The Anarchy - William Dalrymple

 

I adored Dalrymple's Return of a King; this one not so much.  I knew no more about Afghanistan than I did about colonial India, but Dalrymple managed to educate me about the former - again, not so much about the latter.  Of course, the latter is even more complex, but I never felt confident about the geography or tribal ethnicity of the main protagonists of The Anarchy.  That said, I was clear about the causes of the Anarchy and its timeframe.  Unfortunately, it was all rather a depressing mirror of the state I now live in and detest.  Debauched, long-outdated aristocrats desperate to claw their last profit from the poor, outwitted by the first global corporation, imposed upon a culturally rich nation by foreigners who had yet to accumulate much culture of their own.  The standout character was Shah Alam, the last hope of the Mugal Empire, who did his best, suffered much, and ultimately came to nothing much.  Tipu Sultan of Mysore was another strong character but overall the cast seemed to be rather two-dimensional.  Dalrymple only really came good when discussing those on both sides who truly loved India as much as he does.  And the chapters were far too long.

The Razor's Edge - Somerset Maugham

The sharp edge of a razor is hard to pass over; thus the wise say the road to salvation is hard." (Upanishad)

The Razor's Edge (1944) is said to be Maugham's last great novel. It came as a shock to me, who remembers Maugham's death being announced on the BBC News in 1965, to realise that by 1944 he had been a novelist for almost half a century. No wonder then that his prose is beautiful yet simple, utterly devoid of cliche. What is more remarkable is the structure, which borders on the experimental. In the very first section he tells us that this is a novel, based on fact, that will not have a conventional ending. He - Maugham - remains the narrator and makes it very clear that this is a close approximation of the real Maugham and (just once) he is even called Maugham by one of the other characters. Who they really are, beneath the false names he has given them, is neither explained nor hinted at; he tells us we would not know them, they are not famous people.

They are however glamorous people, as Maugham himself was supremely glamorous by that point. He starts just after World War I in America. Maugham is already famous and wealthy enough to roam the world at will.  Through his friend Elliott Templeton, a snobbish, effete American ex-pat, he is introduced to the Bradley family. Mrs Bradley is Elliott's sister, the widow of a middling US diplomat. Her daughter Isabel is a coltish adolescent hopelessly in love with Larry Darrell, who lied about his age to fly in the war. Isabel is doted on by Gray Maturin whose father is a millionaire stock broker. Also present is a younger girl, Sophie Macdonald.

And that is basically it. Maugham narrates his encounters with these people over the next twenty years. He tells us when he is reconstructing conversations and events he only heard about but did not witness. There is a vast amount of travel and a hell of a lot of conversation. Elliott becomes increasingly flamboyant and ridiculous but is always saved by fundamental goodness of heart. Isabel almost marries Larry but ends up marrying Gray, whose fortunes rise and fall with the Crash of '29. Larry almost marries Sophie but doesn't.

So what is it all about? Maugham, of course, witnessed the war and the human damage first hand with the Ambulance Corps. He understands something of the lost generation but is too old and too British to understand the repercussions for the American Dream. This is what he explores. Larry never recovers; he avoids all responsibility, professes no ambition, commercial or academic, but instead wanders the world in menial jobs in the search for 'meaning'. Isabel meanwhile clings to the battered remnants of the Dream like a tigress. Sophie lets it all overwhelm her. In the end, nothing is resolved. Elliott and Sophie die, Gray gets back into business, and Larry vanishes, his quest unresolved. Maugham is the only one left in Europe.

One key section towards the end is an interminable evening in a French cafe in which Larry tells Maugham about his time spent on the ashram of an Indian mystic. This is in fact Maugham's own story. It was he who really visited the ashram of the enlightened guru Sri Ramana Maharshi. Did he find meaning or peace? He doesn't say. This is a novel, not autobiography. And it is a wonderful novel, surely a Twentieth Century classic. It encompasses that quest for meaning in the face of mechanized war and unrestrained capitalism which was surely the driving force of all art in the last century.

The Strangler Vine - M J Carter

The Strangler Vine is the first novel by Miranda Carter, biographer of Anthony Blunt and author of The Three Emperors, an account of Queen Victoria's grandsons and how their relationships contributed to World War I.

For a first novel The Strangler Vine is an astonishing achievement.  Carter says she knew nothing about India in the 19th Century before starting the project.  By the end, clearly, she knew more or less everything.  The level of detail is just right.  We never get any sense of contrivance, avoidance or - just as fatal in a novel - showing off.

The story inevitably has hints of Kipling and John Buchan.  The blurbs cite Sherlock Holmes but it is much better than that (Conan Doyle is a martyr to contrivance and bodge).  The year is 1837 and young William Avery, a neophyte and impoverished officer in the private army of the East India Company, is paired up with lapsed agent Jem Blake to go in search of Xavier Mountstuart, the Byrom of India.  Avery is a huge fan of Mountstuart, whose work inspired him to seek his fortune in India.  Blake was Mountstuart's protege back in the days before he trading spying for literature.

The quest is multi-layered.  Nothing is as it first seems as Blake and Avery probe to the black heart of corruption in the Company.  The revelations keep on coming, alongside rip-roaring adventure and a sensitive portrait of India clinging to its last vestiges of independence.

I can't wait to lay hands on the second Blake and Avery, The Infidel Strain.

Kipling Sahib - Charles Allen

Anglo-Indian like his subject, Allen's subtitle says it all.  Kipling was born in India, returned there as a cub reporter and became a sensational prodigy there.  Having survived a life-threatening illness and the death of his firstborn, Kipling worked with his father on his sole significant novel Kim, and then to all intents and purposes ceased to develop at the age of 34, slightly less than halfway through his life.  He never wrote nothing important or new thereafter because, Allen maintains, Kim said all he had to say about India and his own dual sensibilities.

Kipling Sahib is, in short, a brilliant book.  Allen wears his knowledge lightly, which he can do because it's real personal knowledge, not academic learning focused through a westernized, post-modern filter.  Kipling is hopelessly old-fashioned - his attitudes to imperialism can sometimes offend contemporary ears - but they are the attitudes of his time, attitudes he in many ways created and it is important to differentiate between his early, pre-1900 writing and that of the long decline that followed.  He began as a critic and ended as a bombastic bore.

Allen tackles the man, his mind and his work in a seamless narrative.  The works are discussed with an assuredness that comes of long familiarity.  His examination of Kim itself, as an envoi to the closed narrative, is masterly and insightful.

If anyone had suggested, a year ago, that I would even open a work by or about Rudyard Kipling (known as 'Ruddy' in the family) I would have laughed in their face.  Yet Kim was one of the first books I read in 2013, and Kipling Sahib almost the last.  Kim is my book of the year, with Kipling Sahib a close second.  There is no bronze medallist.  Nothing else I have read comes close.