Book Review: The Man Who Missed The War by Dennis Wheatley (1945)

My job, for odd reasons, gives me access to untold amounts of beat-up old pulp paperbacks, which gives me no end of joy. Dennis Wheatleys are fairly common, probably because here in the UK, it seems up until some point in the 70s, every house was contractually obliged to have at least a small number of them. Despite being something of an amateur expert on Britain's 'occult uncle' (I even read the mammoth biography The Devil Is A Gentleman), I'd never heard of this week's offering, The Man Who Missed The War. That's partly because Wheatley was so damn prolific, but also because it's not one of his occult-themed books, so it has been somewhat forgotten about over time.

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.

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!

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1990) by Edward Rice

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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.

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.

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.