The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes (2008)

The Age of Wonder sat on my to-read pile for over a year. I go in and out of periods of enjoying non-fiction, and it wasn't until this December that a Christmas reading of Treasure Island got me interested in the18th century again, and I thought that it was time to dust off this tale of Enlightenment science. It's a setting that's a bit earlier than my usual period of interest. Traditionally I've been fascinated by the Victorian period, partly because I love their dress sense, and I've always been turned off by anything involving powdered wigs and ridiculous-looking breeches and high socks. But I remembered reading through the first chapter previously and being struck by the tale of the first Europeans visiting Tahiti, so I cracked into the book for real this month.

The Patriot (2000)

Some bad things get worse the better they're executed- and I think that propaganda is one of them. And I'm sorry to bring up some pretty heavy examples, but Birth Of A Nation and Triumph Of The Will are both all the more terrible for being particularly well-made movies. Nobody takes a bad movie seriously; in particular, nobody takes the message of a bad movie seriously. So when a movie that had a dubious message is well-made on a technical level, it becomes all the more troubling. Which brings me onto The Patriot, which, while not as reprehensible perhaps as those two movies, is still pretty problematic.


In this movie, Mel Gibson again reminds us how much he loves a bit of Brit-bashing. As you probably know, that's the kind of thing that usually plays well to Irish audiences. This is something else that I find problematic. No matter how enlightened we may think we are, for some if us there's always a bit of us that enjoys seeing the dirty Brits get their comeuppance, even if it's only in the form of a stupid and obviously cartoonishly patriotic Hollywood shlockfest. We tell ourselves that it's just a bit of a laugh and that we don't mean anything by it, and that it's no reflection on our attitudes towards the British today, but I think it says something about our inner nationalist side that we enjoy this stuff so much. As it happens, I have no idea why Mel Gibson likes having the British be the villains in his movies.  

The Patriot is certainly no Braveheart, but in terms of sets, cinematography and the ordinary nuts-and-bolts of movie-making, it's pretty good, and it should be, as it's made by people who know their craft. Jerry Bruckenheimer was the producer on this, and though he may be something of a schlockmeister, he sure knows how to make movies that look great. The Patriot aims at being a historical epic, and it definitely looks like one. The colours are lush, the landscapes are beautiful, and the action sequences are tense and thrilling. Mel doe a pretty good job directing too, which must have been difficult as he's in pretty much every scene. As someone who likes history, I sometimes enjoy even bad historical movies as I love seeing an era I'm interested in realised with a decent budget, and The Patriot doesn't disappoint in that respect.

Cup of Earl Grey?

So what's the plot? Well, it's 1776, and Mel plays Benjamin Martin, a character who seems to be based on various real-life guerrilla militia leaders who fought in the War of Independence. At first, all we know about him is that he did shameful but unspecified things back in the French & Indian War, and therefore has no interest in getting involved in this new war against the British. He's got about a million kids to look after, including a young Heath Ledger, and a conveniently-dead wife (convenient for her predatory sister, that is, played by a very hot Joely Richardson, who was no doubt dreaming of her days on board the Event Horizon). So when a bunch of South Carolina powdered wig-wearers get together to debate whether they should join the rebellion, Martin is all like 'nu-uh, I don't do that shit no more, besides I gotta mind the kids, no matter how much of a dick King George is being, and no matter how much shitty tax he's putting on our tea.' This is important as it allows the screenwriters to have their cake and eat it too: Martin is show to be a pacifist, but later events (vis the eeeevil British) will force his hand and make him take up arms. He's a nice guy when he's allowed to be, but he's a badass when he has to be. These early discussions about when/if it's morally okay to use violence for political chance are kind of interesting, but they get dropped after this scene and don't really ever come back.

'Benjamin Franklin?'

The requisite events occur at the hands of Colonel Tavington (Jason Isaacs, also dreaming of his days aboard the Event Horizon), who is the most moustache-twirlingly cartoonish villain this side of Jafaar. He probably enjoys tying girls to train-tracks when he's not out committing atrocities in the South Carolina countryside. Tavington kills a bunch of unarmed prisoners, including one of Martin's kids, therefore filling our hero with righteous rage and usefully providing him with a guilt-free reason to go on his own rampage. Martin grabs the rest of his family and teaches them how to kill British officers, pretty much declaring a one-man war against Tavington. Martin comes to be known by the British as "The Ghost," due to his almost supernatural ability to kill large amounts of their soldiers. As far as I can see, the only special ability Martin has is being able to ignore soldiers who are not in shot during tight camera angles. But that's just me.

 Tavington gets chewed out by his superior, Lord Cornwallis (who's appeared on this blog before), for being too brutal. Apparently, Tavington's cruel tactics are not sanctioned by the British army and are not representative of their behaviour during the war. This again is a ham-fisted ruse by the scriptwriters that allows them to have their hateful, eeeevil villain, but not seem like they're implying the British were all bad. Too bad they stuff it up by having even the other, slightly more sympathetic officers be snooty, arrogant and disrespectful to the American soldiers every time they appear. They aren't decentl professionals who happen to be on the other side to the protagonist, they're twits and cowards. Some soldiers occasionally seem horrified at Tavington's actions, but they're pussies and don't follow their conscience. And just in case you hadn't got your fill of stereotypes, Tavington himself is effeminate and foppish.

Martin gathers a group of rag-tag militiamen and sets up camp in the swamps. A French officer joins his squad, resulting in much hilarity (sic). If you figured that there'd be jokes about the Frenchman overdressing and being vain, well, award yourself a beer. They organise more attacks on the British, leading to a climactic final battle in which Martin finally faces down his nemesis and gets to wave an American flag around in slow motion.

But for all my kvetching, the movie is very enjoyable. Mel and Bruckenheimer know what they're doing, and even the very well-worn tropes that they're using go down easy. The dialogue is largely enjoyable, the characters are likeable and hateable as they need to be, and everything looks great. Which is the problem, as the movie contains some pretty troubling ideas.

One of the main themes of the movie is that of using violence to solve problems. As I've mentioned, the film toys with going into the ethics of this decision at the beginning, and then dispenses with it altogether, becoming a simplistic glorification of violence instead. It's very black-and-white; us vs them. Which is one thing if a movie is dealing with completely fictional forces (ie, Star Wars). It's quite another when real peoples from history are involves. I feel that if a film-maker is dealing with history, they have much more of a responsibility not to simplify (though I accept that this rarely happens). It's far more irresponsible to have Tavington, as a representative of the British forces, commit war crimes, than to have Darth Vader commit war crimes, because Tavington's actions actually serve to represent how the British behaved during the real war. And, by extension, how the Americans behaved. In reality, atrocities were carried out by both sides, and there isn't currently any concensus that the British were any worse than the Americans.

