The Species Seekers by Richard Conniff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Storytrails by Allen Sharp

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

Let’s examine the differences here.

Tai-Pan by James Clavell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury

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

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

Bigging Themselves Up: The Culture and Consider Phlebas

Memory can be a strange thing. 

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

Madam Crowl's Ghost by Sheridan Le Fanu

Bringing up the Irish contingent in the Victorian ghost story sub-genre is Sheridan Le Fanu. He's a well-known writer of early spook stories, and was much-respected by the later greats such as M. R. James.


However, he suffers from having been over-influential. Today, virtually all of his plots and situations will be over-familliar to pretty much any reader, and the stories seem tiresome and hackneyed as a result. Perhaps in his day he was able to send shivers down spines, but after  a few stories I really couldn't take another formulaic yarn about evil deeds done in creaky old houses.

Le Fanu does set a couple of his stories in Ireland, and it is interesting to hear his take on the rural accent... some things about it seem not to have changed even over one hundred and fifty years. For the most part, however, even his Dublin-set stories are interchangeable with the standard London-based horror fiction of the Victorian period. Le Fanu did occasionally make use of Irish folklore as part of his story-telling, but not in this volume.

I can't really recommend this book except as a curiosity, or to anyone who is tracing the evolution of Victorian fantastic fiction, and even then it isn't very interesting.

Sorry Le Fanu, I really did want to like your work! You being from the ol' sod, and all. Ah well.

Flashman And The Dragon by George MacDonald Frasier

Man, it’s good to come back to Flashman. After a period of trying to broaden my palate with other popular historical fiction writers of varying quality, it took less than one paragraph of Flashman And The Dragon to remind me of what I was missing. I was beginning to think that I was holding other writers to some unfair or impossible ideal; but no, I have been reminded that Flashman really is that good. This is what historical fiction is capable of, and there’s no excuse for anything less.

Chronologically, we meet Flashy here just after his pre-civil-war adventures with Tom Brown in the USA (that adventure is chronicled in Flashman and the Angel of the Lord). Somehow he has wound up in Hong Kong, awaiting a ship home. Of course, once again his attention for the ladies gets him into trouble, and our ‘hero’ winds up running opium into the Chinese mainland, hoping to make some quick cash and get some attention from a smitten clergyman’s wife. But it’s all a ruse, and Flashy ends up getting a much closer look than he intended at the fighting that has been tearing China apart for ten years…

By 1860, when Flashman foolishly drifts up the Yangtse, the rebels known as the Taipings were at their greatest strength. Years earlier, the movement had started when a humble clerk failed his exams and fell into a religious frenzy. He came up with his own crazed version of the Christianity that was being peddled by Westerners in China at the time, and gathered quite a following, which eventually snowballed into what was effectively the biggest and bloodiest civil war of all time, with an estimated death toll up to sixty million. The Taipings fought against the Imperial forces of the Manchu dynasty, the invaders from the north who had ruled China as a high caste for centuries, engulfing enormous swathes of China in their war. Somehow, this event has slipped off the radar in the intervening years, and Westerners, for the most part, have never even heard of this titanic conflict. Perhaps it’s because the Taiping Rebellion, as it’s known, had the misfortune to have occurred around the same time as the far more fashionable American Civil War (though it lasted eleven years longer than Lee and Grant’s little spat).

Please excuse the excessive use of italics, but the real-life figures and history that Fraser has to play with here are absolutely astonishing, especially given their little-known status in this part of the world.

But there’s more: in the midst of this mind-blowing struggle, Britain decided to step into to once again force the issue of trade with the stubborn Mandarins, inevitably causing more war. Hilariously, in cities like London and San Francisco, immigrant Chinese were scorned and feared for their spreading of the opium habit- ‘a heathen curse on Christendom,’ as Alan Moore satirically put it in his Victorian-era League of Extraordinary Gentlemen- when in reality, opium was outlawed and almost unknown in China before Britain fought two wars to be able to import it there.

And that’s where Flashman steps in. He soon becomes involved in his country’s efforts to negotiate (at the point of a bayonet, natch) with the Mandarins at Peking. One of the most interesting themes of the book (to an anti-colonial whelp like myself) is Flashy’s description of the Chinese at this time: arrogant, insolent and as racist as he is himself. What’s true is that before the mid-19^th century, China had existed in a kind of dream-world for centuries, believing itself to be literally the centre of the world (‘the middle kingdom’), with a god for an emperor.  It wasn’t until the First Opium War in the 1840’s that China was forced to accept that there were other powers in the world besides itself, and that it would sometimes have to respect those powers. But the belief that Westerners were sub-human barbarians (not aided, of course, by said wars) seems to have returned, and Fraser depicts them as treating the Westerners like scum, hampering their efforts every step of the way to Peking.

Now, my mindset would generally be that the Chinese had every right not to aid the British in getting their claws into the country. If they had any sense, they would obviously have seen what was happening in the rest of the world, and done everything they could to keep the foreigners out. But Frasier’s point here is that this policy was being proposed by a rotting structure of small-minded, bigoted Sino-centrists, to coin a phrase. And, to be fair, he goes a fair way towards convincing me that he has a point. If the Chinese had had a more realistic take on the world and its politics, perhaps they would have accepted a certain amount of trading (which was perhaps inevitable anyway) and played their advantage to maintain a more powerful position among the nations. Instead they were crushed and humiliated because they refused to accept the reality of the situation. As usual, Frasier manages to convince me at least that there is another side to the story, or that the nations crushed by the imperial powers didn't always behave like angels either.

There’s a very high level of Orientalism in the book too- quite enough to make Edward Said run crying to his harem. The Chinese court, and in particular the famous Summer Garden, are portrayed as being so alien as to be ‘not of this earth.’ It’s as evocative as it is convincing. I have a particular love for a slightly unreal take on exotic cultures, probably as a progression from my love of the alien worlds of science fiction when I was a kid. My heart sings as Flashman wanders through corridors of green jade and dragon temples, and however patronising it is, I will always love this kind of thing, even if I know that it's all slightly silly.

Something else I love about this book is that it’s one of the Flashman novels that really focuses on the history. While Flashy himself is the glue that holds the series together, I have always felt that the books fall apart whenever the emphasis is on too many of Frasier’s fictional characters or unlikely coincidences (I rather loathe fan-favourite John Charity Spring, for example). I far prefer the books in which Flashy is thrust through a series of real events, and Flashman And The Dragon is played almost completely straight in this regard. Almost all the impossible events that the anti-hero bumbles through really happened, which adds a certain frisson to the proceedings. The only serious fictional intrusion is Flashy’s dealings with the scheming Trooper Nolan (of note to those looking for the Irish connection!), which falls rather flat compared to the rest of the novel.

Alongside tantalising hints as to an elderly Flashman’s presence at the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and a brief walk-on part for ‘Chinese’ Gordon (whom Flashy seems to have come to know better later on- surely at Khartoum?), possibly the saddest missed opportunity here occurs at the very end of the book, when Flashman’s American contacts catch up with him, and shanghai him into what is surely the most lusted-after of Frasier’s unwritten books: the scoundrel’s adventures during the American Civil War.

Flashman And The Dragon is an epic adventure through a never-never-land that really was, and will likely introduce the reader to a world of extraordinary events and characters. Not to be missed.