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Alphabet of Dreams
By Susan Fletcher
Atheneum, 2006. 294 pages.
Reviewed by Christy Risser-Milne
Every year at the annual Christmas pageant, the Three Wise Men process up the aisle, present the baby Jesus with their gifts, and then disappear to the strains of “We Three Kings of Orient Are.” But have you ever wondered who they are? Why they followed the mythical star in the first place?
Award-winning author Susan Fletcher did. And with deft skill and grace, she has constructed for her readers an engaging story about the birth of Jesus in which he never once appears on the page directly.
Mitra and her brother Babak are the children of royalty. Their father, a king of Persia, attempted to overthrow the high king but failed. Mitra is haunted by memories of the soldiers invading their palace, the sounds of death and sword on sword never far from her consciousness. We meet Mitra and Babak as they are living by theft in the City of the Dead, far from the palace they once inhabited. At fourteen, Mitra knows all too well what she has lost, and is bitter about having to pretend to be poor, and a nobody, in order to hide from the spies of the high king who still seek her and five-year-old Babak. She pines for what she has lost and thus misses the gifts before her every day.
Babak is the only person to whom she shows kindness. But she betrays even Babak when it is discovered that, by taking an article of clothing from a stranger to bed with him, he can dream dreams about that individual: dreams telling the future, dreams of their dreams. Mitra is willing to exploit Babak’s mysterious gift to make money so that she may take him to find their kin in a distant city. But things do not go as planned, and they are betrayed and sold into a kind of slavery to Melchior the Magus, who, in the company of two other magi, is seeking after a king born in a distant place.
Fletcher gives each of the kings/magi a wonderful, human distinction that has always been missing from our interactions with them through the Gospel of Matthew—the only book of the Bible in which they are mentioned. Melchior is fat, rich, and spoiled. He dreams of power and influence, and his service to the Zoroastrian Wise God is primarily for his own gain. Gaspar is a stargazer. He is quiet, contemplative, and seeks the will of the Wise God in the movement of the stars. Balthazaar is kind, gentle, and holy in the most sacred sense of the word.
With Babak’s dreams—which are slowly killing him—to guide them, the group, including Mitra dressed as a boy, travels from Persia to Jerusalem and eventually to Bethlehem. Mitra cannot comprehend how a king could possibly reside in a hovel such as the one the Magi enter in Bethlehem. Her arrogance and blindness to the kindness and grace all around them is killing her as surely as dreaming for others is killing her dear brother.
Finally, however, she does find grace and understanding, and in that flash she abandons her one chance to finally go and find her royal kindred and instead returns to Bethlehem to warn the people there of the impending massacre of the infants, about which Babak has dreamed.
Although anyone who knows the story of the Magi from Christian tradition will know the point of this tale from the moment Melchior is named, it is still delightful to read. Fletcher, perhaps best known as the author of Shadow Spinner, weaves a story that we all think we know into a story we all ought to encounter. There is nothing particularly provocative or enlightening in the Alphabet of Dreams. It’s just a wonderful story of redemption and grace, well-told and a pleasure to read.
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