Also troubling is the movie's treatment of black people. Martin's farm is worked by a bunch of happy, non-slave blacks who are insanely loyal to his family (yeah, right). There's a whiff of Uncle Tom off the whole thing. There's one black man who joins the militia, at first because he's gotta serve a certain amount of days to earn his freedom, but who later sticks around because he believes in the cause. Which is fine, except his final scene is horrifically offensive: he announces that now everyone's building a new world, he thought he'd help rebuild Martin's house first. WHAT? The man has not a single thought for himself? What about building his own Goddam house now that he's free for the first time in his life? Instead, he acts like the Magical Negro who's only around to help out the white folks.

I flip and flop on this movie. I guess overall I like it, because I usually prefer a movie that tries to do something ambitious and fails to a movie that plays it safe. Mel could have made a perfectly ordinary, dumbass action blockbuster. Instead, he made a dumbass action blockbuster that's dealing with ideas it's laughably unprepared to follow through on. It's a movie that annoys me as much as I enjoy it.

The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

I live near Michael Caine. I just wanted to say that.

I seem to review a lot more books here than movies. There's definitely a paucity of British-Empire-themed movies compared to books, and the movies that have been made are sometimes pretty hard to come across. Though I had virtually no knowledge of this particular film before someone gifted it to me, it's considered something of a classic. Well, who knew? I didn't know just how much I needed to be reminded of why I own a pith helmet.


The Man Who Would Be King is a film version of a Kipling story. Now if you've been following the blog, you'll know that I've recently come around (in a small way) to Kipling after not liking him for years. As such, it's rife with allusions to other works of the Bard of Empire.

Things get off to a fine start with Maurice Jarre's stirring theme, which includes a version of the Irish revolutionary air The Minstrel Boy (though sung with Christian English lyrics). The music contains echoes of nostalgia for a time when big-whiskered men could be big-whiskered men, and could ride out into the wilds of British India's North-West Frontier to Have Adventures.

Christopher Plummer, his days as a Shakespeare-spouting Klingon in Star Trek V (special thanks to my brother for correcting me on that!) still ahead of him, plays Kipling himself in the wraparound sections that give the movie the flavour of a round-the-campfire tale. One night, Kipling is working hard in his newspaper office when a wreck of a man shambles in. Kipling doesn't recognise him until he reveals himself to be one Peachy Carnehan.

'You?' says Kipling in disbelief. Carnehan then replies with one of cinema's great lines:

'The same... and not the same... as the man who sat beside you in a first-class carriage to Malwar Junction, three summers and a thousand years ago.' It's stirring and wonderfully evocative of adventure, like everything in this first section of the movie.

Carnehan reminds Kipling of a similar night some years earlier, when two cheeky but charismatic jack-the-lads entered that selfsame office: Carnehan and his hetero life-mate Daniel Dravit. There's some footage of these ne'er-do-wells in their earlier adventures; wheeling, dealing, throwing respectable Indian citizens out of trains ('Out the window Baboo!) and falling foul of authority. As Dravit says, they know India; her cities and deserts, her palaces and her jails.

'It was detriments like us who built this bloody empire,' snarls Carnehan to one starched-shirt official. He's speaking with more truth than he knows: particularly in the early 19th-century, it was irresponsible and irrepressible characters such as 'Rajah' James Brooke, Stamford Raffles and John Nicholson who enlarged the British Empire by literally carving out kingdoms for themselves in the East, with or without official consent from London.

And this is precisely what Carnehan and Dravit intent to do. With Kipling as a witness, they sign a contract stating that they are never to rest, nor to dally with drink nor women until they are kings of the central Asian state of Kafiristan. They have chosen this place - now in modern-day Afghanistan - because it is inaccessible and little-known. When Kipling wrote the original story, Kafiristan didn't have long to wait before becoming first a Muslim state and then a vassal of the British Empire for real.

Having signed the document, the two leave Kipling and set off for some adventure (and some serious pith-helmetage). They head for the Khyber pass - realised most convincingly by the stunning Moroccan scenery -and come across Private Mulvaney, a Kipling character from Soldiers Three. Dravit mentions that the last time he came through this way he was with General 'Bobs' Roberts, a reference to the 2nd Anglo-Afghan war of 1879. And so they make their way towards Kafiristan, and destiny.

It's an amazing first act. And it's almost an amazing movie.

It's got all the elements of a classic adventure movie: brave, likeable and mischevious heroes, a clear quest, an exotic land. But there's something about the pacing and the plotting that feels wrong. As soon as they two men begin assembling their little empire the whole thing feels more like heavy-handed allegory than an adventure. The beats come slowly and predictably, and the plot feels less driven by characters than by a godlike story-teller who wants the characters to learn an IMPORTANT LESSON. It's still a good movie, and is never less than watchable. But for me, it doesn't quite make it up into the top category.

Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis

So I watched The Boys from Brazil recently, and it send me on a bit of a quest to track down any and all occult-Nazi-themed books or movies I could find. Turns out I had at least three of them already festering on my bookshelf, waiting for my fickle attention to turn to them. First up is Bitter Seeds, the first book in the so-called 'Milkweed triptych'.

Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds (1978)

-->

Deep breath… and now, an exorcism of sorts.

A piece of classic 19^th-century science-fiction - and one that probably stands as my favourite – that I’ve steadfastly refused so far to review is H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (WOTW, as I’m going to call it). I’m not really sure why this is. Perhaps I’m just scared of getting bogged down in a marsh of Wells’ metaphors. WOTW is after all a thematically rich story that manages to comment on science, evolution, religion, colonialism, and the human condition. I have a lot to say about the book. It’s not easy to write an effective piece of commentary on such a dense work by scribbling furiously on the back of a beermat in the downtime between organising interplanetary smuggling runs and solving supernatural-related crimes for beautiful widows, all over the course of a burboun-soaked weekend (that’s how I’d like you to imagine I write all my reviews).

Instead I’m going to take the easier option first and talk about a later adaptation of the book: Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds (or JWMVOTWOTW, as I’m probably not going to be calling it).

Which is a 1970s progressive-rock opera retelling of the tale.

With disco elements.

Oh yeah, and it’s set in the original Victorian time period.

Maybe this isn’t really the easy option.

Well, I’m going to make things slightly easier for myself by talking about how I first came across this batshit crazy musical. As a kid in the early 90s, I had a neighbour whose older sister knew that we liked a bit of sci-fi. Back then, sci-fi in movies or other media wasn’t really easy to come by though, and besides a few blurry, overwatched, taped-off-the-English-channels VHS versions of Jurassic Park and, um, Innerspace, we didn’t get exposed to an awful lot of scifi. Okay, there was Star Trek The Next Generation, but every eight-year-old knew that Star Trek wasn’t real sci-fi because there was too much talking and standing around and their ships moved real slow like submarines instead of fast with pew-pew-pew lasers like the ships out of Star Wars. And besides, there weren’t any dinosaurs or giant robots. Note that these are all lessons Star Trekitself has learned since: JJ Abrams’ new Trekhas lots of creatures and fast ships and no people standing around talking whatsoever, and definitely nothing that would make you think above the level of an eight-year-old. That’s called progress.

