The Future Eve (1886) by August Villiers de L'Isle Adam

A word of warning: The Future Eve is not a novelette that you’re going to find easily. Not in English anyway; from what I can tell, the only available English translation, apart from some rather academic and expensive-looking journals, is in a strange collection called The Frankenstein Omnibus which is almost definitely out of print. So, chances are, you’re probably not going to be reading it, which is a shame. For this reason, I may be a little more lenient with the spoilers this time.

I’ll admit upfront that The Future Eve is not really anything to do with Imperialism or colonialism, but it is choc-full of other points of interest to the nineteenth-century enthusiast. For starters, the author was a fin-de-siecleFrench bohemian who hung out in cafes writing, drinking (absinthe, presumably), being poor and attempting to get rich society ladies to marry him (a bit like my life, really. Except I'm not French, obviously). The novelette is a sort of take on the Frankenstein theme, and what makes it interesting is its distinctly romantic/decadent spin on the subject.

At the beginning of the story we’re introduced to one Professor X, who sadly is nothing to do with the X-Men, but is in fact a sort of literary stand-in for none other than Thomas Edison. That’s what the intro says, anyway; if it’s true then the general public (in France at least) must have had some pretty weird ideas about the man and his abilities back in the 1880s. We first meet Not-Edison rambling about in his mansion outside a city (presumably New York), being attended to by the disembodied voices of artificial personalities he has somehow created using ‘electricity.’

Not in this book.

One of the great joys of reading literature from this period is the almost mystical reverence that was given to electricity. I guess even this late in the century it was still seen by many people as being wondrous and a little bit mysterious… the kind of ill-understood force that could be capable of almost anything. Think of Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues telling his captives that ‘my electricity is not the same as everyone else’s’ in an attempt to handwave the workings of the Nautilus. Way to fluff your research there, Verne.

Electricity in Victorian novels is always a plot device for creating monsters, bringing people back from the dead or other Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, mostly based on its demonstrated ability to make dead frogs twitch. Makes perfect sense, really. In the 1950’s, its place as a magical monster creator was taken by atomic power, and later by genetic engineering, which are similarly both misunderstood by the public and misused by narrative media. Read this for a bizarre real-life example.

This is exactly what Victorian science was like.

Not-Edison’s devices are described and explained in very strange ways in the novelette. The science isn’t ignored or handwaved away like in Wells, nor is it excruciatingly and accurately thought-through like in Verne. Instead, the author does go into quite a lot of detail; it’s just that none of it makes any bloody sense. There’s lots of talk about telephone wires and reflections, vibrations and currents. Of course, none of these descriptions really address how Not-Edison has achieved artificial intelligence, no matter how long they go on for. But they do bring a wonderfully romantic feeling of science-as-magic to the story.

How did I do it? I'll never tell!

 The scientist receives a visitor: the young and handsome Lord Ewald. But despite being the very picture of virile English manhood, the lord has a problem: he’s desperately lovesick. Despite having a position and profile that would win him the heart of almost any woman he meets, he’s gone and got himself hung up on a girl who’s doing him wrong. Things are so bad that he’s considering suicide.

The girl, one Alicia Cleary, is so beautiful that she’s regularly compared to the Venus of the classical world. She is, in a way, attached to Ewald, but he is constantly disappointed by her because the silly chit’s personality is not equal to her beauty.

Ah, yes. It would be neglectful of me not to mention that The Future Eve contains more than a strain of misogyny. In fact, it’s rather famous for it: the misogyny is the main thrust of most of the literary criticism that has been written about it.

Professor X and Ewald talk over the particulars of the situation. Apparently Miss Cleary is so physically perfect that Ewald is willing to die for her, he is so in love. They also agree that her personality is deficient: she doesn’t like opera or sculpture, she’s small-minded and selfish. The two men discuss which aspects of her being are acceptable and which are lamentable, and they both agree how wonderful it could be if they could somehow keep the former while jettisoning the latter.

And then Professor X realizes that, actually, he knows just how such a thing could be achieved.

Uh-oh.

Yeah, it’s pretty despicable. There’s no getting around that. Ewald, like all romantic/decadent heroes, is so hung up on this girl that nothing else in life really seems to matter. Fair enough, we’ve probably all been there. But the explicit fact that he’s only in love with her beautiful exterior, and cannot stand her personality, makes him utterly shallow. And that the two characters coldly and rationally decide what characteristics are desirable and not desirable in a woman makes them both pretty unlikable. Also, their limits for what’s desirable, personality-wise, are offensively narrow, which I suppose was probably typical for the time.

Eventually, Professor X reveals his plan: he will create an electronic facsimile of the girl, an exact copy: an android (the first use of the term in literature, fanboys!). Ewald is at first horrified, noting that even if the physical likeness was perfect, her store of conversation and actions would necessarily be woefully limited. Professor X mentions that they’ve both observed in the past that a proper society lady is nothing more than a limited number of learned conversations and actions. Shudder.

The two then retreat to Professor X’s gigantic underground cave of electronic wonders, where he explains in fascinating (and horrifically offensive) detail exactly how one would go about making a perfect woman. He ‘proves’ to Ewald that real women aren’t that ‘real’ anyway, because they use make-up and can alter their appearance. It’s this that a man really falls in love with, he says while pointing to a drawer full of cosmetics. An illusion. So really, falling in love with an automaton isn’t that different. Again, the superficiality is staggering.

This section is fascinating, if ghoulish and ethically questionable. Again, the author goes into masses of detail about how the android will be constructed, how she will function and how perfect the likeness will be. And even though he’s despicable, I liked how Ewald’s emotions swing constantly as he see-saws between revulsion and lust at the idea of having his desires granted in this unorthodox way. By the end, I wanted to find out what was coming next as much as the lovesick Lord.

Later, there’s an amazing scene in which Ewald has a surprise meeting with his automated lovedoll that prompts us to think about what it is that we really fall in love with. Ewald is obsessed with an ideal of Alicia; an impossible vision of her that is no more or less real than the automaton is. It’s an interesting idea, and one the author delves into in some detail, only to slightly spoil it with his underlying shades of misogyny, as well as the fact that he cheats by having the android inhabited by the essence of one of Professor X’s artificial personalities through supernatural means, thereby giving it a bona fide soul, as it were.

Large portions of the novella take place in real-time, with the Professor and Ewald having long conversations (while smoking cigars and drinking brandy, of course) that allow the writer to indulge in reflections on morality, science, and emotion. Even if some of the ideas are now repugnant to us, it’s still a good deal more interesting than the flat characters that usually turn up in Victorian speculative fiction. Ewald in particular fascinated me as a man who knowingly and deliberately buys into his delusion in the most literal way over the course of the story.

The Future Eve is not easy to come by in English, but it’s well worth looking out for.

Mmm... gentlemanly.

Hart of Empire by Saul David

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Everybody ready for another trip to 19^th-Century Afghanistan? Thought not. Well, we’re going anyway.

How good is Hart of Empire? Well, I’ll tell you this much: I read the last hundred pages of it while marching up a mountain. Granted, I was living on top of the mountain, and the walk up it from town had become more of a regular tramp to me than a breath-taking experience. But, yeah, I was gripped enough that finishing the book became more interesting than taking in the Yorkshire Dales scenery. So that must say something.

But that was a year ago, and things have changed. Surrey is not Yorkshire; in Surrey, there’s always a rich prick (or a housemate) around to snigger at my habit of reading while walking. For whatever reason, I never got around to reviewing the book then, so I’ll review it now, following a recent re-read.

If you’ve ever haunted the historical fiction aisle in bookshops (really? Are you a ghost or something?), you’ll know that there’s something of a cottage industry of book series that ape the whole Flashman/Sharpe thing: books that follow the adventures of a dashing young soldier who takes part (willingly or otherwise) in the various famous battles of his era, which is usually either the Napoleonic or Victorian era. Just off the top of my head, I can name Hornblower, Flashman, Sharpe, Fenwick Travers, Jack Absolute, and now Hart as well as examples of this. Some of these characters are older and more influential, some are clearly very derivative. Those that take after Flashman tend to be tongue-in-cheek, those that take after Sharpe tend to take themselves very seriously.

The lure of an author who loves history to write a series like this is obvious. It’s great fun, and tremendously useful, to have a character who exists at a place in time where they can plausibly (ahem) pop up during events that are themselves fascinating and well-known. Much of the history of Victorian colonialism in particular reads like a (highly racist and bigoted) ripping yarn anyway, so it makes tremendous sense to make fiction out of it. Someday, someone will write a series like this that takes place during some radically different period, and then the floodgates will open. Anyone for the adventures of a dashing young rapscallion who blunders his way through the Pelleponesian wars, pissing off prissy Athenians and getting riotously drunk with crazy Spartans? I’d buy that for a dollar.

For me, these books serve a higher purpose too: they add life to the history. I find that even the best-written history book comes to life just a little bit more when I can relate the events to a fictitious piece of work. History gets so often reduced to lists of names, dates and numbers. It’s great to know exactly who fought who during the Zulu wars, and how many troops they had, but I sure as hell wake up when I suddenly realise that Bromhead was the guy who was played with such uppity magnificence by Michael Caine, or that Cetshwayo was the leader who double-crossed Flashman. Fiction is able to bring character and meaning to the subject in a very different way than real history books. Of course, it also has a certain responsibility to the source material; witness the descendants of Private Hook who were appalled at his portrayal as a coward in the movie Zulu, and loudly made their grievance known to the film company.

Anyway. So, Hart of Empire is a sequel. The first book is Zulu Hart, which I’ve not read. It isn’t supposed to be very good. But the opening chapters of the sequel make a few things clear: George Hart is part Zulu (and part Irish, for those of us still paying attention to such things!), but he passes himself off in English society as being of Mediterranean extraction. He fought in the Zulu War in 1878 and was, rather predictably, involved in the Isandlwana debacle as well as the defence of Rourke’s drift. There are at least a couple of women who are fond of him, and whom it seems will continue to play a part in the series. We also learn that he has a mysterious rich father who has left him a legacy: the young Hart will inherit rather large sums of money if he can rise to a certain rank in the British Army (for God’s sake don’t ask me what rank), earn a Victoria Cross and ‘marry respectably’, all before he turns 28.

