange, lumpy newness with a charge often as tactile as it is visual. "She could smell the sweet process of the woods", "Gretje knows all rooms see death in a sturdy house". He also brings to his created history the ironies and underpinning truths of what he knows of the real one. Here is Gretje with a drunken woman, seeing the lines of trenches that map out the city the settlers mean to build: " 'that,' said the woman, pointing to the ditch 'is going to be Herengracht, until it gets to Broad Street. Then it's going to be Prinzen-gracht.' Gretje thought the woman must be dumb with drink if she could see mansions reflected in a ditch."

Whoring offers the newly-arrived Gretje her only real chance of a living in the embryonic town, and so she presents the perfect moral conundrum for the local mijnheers, who both need her and resent their need. After all, the West India Company wanted her there to help populate the place. She may have been the first woman of America so to trouble its fussily moral yet nervously liberated manhood but she certainly wouldn't be the last, and almost every debate in America's history, cultural, political or moral, could be said to have started in the confused minds of those who would have dealings with Gretje. For example Kieft, the Gover-nor, faced with her various offences, "resented what Gretje knew about him, sticky, intimate knowledge. He imagined New Amsterdam under a new and godly dispensation and he said: 'The sentence is banishment.' "

If the scenes set in 1642, as Gretje discovers the truth about why the strange boy Pieter wants to hear her story, are less successful than the story itself, it's merely because Pye has less to work on. Gretje's auditors bring no new insight to her tale: they are themselves victims of it, washed up in its wake. No one in the book is nearly as engaging as its heroine and even Pye, with his fine sense of detail, of distance, and of the sweet tugging pain felt by true storytellers, could find no imaginary indecencies more appealing and memorable than this one he found in the vaults of history: that Gretje Reyniers, walking off a boat and on to the New World, swore at the brutes sneering behind her on deck, flashed them her arse and got on with living her life. In this very good fiction, Pye is still writing the true history of the Maximum City.