So the sister, bless her, presumably hearing the bizarre combination of Richard Burton’s drunken ramblings, blood-freezingly terrifying string music, and mysterious alien encounters that opens Jeff Wayne’s opus, didn’t think gee, that’s fucked up, what the hell was wrong with people in the 70s like any normal person would, but instead thought hey, my little bro and his weird friends sure would like this, where’d I put that Jason Donovan cassette where he vomits during the hidden track? I sure could tape over that shit!

So yeah, big thanks to her. We used to listen to the cassette in a garden shed that was our hangout. It had nice chairs and a boombox (well we probably called it a ghetto blaster back then, but you know, the world has changed for the better since then, so let’s get with it, yeah?). The album went on for what felt like hours.

And we usually emerged completely traumatised.

Uh-oh.

Seriously, I don’t think I ever equated horror with sci-fi before hearing Jeff Wayne’s lunatic endevour. Perhaps I was just a bit too young to deal with it, but for whatever reason the story always struck me as being very disturbing. I’d heard of War of the Worlds before and was desperate to read the book, but I’d never come across a copy of it, and the Jeff Wayne version was the first time I heard the story told in any detail. And was it ever heavy: Martians land in Woking in Surrey; cold, inscrutable and utterly alien Martians that set innocent people on fire and burned them to a crisp with weapons no humans can understand. Then they proceed to destroy (English) civilisation, leaving mankind a shallow wreck of its former self, peopled by lunatics and delusionals, with no hope of victory or redemption. There is the infamous 'happy' ending of course, though as a child I found it somewhat tacked-on. I found the description of the alien invasion chillingly realistic and believable, but found the quick-fix-it ending (nothing the humans do succeeds; the Martians are killed by bacteria) unconvincing and therefore unconsoling. And all of this set to the most otherworldly sounds that British 70s prog-rock could offer.

The red weed: H. G. Wells was ahead of the game with the whole 'invasive alien species' thing.

 

 A couple of years later, we discovered that another neighbour living down the road had the actual LP from the 70s. This opened a whole new level of trauma: the paintings of the Martians themselves contained within the booklet and on the front cover. The tripods just looked so alien; they seemed so organic with their insect eyes that we were unsure whether they were supposed to be the Martians themselves or if they were machines controlled from within, which only added to the horror. This lunatic notion, though clearly contradicted by the text, was due largely to one image of crows tearing bright red strips of flesh from a fallen tripod. But for me, the most stirring illustration was of a tripod destroying a London street, with Victorian pedestrians fleeing in terror, passing so close to the ‘camera’ that we can see the blood and sweat and fear on their faces. Horrifying. When I read the book now, I see it as an ingenius and original book in which the Martians are stand-ins for various issues that troubled the Victorian psyche. Back then, I couldn’t see anything other than the sheer horror of the invasion.

Aaaargh!

 

  














And possibly the most important factor that made this traumatic for me was that it was all happening in the 19^thcentury. I was deeply troubled that these people were being confronted by a horror that they had no means of understanding, never mind combating. They used useless superstition (ie, religion) to try to explain what was happening, because the truth was beyond anything they could understand. I found this incredibly sad.

Partly because of this exposure at an impressionable age, and partly because unlike virtually every other adaptation (that shitty Asylum movie never happened lalalala I CAN’T HEAR YOU) the album keeps the Victorian setting of the original, it has always stuck with me as being the definitive version of the tale. Even as I read the book, and I’ve read it many times, when I imagine the Martian tripods wreaking havoc on small-town Surrey, it’s Wayne’s iconic silver green-bug-eyed tripods that I see. When the tripods raise their hoods to utter a call of triumph across the Home Counties landscape, it’s Wayne’s terrifying UULLLLLAAAAAAAAA that I hear. And I know that I’m not alone: a quick gander at the Amazon review for the album confirms that for many people, Jeff Wayne’s Warremains a disturbing and definitive retelling of Wells’ original.

Years later, I bought a 2-disc CD version of the album at HMV out of curiosity. It had always remained in my head as this incredibly spooky, terrifying story. And when I put on the disc that first time, I was absolutely flabbergasted …

…at how discoit was.

It’s amazing how things affect you as a child, and it’s amazing how your mind filters out the stuff that’s not meaningful to you. Back then, it was the visceral alien-invasion stuff that resonated. I didn’t really know or care what disco was, so that part of the experience simply washed over me. There’s no denying that the album is very 70s. But once Richard Burton’s stern (though surely not sober) voice began that ominous narration that I still know off by heart so many years later, and those eerie strings started their staccato wailing, something deep inside rumbled, my spine tingled with real fear, and I looked to the skies with trepidation.

SHE'S BEEN TAKEN... by the Martians.

The Khyber Connection (1986) by Simon Hawke

I really ought to like Kipling – as the so-called ‘bard of Empire,’ he represents the personification of the jingoistic colonial attitude that both repels and fascinates me. As a son of British India, and a writer who chronicled its zenith, he should be right down my street. But for some reason, I don’t enjoy much of his prose. I think it stems from a problem common to some fiction from times past: contemporary writers of the Victorian period weren’t trying to give their works a Victorian flavour, and as a result, readers today used to period fiction, with an interest in Victorian settings, are left wanting. For me, I find it strangely difficult to get a feeling for what life might have been like during the British Raj by reading Kipling… either he neglects to mention aspects of culture, or he overloads the reader with alien phrases and concepts without explaining them. Don’t get me wrong, I know my jemadar from my pukka-wallahs, but when but when a barkandaze and a havildargo out for a chukka on the maidan, well that’s where I check out.

His poetry, on the other hand, I often find quite inspiring. Check out this excerpt from Arithmetic on the Frontier, which Simon Hawke uses to warm the reader up for his Afghanistan-set piece of sci-fi pulp nonsense, The Khyber Connection:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come down to cut up your remains,

Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,

And go to your God like a soldier.

Masterful. Kipling was writing about the Anglo-Afghan War of 1878-80, which was only the second time the British had stuck their bayonet into Afghanistan’s business. To be a completist: they got a sound drubbing in the war of 1839, did a little better in the war of 1878, ended things quite quickly in the war of 1919, and as for 2001? Well, they’re still there. It’s their longest one yet, and still counting! I love that for the recent BBC show Sherlock, they updated Doyle's characters to modern times, but didn't have to change the plot point that Watson had fought in Afghanistan because it was still contemporary!

Incredibly, there was another skirmish tucked in there between these encounters; one not quite large enough to have earned the title of a ‘war.’ This was the siege of Malakand, a region in what was then called the ‘Northwest Frontier Province.’ The British had set up this area as a buffer zone to prevent British India from sharing a border with Russian territory, but their careless border-shifting had irritated enough tribesmen to cause them a headache. Dissatisfaction eventually spilled over into violence and rebellion. It is this conflict that is described in The Khyber Connection.

The book is from a completely insane (but enjoyable) series called Time Wars. The central conceit is that after time travel is discovered, nations at war send agents back in time to historical conflicts to fight it out there rather than in their own time. A group called the Time Commandos (hell of a goofy name) attempt to police these conflicts in order to prevent temporal anomalies. But things are even more complex than that, because it appears that in a previous book, our heroes accidentally created an alternate timeline that merges with their own at certain points in history. Both timelines may cause the destruction of the other, so each is out to destroy the other. The Time Commandos encounter alternate versions of themselves from this other timeline; they’re essentially the same people, though they may have lived their lives differently.

Anyway, typically for a time-travel story, things get off to a confusing start. A temporal soldier (that is, a soldier from the future) who has been sent back to the 1987 conflict gets himself murdered by an Afghan dervish who looks strikingly similar to him. More than similar: they are the same man. During a clean-up operation, Future War Control (that’s what I’m calling it, anyway) figures out what this means: the alternate timeline people are up to something nefarious in the Khyber Pass in 1897! And so the Time Commandos are sent to nineteenth-century Afghanistan, and before you can say ‘Elphinstone’s ghost’ they’re up the Khyber without a paddle, or however the saying goes.

Leaving aside their base-dwelling, cigar-chomping boss, the Commandos are a power trio: Priest, an everyman character, Delaney, a hot-headed Irishman and typical rule-breaking maverick, and Cross, a 12^th-century French peasant girl who’s taken up living in the future. Yeah, she’s basically Laureline from the weird French comic Valerian. They’re simply drawn but likable characters. They disguise themselves as a missionary, soldier and nurse respectively to infiltrate the British forces invading Afghanistan.

Early on in the proceedings the reader comes across one of the odd conceits of the series: in this universe, certain fictional characters are real historical persons. The Commandos come across three soldiers called Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris. Yeah… I guess there aren’t that many well-known literary characters associated with the Afghan Wars. I’d not heard of these three before and I didn’t even suspect that they were a literary reference until I read the afterword. They’re taken from several short stories by Kipling as well as a book called Soldiers Three, as it turns out. Later on, they meet a Hindu water-carrier called Gunga Din, who is to play an important part in the proceedings also.

Apart from these, Hawke has packed his version of the Khyber Pass with an array of bizarre characters. Most of them we get only the barest introduction to; six books into the series, Hawke has amassed quite a lot of continuity baggage. There’s Dr Darkness, a man who has become able to travel instantaneously anywhere in the universe but can’t touch anyone else, there’s an enemy agent who has impersonated so many other characters that our heroes no longer know what to call him, and there’s not one but two rabble-rousing Islamic messiahs stirring up trouble, one or both of whom may also be imposters from the future. In fact, there are scenes in which it seems that barely anyone in this historical scenario is who they’re supposed to be. Oh, and did I mention Winston Churchill? Yes, Churchill really was involved in the Siege of Malakand as a young man. Hawke has juggled the dates around slightly to make him fit in with the other historical events he references, but in a novel that messes with history so much already this hardly seems worth griping about.

For a short, pulpy book the science-fictional elements and time-travelling shenanigans are both rather complex and in-depth. The reader very quickly gets buried in a mess of techno-babble that’s hard to keep up with but does have an internal consistency if you’re paying attention. The universe created is lively and interesting, with much world-building done in very few pages. It’s perhaps telling that the multiple time-streams plot is actually less baffling that the real-life explanation given for the political machinations of Afghanistan at the time: not even a sci-fi author could make those sound sensible!

There’s so much going on in this little novel that the history gets short shrift, though there are interesting tidbits, and anyway I’m always happy to read about 19^th-century Afghanistan. I’ve enjoyed one other Time Wars book so I’ll pick up a few more if ever I see them, though they’re definitely not common in 2^nd shops these days. Recommended if you like cheesy scifi action that actually gets rather complex. And as a final aside, the book did provide me with a few more works of Kipling’s that I enjoyed, in particular during a drunken bar scene where Cross, the female Time Commando, surprises the other soldiers by belting out a few verses of this song from Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads. Great stuff!

Production Update on my New Game 'Singapore!'

Here's a map I made for my latest Far-East trading text adventure game, Singapore! You can play it here: Link.

Several months ago, I discovered the game Tai-pan!, which is based on the book by James Clavell. I enjoyed reading the book about a year and a half ago, primarily during glorious summer afternoon sittings outside The Volunteer in deepest Surrey, with a pint of ale beside me as I read. The game is just as good - it's an old game, and pretty simple, but with enough nuance to keep it interesting. It's pure gameplay, with virtually no descriptions, atmosphere or plot, however.

I took inspiration from this to create a game using Inkle, the same online interactive-fiction generator that I used to create the well-received Sand and the Scarab back in January 2013. The premise of Singapore! is that the player is the heir to a small Far East trading company. They can travel around an open-plan world, voyaging between different ports, transporting goods and wheeling and dealing. I did a fair bit of research into what these places may have been like in the 1840s, the period during which the game is set, and had a lot of fun filling out the world with period details. There's pirates, troublesome British authorities, smuggling, and dirty-dealing unsavoury characters. Like most of my projects, I wrote the bulk of the game in intense, whiskey-fuelled sessions over a couple of weeks, then lost interest. Several months later, I picked it up again and found that I quite liked it. I'm now endeavouring to finish it.

Making the game completely open-ended produced some problems with the software. Inkle is a brilliant, if simple programme that focuses on allowing the creator to write and not worry too much about programming. There are some simple commands that you can insert so that the game knows which paths the player has taken, and it can modify the experience because of these. But with the player's ability to carry out a large number of tasks in any order, I began to run into some of the limitations of the programme. Some of these I have been able to overcome with some creative game-structuring; some of them I've been less successful with. So far, there's still a few places where scenes repeat and things don't quite happen in a logical manner, but these should only be noticed if player's are doing slightly odd things, such as repeating the same patterns where they don't need to.

Since the initial writing sessions, I've spent a bit of time in Singapore for real. I can't say that I've changed a lot of the game since then, as Singapore today is an ultra-modern city that largely scorns any architectural links with its past. But my trip to the East has certainly reignited my interest in the project.

I'm taking the step of having some friends playtest this game rather extensively before I present it to the world, as it's large and complex enough that it's now difficult for me to spot every logical inconsistency. If anyone reading this is interested in playtesting and sending me some feedback, you can play the game here. I'd appreciate anything you may have to say!

The map above shows the different ports the player can travel to. I was hoping to have it show up at the beginning of the game, but Inkle doesn't allow you to control the size of images used in the games, and it's currently showing up far too small to be of any use.

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1990) by Edward Rice

-->

Well, they do say you should never meet your heroes. And in this case, it’s not because my hero was an asshole, necessarily. It’s more the sense of crushing inadequacy that reading about Burton fills me with. I can never be as amazing as he was, not even if I brought mammoths back to life. Mammoths that shit out anti-global-warming unobtaneum.

Though, to be fair, the same can probably be said for most people who have ever lived. Sure, there were probably better people who have lived: Burton, after all, was not really any kind of philanthropist. He didn’t really work to better the world’s lot. In fact, in many ways, he probably made bits of the world indirectly worse off, by laying the foundation for British colonial rule. He did occasionally try to act as a just and fair governor in the various odd places he wound up. But, by and large, he spent his life doing things that he wanted to do for himself, and sod what anyone else wanted.

But there have been few people as genuinely awesome as Burton. Winding through the potted history of 19^th-century colonialism, Burton appears like a real-life combination of James Bond, Indiana Jones and Harry Flashman. He investigated interesting cultures from the inside. He travelled to forbidden places. He was a spy. He was present at game-changing historical events. He was a reckless, brilliant rule-breaker who was never entirely trusted by the establishment, and he was tall, mysterious, scarred, and alluring to women.

Legend.

 Aside from my all-consuming jealousy (I can never compete with his knowledge of 19^th-century exotica because he had the unfair advantage of living through it), would I have liked him as a man if I met him? Unlikely. Despite sharing more than a few of his interests, Burton would probably have soured me with his sarcasm and unsociable ways.

Rice must have had a devil of a task researching Burton: aside from his own insanely prolific (I’m inclined to coin the phrase ‘diarrheic’ for this man who seemed to positively shit out books) tendencies, the resources on Burton are varied and conflicting, with his wife’s input attempting to paint him as a saint (and a Catholic to boot; good luck with that, love) and her jealous nemeses colouring him far more negatively. It seems that everyone had their own version of the man. Burton’s bizarre sense of humour does not help matters much either, with him frequently coyly referring to himself in the third person, hinting at ‘a certain officer known to me,’ with Rice having to guess whether the blackguard is referring to himself or not. The sheer amount of things the man got up to that were deemed not acceptable to Victorian society, but which he simply had to commit to paper, means that he adopts this approach rather frequently. Whether, ahem, examining the gay brothels of Karachi for his superiors or measuring the average penis size of Ethiopians, Burton just has to write about it.

Lad.

So who was this guy, exactly?

I feel as though the man did so many varied and interesting things that I must resort to a list in order to cover them all, adding some commentary where I feel it’s appropriate.

-he travelled Europe as a young man and learned multiple languages. Prodigy, then.

-he went to Oxford, and though a genius at multiple subjects, could not tolerate the stuffiness of the establishment. He antagonised staff and students, fought duel (whenever someone insulted his moustache, seriously) and was expelled. He left by tramping the flower beds with his horse and carriage. That's how much he didn't care.

-he signed up for the East India Company and went soldiering in exotic lands. This is exactly what I would have done had I been living in the early 19^th-century, no question. I too, am ‘fit for nothing but to be shot at for sixpence a day.’ He left for India, having been ‘duly wept over.’ Cynical bastard.

-he became, more-or-less, a believer in Islam. This gave him a significant edge on other contemporary Orientalists, whose sympathies for those they studied was sometimes suspect. Old 'Ruffian Dick', on the other hand, was a true believer.

-he became an initiate into various cults and secret societies including the Sufis and the Hashassins. To be honest, for me this section of the book gets somewhat bogged down in theological matters. But then, I’m not a genius like Burton was.

-he (probably) acted as a British spy during the wars of the North-West Frontier, becoming enemy and advisor to various Muslim Khans and religious leaders. Let’s just say that various places he scouted out during this time later fell under the protective embrace of the British Empire. Who knows how that happened? Oops.

-he was involved in the Crimean War, though, as always with Burton, things didn’t exactly go to plan. His ragtag regiment didn’t come out covered with glory (they were more like the dirty dozen, in the first half of the movie anyway).

-he became one of the first white men to visit Mecca and Medina… and survive.Even though he went in disguise, his deep belief in Islam means that this trip was a religiously meaningful one to him, and not just an act of colonial bravaggio or cultural insensitivity.

-he took a spearhead through his cheek when ambushed by Somalians in his tent. This gave him a scar that made him look like a serious badass for the rest of his life.

-he travelled (and fought) with John Hanning Speke across central Africa to find the source of the Nile. This is one of the things Burton is most remembered for. The story of the two men’s friendship and eventual hatred is one of the most interesting parts of the book. The hardships the two underwent are almost unimaginable. Burton’s attitude towards the Africans, however, is far less enlightened than his attitude towards the Arabs.

-he underwent a mid-life crisis of sorts, travelling through the US alone on an epic drink bender, about which almost nothing is known. Despite the fact that Burton inevitably wrote multiple doorstoppers about his impressions of American life, this bit of his own chronology remains comparatively blank, and we know little of his feelings or motivations apart from a deep sense of melancholy. I think someone needs to fictionalise a series of adventures about these hard-drinking days. Maybe he even had a native American sidekick.

-he served in diplomatic positions in various exotic locations, from the island of Fernando Po, off West Africa, to regions of Brazil and Damascus, and finally Trieste. Most of his time in these places, however, he seems to have spent skiving off to investigate archaeological ruins or write books.

-he wrote the most popular English translation of the Arabian Nights. But he wasn’t content merely to translate; if he felt that an appropriate English word didn’t exist, he didn’t hesitate to make one up, resulting in some of the most bizarre writing you’ve ever come across. His Nights, like his Kama Sutra, was stacked with sex and scandalised Victorian society.

Quite apart from many of the other great characters of the era, Burton was never exactly what you might call successful. His knighthood came late in life, and most of his cushy posts were begrudging favours given by those who could no longer deny his achievements. He seems to have spent a good deal of his life being at odds: with his university, with the army, with the government, with his colleagues, his superiors and his friends. None of his frequent schemes to make money worked out. Even his achievements were often tinged with scandal – especially his writing, which was always criticised for so flagrantly ignoring the conventions of Victorian society. By the end of his life, he seems to have been afforded a certain reluctant, uncertain credit by the powers that were, and his funeral was a lavish one attended by the great and good.

Rice’s book… well, it seems unfair to sum up. This is not a review, after all – I could no more review a book about Burton than I could review Burton’s life itself. Like the man himself, it is many-faceted, complex, puzzling, maddening but ultimately fascinating. Rice seems to have traveled half the globe in researching it, and is probably a pretty interesting guy himself. The difference is that Burton did all this stuff first, back when it was not just dangerous but socially unacceptable. The man simply did not give a shit what anyone though, and that’s what made him a real hero. It’s also why I’d probably have hated to meet him.
 