Not very good, apparently.

The story begins with Hart being called for interview with several highly-placed Government bigwigs, including Prime Minister D’israeli himself, though he’s referred to as Lord Beaconsfield (as an aside, I recently spotted an Irish bar called the Earl of Beaconsfield in Cambridge recently. I doubt if many people noticed that the half-heartedly painted leprechaun hanging from the door had once been a portrait of D’israeli. In a weird coincidence, Gladstone once called D'israeli a 'soulless leprachaun'). Obviously Hart’s a bit suspicious as to exactly what these stuffed shirts want with a half-dago like himself, but wouldn’t you know it, he’s being blackmailed by the brother of a man he accidentally killed, so he’s willing to listen to what they have to say in case it’ll help him get out of the country. As it happens, it might just: apparently, a mission to Afghanistan is what they have in mind for young Hart, as trouble is brewing there: the kind of trouble that can best be dealt with by an officer who has just the right qualities. An officer who can go undercover because he has just the right look.

As in, HE’S A DARKY.

Half-castes never amount to anything.

D’israeli takes him aside and gives him a pep talk, telling him that they’re both ‘cuckoos in the nest,’ and that as an ethnic Jew, he knows what it’s like to be singled out. They don’t exactly bond over this issue, however, but the prime minister goes ahead anyway and gives him the details of the mission. And why exactly is our man being sent to rumble in the ‘stan?

Apparently not learning their lesson the first time, the British have gone and got themselves embroiled in a second Anglo-Afghan War (they haven’t learned their lesson since either: Britain went to war against Afghanistan, pretty much with disastrous consequences every time except the third, in 1839, 1878, 1919 and 2001). It’s part of what was called the Great Game: the cold war of subterfuge that had been going on between Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia as their two empires swallowed up vast tracts of real estate in that region during the 19^th century, bringing their borders ever closer together. Afghanistan, being a border state to British India (well, it was once they’d annexed Sind and the Punjab, anyway), occupied a precarious position between these two great enemies. The British had always been keen to keep it as a buffer zone, separating India from the Russian hordes, but the damn Orientals were just so unpredictable: Afghan leaders toppled on and off the throne with alarming regularity, and the country was never as unified as the British would have liked. So naturally they had to step in every so often and tell the Afghans whose rule they should be subject to, though usually not without getting a bloody nose in the process.

 Ever fearful that Ivan is keen to get his grubby mitts on British India, the British become jittery because the Afghan king hsd been consulting with Russian envoys. Ultimatums are given and ignored; redcoats (and khaki coats, for the first time!) march yet again on Kabul as the British military steamroller trundles into the country.

Here we go again...

So far, all this is described pretty much as it really happened. Hart’s particular mission hinges on a small fictional device of the author’s: that a fanatical religious leader, Mulah Mushk-I-Alam, has taken possession of an item rumoured to be the cloak of Mohammed (a real artifact that was in Kabul at the time) and intends to use it to stir up holy war. If he does, the Indian government will doubtlessly use this as an excuse to annex all of Afghanistan as part of their aggressive ‘forward policy’ against the Russians in Central Asia.

But London and Calcutta don’t see eye-to-eye on this. London has no wish to find themselves master of yet more untold miles of savage terrain and even more savage, pissed-off tribesmen, so they aim to deprive Calcutta and the Indian Government of this excuse. Hart’s job is to reclaim the cloak before holy war breaks out.

(While the intrigue between the two governments makes for an interesting plot, this point becomes more and more stretched as the book goes on. As the war against the British becomes more and more intense and widespread, the reasons for Hart to track down the cloak and complete his mission become more and more obtuse. I mean, when all hell is already breaking out all over the country, does the Indian Government really need the excuse of jihad to annex Afghanistan?)

Hart agrees, and gets shipped off to British India, and from there he makes his way to Afghanistan. Along the way, he picks up a (yawn) proud, brave, earthy Klingon Pathan warrior, Ilderim Khan, to assist him and become his bodyguard and sidekick (Ilderim’s a likeable character, but he’s such a stock ‘proud warrior race’ character that I had trouble not visualising him as a Jaxn’trep from Run Like Hell. How’s that for an oblique reference?). They have a few adventures on the way before arriving at Kabul and meeting Yakub Khan, the cowardly Emir of Afghanistan. The Khan proves indecisive during a riot by his own troops, and Hart’s attention soon turns to Yakub’s hot (and sadly fictional) sister, who, he reckons, would totally make a better ruler, if only the Afghans would get over their inherent sexism. And if he gets to bone her along the way, that would be just dandy. And so the stage is set for scrapes and thrills aplenty.

