The Madonna of Excelsior

The Madonna Of Excelsior by Zakes Mda
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A novel that has a little bit of everything, almost -- a sex scandal, sibling rivalry, political chicanery, and believable characters. And so much of it is true, I read it in the newspaper 50 years ago.

It is set in a real small town in the Free State province of South Africa, and is based on real events, so the usual disclaimer about the characters not resembling any real persons, living or dead, is somewhat differently worded. Though the events are a matter of public record, the characters are fictitious. I've written a few books set in a small South African town, but having lived in a small town myself, I didn't dare to use a  real town as the setting, but Zakes Mda boldly does so, and his book is all the more realistic as a result.

But the fictitious characters do resemble real people. And the book gives a microcosm of South Africa in the last three decades of the 20th century. Excelsior is a real town, and it really was rocked by a sex scandal in the early 1970s. The neighbouring towns, mentioned in the book, are real and I have been to, or through some of them.

And at least one of the characters is real, Father Frans Claerhout, a Roman Catholic and artist who lived at Tweespruit just south of Excelsior, and descriptions of whose paintings at the beginning of each chapter form a linking motif for the story.

Popi Pule has two half-brothers; one, Viliki Pule, is black, and the other, Tjaart Cronje, is white, and all three were born in apartheid South Africa, much of whose legislation was calculated to prevent precisely those kinds of relationships. Viliki and Puke's mother Niki had been Tjaart's nanny when he was small, and she is the eponymous Madonna of Excelsior, and had been a model for some of Father Frans Claerhout's paintings.

People sometimes ask, what was South Africa like during apartheid, and during and after the end of apartheid, and in this book Zakes Mda nails it. He tells it like it is, and was. He has written several books set in South Africa, and each of the ones I've read gives an accurate picture of some or other aspect of South African life. There are links to some of my reviews of them here,

If but someone from another country was coming to South Africa from another country, and wanted an introduction to South African life, and history, and social relations, this is the book I would recommend to them. Since it is fiction, it doesn't have all the facts, but it does tell the truth about South Africa, the unvarnished truth. If you want to know what South Africa is really like, read this book!

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The Quiet American

The Quiet American by Graham Greene
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I think this is one of Graham Greene's best books. I find Graham Greene a bit like Stephen Kind -- I like some of his books a lot, and others I don't like much at all. This is definitely one that I liked.

Thomas Fowler is a reporter for a British newspaper, reporting on the French colonial war in Vietnam when the Americans are just beginning to get involved. One of the new people at the American embassy, Pyle, tries to befriend Fowler, and falls in love with his girlfriend, Phuong, whom he steals, ever so politely. 

Fowler tries to be neutral in his reporting, and to remain uninvolved, but Pyle's role causes him to reexamine his approach, and but he is never sure whether his actions are due to Pyle's political role or his own jealousy. 

Perhaps one reason that the book appealed to me so much is that it reminded me of my time in Namibia in the early 1970s. Namibia was then in a colonial situation, under South African rule, as Vietnam had been under France 15 years earlier, and I was, like the protagonist in The Quiet American, a journalist. And something Greene wrote illuminated a difference that I was aware of, but fund difficult to describe.

In December 1971 there was a big strike of Ovambo contract workers in what was then known as South West Africa. One of the interesting differences in the approach to journalism came on the second day of the strike, Tuesday 14th December 1971. My friend David de Beer and I worked for the local Anglican Church, and I also worked on the local paper, and we were also stringers ("correspondents") for the Argus Africa News service, which supplied most of the South African evening newspapers. But the strike was big news, so some of the newspapers sent their own in-house reporters to cover it, and one of them was Alan Hardy of The Star of Johannesburg.

Pastor Maasdorp of the Lutheran Church had said that one of their evangelists had been arrested in the Ovambo compound, and that Pastor Haufiku was busy trying to bail him out. Alan Hardy immediately phoned Brigadier Brandt, the local police chief, who denied that there had been any arrests. Dave and I went out to see Pastor Haufiku to check up, and he confirmed it, and said he would take us to see the evangelist, Thomas Nalupi. And Thomas Nalupi showed us his admission of guilt receipt.

This ties up with an interesting passage in The Quiet American, where the protagonist, the journalist Thomas Fowler says:

It had been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action—even an opinion is a kind of action.

Alan Hardy was a reporter, Dave de Beer and I were correspondents. And that describes the difference between us. To confirm a report that there had been arrests, the reporter asked the chief of police. That would never have occurred to us correspondents. For us the convincing evidence was the admission of guilt receipt.

There was more, perhaps. Alan Hardy was a bit older than us, but not by much. But he belonged to a different generation. We belonged to the 1968 generation. It had been, for both Dave and me, our last year as full-time students, and that was the year of student power, which had been immediately preceded by the year of flower power. But both hippie flower power and student power shared a distrust of authority. I had even developed a theological rationale for it. One of the slogans was "Don't trust anyone over 30," and I had just passed my 30th birthday, though I thought the least trustworthy age was between 40 and 60, when people were at the most powerful stages of their careers and were most likely to be embedded in and thus wedded to the System.

Of course the trouble with us was that we seldom adhered to the "audi alteram partem" rule, but then neither did the establishment reporters. They put the point of view of the establishment, businessmen, employers, government officials, whereas we reported what we heard from the underside -- the strikers and ordinary workers and those who ministered to them. And Graham Greene in this book illustrated the difference very clearly. 

And perhaps even more clearly he showed the shallowness and folly of much American foreign policy. Pyle, the eponymous "quiet American", was a fan or a particular (fictional) foreign policy wonk called York Harding. And at one point Dave de Beer met just such an American foreign policy wonk by the name of George Kennan, who struck Dave as incredibly naive. Kennan talked as though all he had to do was press some magic button in the depths of the Pentagon and all Namibia's problems would be instantly solved. 

I have sometimes wondered since then whether George Kennan was playing some devious game, and trying to appear more naive than he actually was, but since reading Graham Greene's book I wonder if he wasn't the model for York Harding.

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Missiology and the colour of fish

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss

I haven't read this, but GoodReads recommended it to me, based on the books in my Missiology shelf. That intrigued me. I see most of my GoodReads friends who have rated it gave it a high rating, -- perhaps they can tell me what it has to say about missiology. 

Here are some of the books on my missiology shelf, and I'm not sure how the Dr Seuss book fits in with these:

• Allen, Roland 1962 [1912]. Missionary methods: St Paul's or ours.
• Allen, Roland 1960. The spontaneous expansion of the church and the causes which hinder it.
• Bosch, D.J 1991. Transforming mission.
• Davies, John D. 1983. The faith abroad.
• Kaplan, Steven 1984. The monastic holy man and the Christianization of early Solomonic Ethiopia.
• Stamoolis, James 1986. Eastern Orthodox mission theology today.
• Bosch, David 1980. Witness to the world: the Christian mission in theological perspective.
• Veronis, Luke 2009. Go forth: stories of mission and resurrection in Albania.
• Griffiths, Michael 1980. Shaking the sleeping beauty: arousing the church to its mission.
• Ajayi, J.F. Ade 1965. Christian missions in Nigeria, 1841-1891: the making of a new elite.
• Anderson, Gerald; Stransky, Thomas F. 1976. Mission Trends No 3: Third-World Theologies.
• Becken, Hans-Jurgen (ed) 1973. Relevant theology for Africa.
• Beeching, Jack 1979. An open path: Christian missionaries, 1515 - 1914.
• Beidelman, T.O 1982. Colonial evangelism.
• Bevans, Stephen B. & