Return of a King - William Dalrymple

Obviously I'd heard of this book, which received a huge amount of cross-media free publicity when it came out in 2013. I approached with caution because that level of freebie usually means one of three things: the author is an ex Tory MP, the author is phenomenally rich and/or well-connected, or it really is an astonishingly important book. The name Dalrymple (actually a cut-down version of the hyphenated original) rightly suggests the middle category, but luckily for us he is also a writer of genius, a historian who delves into archives which average scholars couldn't begin to tackle and surprisingly even-handed in his judgments. For example some British military men were complete idiots, others were astonishingly brave. Some were just incredibly lucky or indeed unlucky. The Afghanis who sucked up to, repulsed and then were butchered by the British are duplicitous, chivalric, noble, homicidal and generous. Everyone here, even the inbreds of both camps, is a real, three-dimensional human being.

This then is the story of the First Afghan War 1839-42. For reasons never entirely clear, the British decided to replace Dost Mohammad Khan, the perfectly friendly ruler of the always fractious mountain people with the man he deposed thirty years earlier, Shah Shuja. The replacement itself went surprisingly well, but everyone including the man himself knew that Shuja was simply a puppet of the 'envoy' Sir William Hay Macnaghten. A dyed-in-the-wool diplomat who knew nothing about tribal culture, Macnaghten was given to machinations and, far worse, often late in paying the pensions (bribes) which kept the peace between the rival chieftains. Over time, the Afghani leaders waxed nostalgic for the long golden age of Dost Mohammad. There was a king who was approachable, fair, and who paid his bribes on time.  Rebellion broke out. The idiots in India and their envoy in Afghanistan all misread the situation, and unbelievable bloodshed resulted. Very few Brits and hardly any of their sepoys made it out alive.

This to me was the most emotive part of the story. Dalrymple pulls no punches and his description of the disastrous retreat through the Khyber Pass in January blizzards is truly shattering. The Afghans who enslave and mutilate their captives are named and shamed. Yet he contrasts the behaviour of the outlying villagers with that of Dost Mohammad's son Akbar Khan who personally slew Sir William Macnaghten but who protected Macnaghten's widow and the wives and children of officers who were in the field against him with courtesy that would shame the Geneva Convention.  One fascinating aside, expertly handled by Dalrymple, is the escape of these hostages and their long journey to freedom, effectively under the command of the more mature women.

Then comes the Army of Retribution - and we should be thoroughly ashamed that we ever had such a force.  The new Tory government in London could not let such an affront to British arms go unavenged. So the army returned, with capable commanders, killed all who could not prove themselves friends of the young Victoria's fast-expanding empire and reduced the historic cities of Afghanistan to sand.

But the Afghans were not conquered. The Afghans are never conquered. The Army of Retribution came, slew and destroyed, but then withdrew and left Dost Mohammad to it.  Dalrymple is right to draw the parallels with today.  We Brits have just 'withdrawn' from our fourth invasion of Afghanistan, so that's 4-0 to the Afghanis.  Those guys even saw off Soviet Russia for Pete's sake!

I knew nothing whatever about this subject before reading Return of a King. I am now fascinated. That is surely the aim of the popular historian. Job done, then.

A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder - James de Mille

A real oddity, this.  Published posthumously in 1888, it follows the well-known fantasy trope made abundantly clear in the title, blending The Lost World with Gulliver's Travels.  The manuscript author gets lost in Antarctica and penetrates through to a semi-tropical land where dinosaurs co-exist with the Kosekin people who are incredibly kind and welcoming but who regard death as the best thing in life.

As an adventure yarn, there's not enough adventure.  There are nowhere near enough dinosaurs and those we do get - pterosaurs excepted - are simply not described well enough to be properly threatening.  So once we get established in the new world we have nothing to detain us but the unusual habits of the Kosekin and a rather tedious, formulaic romance.

The publishers (or re-publishers in this case) try to make the case for it being a satire of mid-Victorian mores, but it's not.  It's the oldest trope of all in satire, the world turned upside down.  Aristophanes did it better more than two thousand years earlier.  Again, once the premise is established - we love death/you love life, divorce is the best thing about marriage etc. - we have nowhere else to go.

For me, the part I really enjoyed was the framing device, usually the part we skip in these things (I particularly remember the tedium of the device in William Hope Hudgson's otherwise thrilling From the Tideless Sea).  Here we have an inbred toff on his yacht with a doctor, a writer of fiction and a linguist.  The chinless wonder is genuinely amusing, the writer dismisses the manuscript as a fake, and the two scholars get deep into debate of what and where the things described might be.  I can't help thinking these are the bits the academic De Mille enjoyed most too.  The very best, the last - we have to go back to the yacht, it's a requirement of the form, but instead of a wearisome epilogue, De Mille simply gives us:

Here Featherstone stopped, yawned and laid down the manuscript.

"That's enough for today," said he.  "I'm tired and can't read any more.  It's time for supper."