Don't google-image search 'Jaxn'trep, unless you're a fan of Rule 34.

This is not my first encounter with author Saul David: before writing fiction he wrote history books, and I once struggled through his Victoria’s Wars, despite my obsession with the subject. I found it a snooze-worthy collection of boring troop manouvers and colourless, indistinguishable battles. Nobody should go near the book who isn’t well-extensivelyversed in military terminology. His mammoth book on the Indian Mutiny too glowers at me from my bookshelf, daring me to give it a go, though at the moment I’d rather be held under siege by marauding Pathans. Happily, I found his fiction a far more pleasing way to digest his undoubted expert historical knowledge. Predictably, David has been quoted as saying that his interest in Imperial history was sparked by a reading of Flashman as a young man.

Compared to that earlier book, this is definitely a case of an author writing historical characters that have worldviews waytoo modern for their supposed period. Hart is such a lefty that he’d have had no place in the Victorian military system. He’s all in favour of independence for small nations, and is far more respectful to the Afghans than even the Orientalist travellers and explorers like Burnes and Burton were in real life. He’s also well into his women’s lib. It must be impossible in this day and age to write realistic characters from an age that had mores which are now considered offensive.

Now Hart is clearly the latest of many characters to have been inspired by Flashman, but with the Afghanistan setting, David is clearly setting himself up for a rather explicit comparison. The Afgan war of this book was, in real life, the sequel to the First Afghan war that was the setting for the first Flashman book. Many of the settings, buildings and military engagements are identical, and the exercise often feels like a bit of a re-tread (as it may have to some of the soldiers involved) though with a slightly different tone. I think it’s a compliment to say that David’s book doesn’t come off as being truly awful compared to Flashman, though it’s nowhere bear as good. It’s well written enough that I enjoyed it as a tour through an unfamiliar bit of military history. But while it jettisons the humour and right-wing attitude of Fraser’s book, it doesn’t really replace it with anything unique that is strong enough to stand out from the crowd. Little is made of the character’s mixed-race, apart from his useful ability to pass as a native. The more left-wing tendencies of the book seem a somewhat wishy-washy comeback against Flash Harry’s pro-empire worldview, and also seem frequently out of place in this time period. Flashmandefinitely gained something by being published back when more offensive attitudes could be included in popular fiction.

All the same, I enjoyed the book and will pick up the next one in the series, if David ever cranks one out. He’s covering a later period in Imperial history than the majority of the Flashman books, so I’d be definitely interested in seeing his take on the African wars of the 1880s and 1890s. By all accounts Hart of Empire is a vast improvement over Zulu Hart, so perhaps David will be able to nab that elusive something that will make Hart less bland.

Come and take me, Brits - if you think you're hard enough. Wait.. actually, no. I've had enough.

River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh

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Desperate for another fix of Opium War-based derring-do after finishing Tai-Pan, I picked up River of Smoke after spying it during one of my late-night waiting-for-the-train-at-Victoria-station-might-as-well-have-a-look-at-the-tat-in-WHSmith’s endeavours. Despite sporting a cover that would be better suited to a rejected Cecelia Ahern novel, the book managed to sucker me in with a blurb that promised an exotic location, 19^th-century imperialism, and a take on a familiar situation (the first Opium War) from a different perspective.

River of Smoke follows a bunch of characters living in Canton in the years just prior to the first time the British decided to showcase their love of ‘free trade’ in China: i.e., the freedom to have life-destroying drugs imported to your country while the gunboats look on. They all live in Fanqui-town, which is a little enclave outside the main city of Canton; foreign devils, of course, are not allowed to live anywhere else in the country - which, given how they behave, isn’t an altogether unreasonable situation; as one Chinese character puts it late in the novel, they don’t want China to end up as ‘another Hindustan.’ The wily Chinese, then, have judged the British character well, and no error!

So there’s a merry community of English, Americans, Dutch, Portuguese and Indian merchants living just outside the margins of Chinese society, pretty much living by their own rules and flaunting Chinese law when it suits them. The corrupt Chinese officials themselves get rich skimming a few taels off the opium trade, and therefore are rather lax about enforcing its supposed prohibition. This uneasy situation has been going for some time when the book opens, with the foreigners unused to much in the way of attention from the Chinese law enforcers.

All this changes when the seemingly-honest and incorruptible Commisioner Lin arrives. He travels like a commoner, refuses to take bribes, and is determined to enforce the Emperor’s edicts outlawing the trade in opium. Suddenly, things get very unpleasant around Fanqui-town as the foreign Tai-Pans - business magnates grown rich on plying their killer trade – try to outdo one another in protestations that they are in fact good men trying to introduce to the barbarian Chinese the selfless notions of free trade and globalisation.

So what did I think of the book? Well, it should be noted that the above plot description probably accounts for about 40% of the actual narrative. By the time the plot actually kicked in, Ghosh had quite worn me down for what felt like a thousand pages with every possible side-track plot he could think of. The Fanqui-town residents are many, and not one side-street of their winding lives goes unexamined. Every walk-on character is treated to an extensive discourse on their family history, often going back two or three generations. Some might find that this technique adds depth to the setting, but I found that nine times out of ten it just overloads the reader with information that becomes useless immediately after if has been imparted. As much as I appreciate a well fleshed-out fictional world, the book became so much more enjoyable when the plot actually got started and I realised quite how much Ghosh had been jerking me around with these pointless plotless sidetracks. He’s like the Terry Gillingham of novelists: he really is good at what he does, but man does he need a strict editor.

There’s also the issue of food: at the drop of a hat, Ghosh is likely to abandon whatever thin wisp of plot that might be floating around and just have the characters pig out. He will then spend half a page or more describing, in loving detail, every exotic morsel of what is usually the kind of feast that Tiberius would have been proud of. Not one paratha, masala, chakki or daal-purri goes undescribed.

And that touches on another issue. Ghosh is Indian, but he’s lived all over the world, and is writing for the English market. Yet the amount of non-English words he drops into the book, without a sniff of a glossary, is literally astonishing. Writers of historical fiction are always quick to drop in a few foreign words, usually hygienically sealed in italic, as a way of adding local colour. But even as a veteran of Anglo-English literature, and no stranger to the odd maidanor jemhadar, I quickly became distanced from the story by entire pages in which I did not recognise one single noun. The use of language is a quite deliberate tactic used by Ghosh to portray the mix of cultures that inhabit Canton, as I describe below, but its over-use grates massively.

As a pedant, something that bothered me that probably wouldn’t bother most people was Ghosh’s somewhat creative use of punctuation, in particular when it comes to dialogue. In short, he frequently leaves his dialogue without quotation marks, as if he was some sort of Indian James Joyce or something. At first I tried to spot the logic behind this; perhaps he uses this technique to indicate that characters were not actually speaking English; it also occurred to me that he might only be using it for Indian characters, or just for the main character Bahram. But none of these rules are adhered to consistently as far as I could see, so this confusing lack of punctuation remains a mystery to me.

Something I did like about River of Smoke was its focus on the non-Europeans amongst the opium merchants. Bahram is an Indian Zoroastian who is just as rich a businessman as his white colleagues, and yet he finds that when it comes to the crunch, he is not considered one of them. It’s interesting to discover that Indian merchants were extensively mixed-up in the opium trade; we are so used to thinking about it as a European-dominated industry.

Ghosh has said in interviews that his ultimate goal with his books is to show that much of the world was a dynamic, globalised network of trading and learning even without the input of Europeans. The theme of globalisation is hit again and again in the book; the language, food and commodities of the characters come from a multitude of backgrounds (each of which is usually exhaustively followed up). The author is showing that even before the intervention of Europeans, the East had a sophisticated mix of cultures and trade.

And yet it must be said that the book languishes in what colonial Europeans would call ‘Oriental decadence,’ revelling in its choking, smothering richness of food and languages, and going absolutely nowhere, until the Fanqui-town Europeans take centre-stage towards the final third to deal with the threat to their livelihood and inject some actual plot to the proceedings. If by the time I came to the closing chapters I felt a few pangs of regret, it was the regret of a hostage who’s acquired Stockholm Syndrome: a massive book like this will sometimes charm the reader just because of the sheer amount of time they’ve spent in its world.

River of Smoke isn’t an adventure story, and it isn’t a fast-paced breezy read. Despite its odd and obvious flaws, its far closer to actual literature than anything else I’ve read lately. The prose style is absolutely gorgeous, and this coupled with the interesting setting, is probably what kept me reading. I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s the kind of book I will return to in several years’ time and enjoy much more. I certainly can see how many people would probably enjoy the book: there really is a lot to like, despite all my bellyaching. Somehow, I’m not sorry that my urge to chase the Opium War dragon led me to River of Smoke.

Flashman at the Charge by George MacDonald Fraser

 I’ve never been interested in the Crimean war, much: a war fought by two relatively modern colonial powers, it lacks the all-important element of exoticism or orientalism that I enjoy in most colonial-era history. Nevertheless, in Flashman at the Charge, Fraser rather predictably paints mid 19^th-century Russia as a backwards, barbaric and thoroughly alien place, and whether or not this is true to any sort of historical reality, it keeps things interesting enough for me to pay attention. And he even sticks in some Arabian Nights-type scenarios in central Asian locations towards the end too, to ramp up the exoticism.

Charge is one of the volumes where we get to learn a little bit about what Flash’s civilian home life is like, which I find rather interesting. It’s the upper-class version of Dickens’ London: Flash plays billiards in Piccadilly, goes whoring in St John’s Wood and gets ‘roaring tight’ just about everywhere. I do wish there had been a little bit more of this stuff; with the amount of time Flash spends moaning about the barbaric places he gets shanghaied into soldiering in and the idiots and hypocrites he’s forced to schmooze with, it’s interesting to see just what kind of things he does approve of, and to see how he behaves when he’s in his element (he claims in this book that he really is ‘all for a quiet life for everyone’). Predictably enough, he acts like a complete cad, and the reader is glad of it!

At the beginning of the book, Flash’s troubles start when he unwittingly makes the acquaintance of a cousin of Prince Albert’s while out prowling the pool halls with his cronies. When the army decides that young Willy will require a mentor to accompany him into military action in the Crimea, Flash realises that it’s him who they’ve got in mind, and as usual is incapable of wriggling out of the job.

The reasons the Crimean war broke out are not easily explained, and Fraser doesn’t try much. Flashman gives us a lot of background about how much the British public and the papers were spoiling for a fight, though, and sometimes that matters just as much as any solid military reasoning. He humorously points out that once the British had decided to make war on Russia, they were somewhat stumped on exactly how to do it. It is a pretty big place, after all. In the end, they settled on making a start on the Crimean Peninsula, and so that’s where Flashy gets packed off to first.

Once there, Flashman becomes involved, despite himself, in all the major battles of the campaign, including the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade. I often find military engagements tedious and difficult to follow in novels; no matter how hard I try, I just can’t keep up with all the terminology and troop movements. Military writers so often expect us to know what redoubts, jemadars and fusillades are without the benefit of a glossary. The battles in Chargeare no exception; they were complex and convoluted affairs in real life, and Fraser does his best to stick to the historical record. Overall, it’s the small touches that work better than the sweeping vistas here- soldiers swearing, horses bleeding, that kind of thing. Fraser’s attempt to depict the bungled communication that caused the suicidal charge is probably about as confusing as the real thing was- he makes it clear that nobody had any idea what was going on at the time, and neither do I now.

Following the charge, Flash is taken as a prisoner, and from there he undergoes a convoluted odyssey across Russia and eventually, central Asia, where he meets up with Tajik warlords who are opposing the Russians. Again, Fraser has identified a historical period that is rich and fascinating, but rarely explored in media: Russian military expansion in Central Asia. An ardent colonialist, Fraser whines in the endnotes that while the Western powers are now endlessly derided for their empires, the brutal Russian land-grabbing of the 19^th Century is all but forgotten, even though most of the countries involved remained tied to Russia right up until the end of the 20^th century. The political intrigue between Britain and Russia in Central Asia was known as the Great Game, and it’s an amazing background for storytelling. Thousands of tribes rose against the Russians, famous and exotic silk road cities like Bukhara and Samarkand were the scene of attacks, escapes and sieges, secret agents travelled incognito, buttering up local leaders and collecting intelligence for their respective powers: we need more books and movies set against this scenario! Admittedly, the connection to the first 2/3 of the book feels slightly stretched. I do get the feeling that Fraser just wanted to get Flash back somewhere where he could be a hero again, amongst the kind of wild tribes that adored him in the first book, and jam in a bit of orientalism too. Fraser mentions Stoddard and Connelly, and once again comes dangerously close to mentioning my all-time favourite colonial story, the journey of Joseph Wolff to Bukhara.

 Charge is a short book in which rather a lot happens- it’s expansive in terms of action as well as geography- though it never feels rushed or forced. Each chapter follows more-or-less naturally on from the one before, and it’s only when you finish the book that you think ‘wow, actually, Flash must have travelled about a thousand miles in only four pages.’ But it never feels like this when you’re reading it, and that’s down to Fraser’s amazing prose. I recommend Flashman at the Charge as one of the most entertaining of the old lecher’s memoirs.

The Species Seekers by Richard Conniff

You are to imagine, ever-constant reader, that I type surrounded by towering columns of books, some mouldering, eldritch tomes (first editions of Haggard and Doyle, no doubt); some gharish and wrinkled (trashy, sensationalist page-turners from the 70s and 80s); some bright and shiny with embossed silver font (modern bestsellers dealing out contemporary thrills while pretending to concern themselves with the Empire of yesteryear).

You are to imagine, too, that beside me as I sip bourbon and clack the keys on my automated type-writing engine is my to-read pile. It is enormous, of course. Figuratively and literally, I will never defeat it. Try as I might to make a dent into it, I know that I will someday have to throw in the towel and admit that my literary eyes are bigger than my belly (I am speaking metaphorically of course. I don’t recommend consuming books with your belly).

A book which has recently been exhumed from the depths of this Babelian tower of unread works is The Species Seekers. It was gifted to me at the end of my stint in the jungles of Panama by an employer who obviously took note of my enjoyment of her copy of The Lost City of Z. Here’s a chap who appreciates a good tale about explorers and naturalists getting themselves killed in far-off lands, she must have thought. And she was right, though I didn’t get around to realising just how right she was until almost two years later.

The Species Seekers concerns itself with tales about individual enthusiasts from the so-called ‘age of discovery’. See, up until the mid-eighteenth century, according to the author, mankind had developed no sensible, systematic approach to cataloguing the wonders of the natural world. He admits that various non-European cultures did have a tremendous knowledge of their native flora and fauna, as well as the uses to which it could be put, but none of them had anything approaching a rational, scientific classification system, ‘though it is no longer fashionable to say so.’ Conniff, however, is far from pro-Imperial, and largely I feel that his interpretation is correct. I may disagree with how the native peoples were treated during the age of colonialism, but I still appreciate the scientific benefits that accrued during this same period.