Hero.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne

Descend, bold traveller, into the crater of the jokull of Snaefell
Which the shadow of Scartaris touches before the Kalends of July
And you will attain the centre of the earth.
 I did it. Arne Saknussemm

I've been harsh on Verne before. Like, really harsh. For years I typified him as the antithesis of Wells: stuffy and scientific where Wells was fun and lyrical. Well, I'm here now to take it all back. Journey to the Centre of the Earth is one of the greatest adventure novels ever written.


And actually, I have no idea why it hasn't always sat in my head as a classic, as I was fascinated by the illustrated Ladybird version as a child. The images in this book were in a really weird style, but they've stuck with me for years. Despite not having read the book since the Jurassic, I still remembered vividly the mysterious message of Arne Saknussem, the Liedenbrock Sea, the plesiosaur vs icthyosaur battle, and the lonely caveman.

Here it is. Weird, eh?

More recently, I picked up a Wordsworth edition for just a few pounds in a favourite late-opening Charing Cross bookshop during an otherwise bleary-eyed night in central London. What strikes me, reading the book again, is the sense of awe and wonder it evokes. I've felt nothing like it since reading The Lost World years ago; it's enough to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. As usual with Verne, there's tonnes of infodumping, though on this occasion the inclusion of barrel-loads of barmy 19th-century geology and zoology is handled far more entertainingly than in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

I don't suppose I have to tell you anything about the plot, but here goes anyway: the eccentric German Professor Liedenbrock finds a book containing a note in code written by the historical Icelandic explorer Arne Saknussem. The note includes a description of how to get to the centre of the Earth by traveling through the Sneffels volcano in Iceland. This opening, of course, set the template for a thousand lesser adventures and thrillers ever since, but the original is still thrilling. Imagine...every single lame movie you've ever seen that opens with the hackneyed 'coded map to adventure' trope... this is where it all started (with apologies to Mr. Poe!).

After decoding the message, Liedenbrock immediately packs and departs for Iceland, despite the whines of his nephew Axel. Along the way, they pick up a 'stoic' Icelandic guide named Hans. Now in terms of characterisation, Verne does a little better here than he did in Leagues. Liedenbrock is one of your classic 'eccentric scientist' characters, though of course without the sinister edge of satire that Wells gave to the likes of Professor Cavor. Verne's work remains nigh-on free from satire of any kind, and though this bothered me previously, I find his gee-whiz optimism rather refreshing now. Liedenbrock is genuinely likeable; positive, knowledgeable and exciting where Axel is dour and cowardly. Axel's character arc from yellow-belly to adventurer is also enjoyable in its own simple way. Hans, however... I don't know what Verne was thinking with Hans. You've only got three characters in your book, Mr. Verne, and you chose to make one of them mute? At least we can be thankful he's a mute Icelandic guide and not an African one. Sometimes its blessings for small mercies with 19th-century fiction (Frycollin from Robur the Conqueror, anyone?). A running joke involves Hans silently demanding his payment at exactly the prescribed time each week, regardless of their circumstances. Ha.

Anyway, these three travel to the Sneffels volcano, which they find has got three 'chimneys' leading into it. They have to get there by a certain date (no I'm not fact-checking what date it was) so that the shadow of the cone will touch one of the entrances, letting them know which leads to the centre of the earth. It's a great touch, and Verne wrings out the tension by having the sky remain clouded until the last possible minute.

Remind you of anything?

I really love the use of a natural phenomenon (in this case, the movement of the sun) as a necessary part of finding the trail. It's been used hundreds of times since, most famously in Raiders of the Lost Arc of course, but this must be one of its earliest uses in fiction. It gives the impression that Saknussem must have been a very clever man indeed.

Our heroic trio descend into the chimney, and make their way through the world beneath the surface of the earth, using a delightful array of 19-century devices to light their way and provide directions. Liedenbrock keeps tabs on where they are with regards to the surface world; ie which country they're currently beneath. There's a truly horrific scene where Axel gets separated and lost for several days in the pitch-black tunnels. This scene always affected me; I'm not particularly claustrophobic, but it's difficult to think of a more awful place to be lost and alone in. Despite this, Axel becomes more and more excited about the prospect of the discoveries they're sure to make. The excitement is palpable; the feeling that they're doing something no-one has ever done before (except Saknussem, of course) is ome f the main attractions of the book.

Eventually they come to the great central idea of the novel: a cavern so vast that its walls and ceiling cannot be seen. This blew my mind as a kid and it's still an amazing idea. They emerge on a beach, a vast sea stretching out before them. Above their heads, clouds have formed, and some strange electrical phenomenon provides light, though it shines from no particular direction, and thus casts no shadows. They have come to the Liedenbrock Sea.

This is an amazing scene. I don't have any smart-ass remarks to make about it.

This scene is truly one of the great feats of imagination of 19th-century literature. As the explorers traverse the beach, they come upon that mainstay of bizarre alternate worlds: the giant mushroom. I don't know why, but ever since, the presence of giant mushrooms has been used by storytellers to indicate that characters have arrived somewhere weird and alien. They then build a raft to cross the sea, encountering the very first fictional prehistoric animals in all of literature in another of Journey's famous scenes.

The idea of prehistoric animals hadn't been around for very long when Verne wrote Journey. Prior to the 1820s and the discoveries of Mary Anning, the biblical account of the Earth's history was largely accepted without question, and fossils were explained away as being the remains of animals that had failed to make it to the arc. The idea that God would have created creatures only to doom them to extinction made no sense. The Earth, of course, was thought to be no more than several thousand years old. These ideas were still changing, and still contentious, when Verne chose to pit an icthyosaur against a plesiosaur in the Liedenbrock Sea. Probably afraid to offend sensitive readers (no doubt on the advice of his canny publisher, Hetzel), Verne talks about geological ages and the appearance and extinction of different species without making any specific mention to evolution. Clever man. Hetzel certainly knew his audience, and this wouldn't be the first time he made 'political' changes to Verne's work: in the Captain Nemo books, Nemo's was originally to be a Polish nobleman revenging himself upon the Russians. Hetzel removed this background because of France's alliance with Russia.

Our trio cannot at first distinguish exactly what kind of animals are fighting in the water. There seem to be many. They then realise that there are just two, though they are massive and seem to be made up of the parts of different animals. It's a great idea - without this scene, there might have been no Jurassic Park - but it's not my favourite scene in the book.

