Chang and Eng Bunker were born with more than the simple brotherly bond that one would expect between twins. Instead, what linked these two was a six-inch band of flesh stretching from one's breastbone to the other's, and as Mark Slouka's novel \God's Fool"" sadly reveals, they were fated to lives of public exhibition and private struggle.
The original Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng were born in a houseboat along the Mekong River in Siam (present day Thailand) on May 11, 1811.
Despite being far removed from Western influences, they would become the main attraction of the ruthless Phineas T. Barnum's American Museum, which excelled in finding the odd and absurd and displaying it for a price. A price charged not only to the patron but also robbed the unfortunate soul exhibited of any freedoms.
""God's Fool,"" told from Chang's perspective, creates a pseudo-memoir of the lives of two of the most famous twins in history.
The novel focuses on the negatives the two endured, disclosing the great losses they survived, from a cholera outbreak that killed not only five of their siblings but also their father, to a horrible storm that claimed the life of their only remaining sister, to the Civil War that entered their backyard.
The two most interesting aspects of ""God's Fool"" are the small amount of dialogue and the manipulation of time.
As it is a sort of memoir, Slouka tells the story through description rather than conversation, which becomes one of the novel's strongest features. Slouka paints elaborate pictures of not only Siam and the princely courts Chang and Eng visit, but also the devastating poverty they come to inhabit and the simple country life they eventually adopt.
Rather than slow the momentum of the narrative, the lengthy descriptions enrich the world of the story and convey and even greater understanding of Chang's state of mind at the different points of his life.
The temporal incongruity also adds to the novel's power. The story is not told linearly from birth to death, but instead jumps from exploitation by others to a strong sense of self-worth, from present to past, from success to poverty and back again, from telling of Chang's own children to his experiences as a youth, and on and on. The novel is almost entirely extended flashback, but even the flashbacks skip around in time.
What this novel reveals is that Chang and Eng were two hard-working, determined humans whose lives were thwarted by a strange twist of fate. Before the storm that claimed their sister's life, they had been successful. It was only the loss of their boats and property, and therefore a lack of money, that forced the two into the public eye.
But the band of skin that would forever link them physically served only in the end to distance them in every other imaginable way.
From what ""God's Fool"" reveals about Chang and Eng, they led discontented lives. There were moments of light in the darkness, but more often than not, deceitful managers, a fading interest from the public that they so loathingly depended on, or simply the growing resentment between them stood in the way of happiness.
By the end of their lives they barely spoke to each other, driven farther apart because of their closeness.
As youths the two had worked together in order to swim, jump and do almost anything else young boys could do, but in old age they only worked against each other. It is a wrenching struggle, to watch the two so disconnected after so many years in the public eye together.
In the end, this novel speaks to the distances that forever separate one person from another, and Slouka shows that however close two people can be, they are never able to bridge the distance that keeps their minds separate entities.
""God's Fool"" is published by Alfred E. Knopf.