All this changed, of course, with the ideas of Carolus Linnaeus, who invented the binomial classification system, an updated version of which we still use today. In terms of his influence, Linnaeus is undoubtedly one of the most important biologists who ever lived. Alongside a few other luminaries such as Darwin, Linnaeus helped knock modern biology into the shape in which we know it now. All in all, he’s a big hero in the scientific world, and he’s featured early on in The Species Seekers… but not quite to the extent to which you might expect.

See, Richard Conniff’s interest lies with the underdogs. He focuses instead on Linnaeus’s nemesis, a Frenchman named Buffon, who you’ve probably never heard of. Despite being a big-shot in his day, Buffon wasn’t quite on the money and his considerable contributions to our modern understanding of classification have been largely forgotten, while Linnaeus still enjoys a rosy reputation. There are some genuinely laugh-out-loud moments early on in the book as the two butt horns in a typically eighteenth-century fashion, naming reprehensible species after one another, the knowledge of Buffon’s eventual historical obliteration lending the feud a somewhat poignant air.

From there, Conniff goes on to show how the collecting and identification of species became a sort of mania within certain European countries. And he uses this mania as a starting-off point to explore Victorian attitudes towards colonialism, race and class, and many other fascinating aspects of the period. He really gives a feel for the time; as he pokes into the lives of these many forgotten heroes and lunatics, the reader comes to understand the very different ideas and expectations that controlled their lives. Class is a huge issue, of course: the difference between Darwin’s privileged upper-class world of great armchair scientists and politicians and Wallace’s grim work-house existence make it a wonder that the two could ever have contributed so much to the same field. It makes us understand too, how Wallace could have genuinely felt nothing but thankfulness that the well-connected Darwin would include him as essentially the lesser partner in a joint presentation that would bring the idea of natural selection to the world at large. As a low-class Victorian, Wallace appreciated that even thought he had stumbled upon the idea independently, and begun talking about it first, he would have been nothing without Darwin’s connections.

Attention is paid too to the men who helped prepare the world for the Darwin/Wallace bombshell through their earlier, preliminary thinking on evolution. Conniff impresses upon the reader that the idea of a sudden, momentous discovery is usually never so simple, and that the road to the theory of evolution was a long and rocky one. Many thinkers had proposed various systems that bordered on common descent, and the idea was very much in the public eye, though of course it was still highly contentious.

Any student of Victoriana will be well-rewarded, as old friends consistently appear alongside Conniff’s forgotten heroes. Super-hero geologists Hutton and Lyle are brought masterfully to life, ‘Dinosaur-creator’ Richard Owen’s low-down conniving merits several mentions, Chambers of the Edinburgh Journal proves that he had other things to print besides gonzo articles about spiritualism, and Charles Kingsley makes several appearances just to prove once again that he was a big ‘ol racist.

The book is a treasure trove of amazing stories. Other subjects touched upon include the remarkably late discovery of such large ‘charismatic’ mammals as the gorilla and the giant panda, the consistent attempts to justify racist delusions using ‘science’, and the link between biology and the destruction of various tropical diseases. It’s been a long time since a book so well reminded me that biology is an adventure. It quite convinced me to once again don my pith helmet and head out into the wilds, with only my wits (God help me) and a copy of Insects of Western Europe to protect me.

Storytrails by Allen Sharp

The Storytrails gamebooks are to Fighting Fantasy what a French arthouse film is to a dumb Hollywood blockbuster: by comparison, they’re weird, hard-to-find, and deeply unmarketable.

Let’s examine the differences here.

Tai-Pan by James Clavell

Forget your invasions, your battles and sieges: the most exciting theme to come out of the entire back-catalogue of Empire fiction is TRADE! Tea, silks, spices and of course opium were what kept the Empire ticking over, providing shedloads of cash to fuel the growing worldwide British conquests of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Military takeovers, after all, are expensive, messy affairs that are of little use on their own, and of course the British engaged in these only when they absolutely had to (though they proved extraordinarily good at it, over and over again…). But when TRADE was involved, well roll up your red-sleeves, private, because you’re going to be sent in to sort out those fuzzy-wuzzies and teach them how to make some economic use of their land… at the point of a bayonet, of course.

If ever a book will make you believe (even for the span of a mere 700 pages) that stock markets and tea prices can be as exciting as battles and wars, it’s Tai-Pan.

I’ve always been suspicious of these chunky, doorstop historical novels that promise ‘epic, sweeping’ tales that follow the fortunes a cast of characters more numerous than the medals on a tinpot dictator’s chest. Partly it’s because they usually fall into the ‘airport novel’ category for me, what with their authors’ names embossed in gold text larger than the title. I know this is largely down to literary snobbery on my part; the thought that the idea of a book should always take precedent over, y’know, telling an entertaining story. And if a book is marketed towards people who care more about who the author is than what the book is about (cough cough James Patterson), than the idea can’t be up to much.

I’ve always been haunted by this anecdote from my brother’s bookshop-working days:

Customer: I’m looking for something by James Patterson. I love him.

Brother: No problem. His books are over here. Which ones have you read already?

Customer: (looking at books) Eh… I’m not sure. I can’t remember.

Partly too, my suspicion down to the books’ enormous length. I usually admire conciseness in writing and storytelling, and the whole Victorian-author-being-paid-by-the-word style has never struck me as a good way to produce literary quality. Of course, their insane length is what allows these books to be epic and sweeping, as they claim to be. Still, why they have to be heavier than a bad date at an arthouse cinema is still somewhat mystifying to me.

James Clavell does not come to me without some baggage, either. As a kid, I was enthralled and saddened by his weirdo cod-Japanese fantasy Thrump-O-Moto, an insane picture-book fable about an Australian girl on crutches who hangs out with a tiny Japanese wizard-in-training. If I recall, it has a leprechaun in it, and a villain with the hilarious name of Nurk-U The Bad.

While in university, I tried really hard to read Shogun, which is probably the novel that most people know him for (it was made into a successful TV miniseries in 1980). The book promised an ‘epic, sweeping’ tale of Japan in the 1600s, but despite being based heavily on the fascinating real-life story of William Adams, the ‘English Samurai’, I found it an interminable snoozefest. I can proudly say that it remains unfinished by me to this day.

So is it any wonder that Tai-Pan sat on my shelf for close to six months (albeit inclusive of two moves of house)?

Well I’m sure glad I gave Clavell another shot, because Tai-Pan is one of the most enjoyable doorstops I’ve ever spend a month of my life with.

The setting is China in early 1841. The British have just wound up the first Opium War, ensuring themselves many more years of merrily providing the Chinese with the killer, life-destroying drug. As part of the reparations (how darethe Orientals try to outlaw the importation of such a product!), Britain has acquired the barren, uninhabited island of Hong Kong. While some see little merit in this, its deep natural harbours and closeness to the mainland are seen as a blessing by others, in particular the giant Scottish trader Dirk Struan, Tai-Pan (or boss) of the Noble House trading company.

Struan is a mountain of a man, in body, personality and influence. The many plots in the book revolve around him, and the book twists history into making it seem as if Struan deliberately manipulated the Chinese and British into going to war, as part of a deliberate scheme to acquire Hong Kong. The cast of characters mostly stems from Struan: his mistresses, sons (legitimate and illegitimate), his business partners, rivals and enemies. This is Empire-building as seen from the point of view of the businessman rather than the soldier, though Struan has long-term plans for the company that might one-day affect the entire practise of colonialism.

The most fascinating aspect of Tai-Pan is its world-building. I’m hard-pressed to think of another work which so well conjures-up the detail and minutia of a forgotten time. Absolutely nothing about the lives of the Europeans in 1840s China seems familiar; not the way they talk, think or act. It’s almost impossible to imagine how Clavell would have acquired enough information to build this fictional society from research- unless of course, he’s making it all up. The nuances of contemporary trade and politics are entered into in more detail than in most similar works. The characters rarely feel like thinly-disguised 20^th-century people in period grab, partly because the book was written in 1966, before the uber-PC standards that we’re now used to came about. As a result, Tai-Panfeels like a genuinely different world, full of characters whose morals and mindsets are utterly alien to us.

Even the length of the book didn’t bother me too much; it rarely becomes dull. It’s true that the much-maligned ‘who-will-be-best-dressed-at-the-ball’ subplot drags on for what seems like hundreds of pages, but it rarely dominates the other, better material. There’s so much good stuff going on- pirates, suspicious Russians, Chinese secret societies- that there’s always something to keep you reading. I would have appreciated some more strong Chinese characters, mind.

Clavell has a whole pile of other books that follow the fortunes of the Noble House over the next 150 years. It probably won’t be anytime soon, but I might one day be persuaded to take on another such behemoth again.

The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury

Never remind readers of your book of another, better book, and especially never remind them of Foucault's Pendulum, the book that destroyed all future silly historical conspiracy thrillers, particularly if your book is a silly historical conspiracy thriller.

But not long into The Last Templar, a minor character  quotes the above tome by saying that you can always tell a lunatic because '...sooner or later he always brings up the Templars.'

Bigging Themselves Up: The Culture and Consider Phlebas

Memory can be a strange thing. 

As a kid in school, Consider Phlebas, the first of the Culture novels by the Scottish Iain M. Banks, seemed quite a daunting read to me. I found it in the library at school amongst several of Banks’ other books; perhaps the blessed doing of the same unknown but thoughtful soul who stocked our book-depository with the many Sandman novels. I like to think that some well-meaning menial member of staff had sneakily inserted these books among the ranks of the Jaquiline Wilsons in an effort to prove that teenagers are capable of enjoying the more complex entertainments if given the opportunity.