When they get to the other side of the sea, Liedenbrock finds a boneyard full of the remains of thousands of creatures, including an anatomically modern human. They seem to be on the verge of even greater discoveries; but from here on out, Verne exercises incredible restraint, giving us only tantilising hints of the wonders that this inner world has to offer. Having created a world which would appear to be abundant in prehistoric creatures, he has his characters now skirt around the very edge of it. Instead of filling the narrative with chases and danger, or encounters with dinosaurs, Verne settles for a single clash between prehistoric beasts and merely hints at the rest. Bones, fossils and one human corpse alone hint at the living relics that populate his inner earth. These fragments are as close as the characters come for the most part, leaving Verne's world with a tremendous sense of mystery still intact. Their vision from a distance of a lonely caveman tending to a group of mastadon is perhaps the ultimate act of restraint. If only Burroughs had such subtlety! From there, Liedenbrock and co make their way back to the surface (without technically having reached the centre of the Earth) via the most ludicrous invention in the book: their raft is propelled up through a volcano shaft by rising lava. They emerge in Italy.

It's characteristic of Verne that the final loose end to be tied is a scientific one and not a personal or emotion one. Liedenbrock and Axel figure out that their compass had been polarised by a magnetic storm while on the raft, thus fooling them into thinking that they had been heading north for much of their journey, instead of south.

Overall, Journey is a surprisingly short, taut and focused novel, showing Verne at the height of his powers. It gets the plot rolling from the very first sentence, and never lets up. Highly recommended.

Beneath Nightmare Castle - Part 1

I CURSE MYSELF FOR AN INATTENTIVE FOOL: as I've mentioned before, somehow without my noticing, gamebooks have changed from being a fond and fuzzy memory of my youth to a full-blown web phenomenon. Who would have thought? To be honest, before I discovered this, I would have been hard-pressed to think of an aspect of nostalgia less likely to recurr in this electronic age. After all, who wants to have to keep their own scores and roll their own dice in games anymore?

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2009) by Peter Ackroyd

Left the book in Cork, forgot to take a picture. Sorry, internet.

-->

 Have you ever wondered what Frankenstein would have been like if the titular character, instead of remaining in Switzerland, travelled to England in order to carry out his grotesque scientific investigations in early-19^thcentury London rather than continental Europe? Me neither – and I’m not really sure why Peter Ackroyd wondered either. I mean, it’s not exactly a massive difference, or any kind of important re-imagining that tells you things about the characters you didn’t know in the original text. Wide Sargasso Sea, this ain’t. For the most part, it’s just Frankenstein as you know it, only happening in a slightly different location.

And, as it happens, it’s the location that’s key. Anyone familiar with Ackroyd’s back-catalogue knows that the man is obsessed with the history of London. He’s written a lot of books set in London, and with Casebook, he’s even set a story there that normally belongs somewhere else. As an aside, ever since reading From Hell, I’ve taken an interest in the architect Hawksmoor; wandering through London, I’ve tracked down most of his churches and wondered at the supposed ‘occult’ meanings that lie behind their geographical placement. Ackroyd has written a fictionalised biography of Hawksmoor which I really ought to check out, and whenever I'm looking at one of the churches I think 'I really ought to track down a copy of that Hawksmoor book'. So yeah, it's not like we've got history or anything, but I know Ackroyd.

Anyway, on to Frankenstein. The story gets underway when Victor, a boy fascinated by the power of nature and the elements, persuades his father to let him travel to England to study at Oxford. The old man reluctantly allows this, and the reader quickly figures out the real reason that the infamous scientist has been transposed by Ackroyd: so he can faff about having college-age adventures with his real-life creators (sort of) Shelley and Byron. Yes, it’s like an early-Victorian Animal House as the learned poets come to grips with college life, hanging out in disreputable taverns, gorging themselves on theatre and high culture, and having a high old time. Soon after, they move to London, where the good times continue in settings more familiar to me, given as I’ve not yet breathed the rarefied air of Oxford (though they’ve still cause to remember me in Cambridge, I’d reckon). I felt that Ackroyd was quite enjoying himself here, and could have let this bit go on for quite a while if the bloody plot hadn’t intervened, spoiling the lads’ fun.

'Away, away ye notes of woe!'

 But intervene it does, and soon Victor finds himself treading down a path that is well-worn, though it may be happening in the slums of Limehouse rather than a spooky old castle in Europe. Victor picks up a few things about science during his time at the city of spires, but it’s mostly his own work that teaches him what he needs to know about the boundary between life and death. Ackroyd of course misses no opportunity to fill his prose with galvanism, ether, magnetism and other discredited 19^th-century sciences, though he goes light on the jargon, and anyone hoping for Umberto Eco-style in-depth diversions into these arcane areas will go home hungry.

Eventually he succeeds, creating the monster we all know and love, which he subsequently abandons and fears for the rest of the novel as it begins to destroy his life. Apart from the setting – and one oddity which might just make or break the novel for some readers, but which is not as clever as Ackroyd thinks – this section of the story is very similar to the original. By now, Victor’s hanging around with Byron and Shelley’s extended circle of friends, including Dr Polidori (creator of The Vampyre) and Mary Shelley (who is of course his own true creator), and he even manages to work in the famous story night at the Swiss lakehouse where the idea for the original Frankensteinwas born.

None of which I found particularly clever – I’ve read too many books recently where it’s clear that the author is just amusing themselves playing around in a time/place/location that they love, chuckling to themselves everytime they use a historical or fictional character in a sliiiightly different way - but it’s well-written, and it’s fun. Yeah, I love 19^th-century London, and I never get bored of seeing it portrayed in different ways. In this book, I enjoyed it being used as a fun place for intelligent, artistic young men to run riot as they push the boundaries of known science and meddle with things that should not be. The writing is crisp and efficient and the story doesn’t stay still for a moment. Historically, I didn’t learn too much about life during this period – and yet somehow the actual day-to-day living of it felt real to me.

'So we'll have The Saint in there as well... God this is fun!'

 Having said all this, my final point is: what’s the point? To which I have to admit that I haven’t a bloody clue. I mean, not every book’s got to have a point. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of airport fodder, if that’s what you fancy. But Frankenstein was about lots of things; about fear of progress and the discovery of man’s place in the Universe; about tampering with natural laws; about hubris. It’s a classic story that had some very important new ideas in it, pretty much inventing science fiction and modern horror. Casebook, on the other hand… is a lark. It’s great fun, it tells an exciting story… but it’s handling such idealogically heavy material that it’s difficult to imagine that Ackroyd didn’t intend there to be more beneath the surface. It's not exactly like writing a light opera about the Holocaust, but it is an odd juxtaposition. Whatever point there might be, it’s hard to discern it beneath the cod-gothic prose and use of themes so commonplace that they’ve become almost threadbare.

So while I recommend The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, I’ve no idea what kind of book it really is or what it was written to achieve.

Lost Games: Devil's Flight by Gaetano Abbondanza

Devil’s Flight is my second-only entry into the reviewing genre of gamebook playthroughs, and the world (or at least the internet) has changed since those heady days of playing through Bodies on the Docks. Back then, I was aware of only one site doing playthroughs of those old Fighting Fantasy books, and that was the excellently-named Fighting Dantasy. Yeah, I wish I’d thought of that title (though my name isn’t Dan). Back then,as far as I knew there wasn’t much interest in gamebooks on the net, or anywhere else either. I pictured Dan as a tortured, lone genius, working tirelessly to keep the gamebook flame alight with no help from an uncaring world.

Zulu Hart (2009) by Saul David

So apparently history writer Saul David once met with George MacDonald Fraser, creator of the immortal Flashman, and asked him if he was ever going to get around to writing about Flashy’s hinted-at adventures in the Zulu wars of the 1870s. Fraser said he wouldn’t, which is not quite true, as there’s a short story in Flashman and the Tiger which places some of its narrative during this period. But this story is a far cry from Fraser’s usual novel-length examinations of 19^th-century conflicts, and upon the old curdudgeon's death, David decided that it was time someone else took up the baton.

And who better than himself? Already a respected historian, David had even written factual history books about the Zulu wars. He was a big fan of Fraser too; it should have been a match made in heaven.

I’ve already reviewed the second book in the series, which I quite enjoyed, so when I found a copy of Zulu Hart in my favourite second-hand bookshop during a trip to my old Yorkshire haunts, I couldn’t resist picking it up. I knew that it was considered to be a bit rubbish, but I was still keen to get a non-Michael-Caine fictional insight into the Zulu Wars. And with a scholar of that very subject as my guide, how could it go wrong?

The first part of Zulu Hart is concerned with the background and early military career of its hero, George Hart. Hart is of mixed race, with an Irish-Zulu mother (yeah, I know. It’s a bit of a stretch and the narrative doesn’t really make it any more believable) and a mysterious unknown father who we’re told is a ‘pillar of the establishment.’ His father has left Hart with a legacy: if he rises quickly through the ranks of the army, finds himself a respectable wife and earns the Victoria Cross before he’s 28, he’ll get a shedload of money. All of these things seem quite distant to Hart as the book begins.

We follow him through Harrow School and into the military. His dusky looks means that he tends to pass as a man of Mediterranean background, which is lucky for a guy trying to make his way through race-obsessed Victorian society. Eventually, he’s shanghaied in classic Flashman fashion into leaving the country by a vindictive military superior and his willing, beautiful accomplice. He travels to South Africa, hoping to strike lucky in the gold fields at Kimberley. Instead, he finds himself sucked into the building war between the British and the Zulus.

In terms of writing style, Zulu Hart is pretty pedestrian; breezy and inoffensive but without much description of places or buildings, which sometimes robs it of the niceties of historical fiction. The feeling of exploring a different world – surely one of the reasons that we enjoy historical fiction – is somewhat absent.

This is also true of the dialogue and character relationships. Neither Victorian London, nor colonial South Africa nor Zululand really come alive as distinctive, different societies in the book. Compared to the Flashman books, or even to the work of James Clavell, the reader doesn’t get the feeling that they’re stepping into a world different from their own.

This is a problem inherent with historical fiction: while the writer desires to reconstruct the past, with its different modes of thought, norms and acceptabilities, they’re still writing for a contemporary audience, and this audience must be given a world that they can somehow relate to, and protagonists that they can sympathise with. Therefore, the writer almost always ends up washing down or whitewashing certain aspects of the past. I find it hard to believe that many readers would empathise with a truly historically-accurately written medieval or even Victorian hero. Their priorities and morals are so wildly different from ours that we would doubtlessly find the former ignorant, superstitious and overly-religious, and the latter racist and jingoistic. Of course, that is not to say that all medieval people were incapable of rational thought (though ideas about what we know as the scientific method simply did not exist yet) or that all Victorians were unenlightened about race. But what historical novelists often have to do, if they don’t simply wish to write about modern people in period dressing, is to make their protagonists be untypical of their era in order not make them not repugnant to us. Think of William of Baskerville from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: his use of an Occam’s razor-like proto scientific method, as well as his almost hereticaly liberal views on God’s place in the universe, would have put him in the extreme intellectual minority during the period in which the novel takes place. Though I understand why it’s necessary, I’ve always found it strange how we are drawn to past times, but can only explore them through protagonists who are not representative of these times.

Even before he learns about his true ancestry, George Hart’s views on the subject peoples of the British Empire would have marked him as an oddball in Victorian society. David is not an Imperial apologist writing in the pre-PC 1970s as Fraser was, and so the Victorian world he presents feels slightly whitewashed. Even the antagonist characters are not particularly racist: the war is treated as an excuse for a land-grab, and the more complex Victorian attitudes about race go unexamined. A pity, especially given George’s own background. His character could have been interesting way to explore these issues. But any potential for this is stymied as George spends most of the novel pretending to be of Maltese extraction, and whenever he does reveal his ancestry, usually to his superiors, they generally react with a somewhat unrealistic level of sympathy.

Lieutenant Bromhead: What's that you say, old boy?
You're a darky? Why, how spiffing!

 Hart himself does have a mid-novel flip-flop between sympathising with the Zulus and accepting the British line that they’re barbaric. At first he romanticises them in the ‘noble savage’ mould, but after spending some time at their capital he witnesses their cruelty and warmongering, and briefly comes to believe that the British are right to destroy their way of life. It’s an interesting storyline, but not one that really goes anywhere after being introduced. We don’t really get any insight into thir society, despite our main character being related to them and being able to speak the language.

David also seems to have squandered some of his knowledge of Victorian military protocol: Hart talks back to his superiors in a way that probably would have ended the career of someone so junior, and he hobnobs and advises high-ranking officers who would not have listened to him in real life. While Flashman’s meeting of every famous historical figure was played tongue-in-cheek, there’s nothing here that stops the reader from noticing the improbability of Hart’s adventures. I am also left with a slightly sickly feeling that David is twisting real characters to make villains for his novel... several of the commanders behave in a rather stereotypically evil moustach-twirling way as they plan the war against Zululand. I'm no expert on the subject, but I doubt things were quite as simple as this.

The climax of the novel involves the two most famous military engagements of the war, the battle of Isandlewana (dramatized in the not-so-famous movie Zulu Dawn) and the battle of Rourke’s Drift (dramatised in the more-famous movie Zulu). Unfortunately, both battles are confusing and somewhat dull. I find it difficult to explain what makes battle sequences work in novels; I suspect it’s really more to do with the build-up and the sense of anticipation; the sense of knowing what the participants are fighting for and what the stakes are. For whatever reason, it doesn’t work here.

Zulu: Four years of blogging, and still no review!

 Ultimately, Zulu Hartis a mechanically sound, if plodding and unremarkable, trundle through what will always be an interesting subject. It isn’t the best introduction to 19^th-century history, or historical fiction, but if you like either then you’ll probably find something to enjoy. Some of the background about the colonisation of South Africa and the various states that existed there in the 1870s is interesting. But really, you’re better off with the sequel, Hart of Empire, in which David shows that he’s learned a few things about his craft since the first book.

Yes, I wear this at work sometimes.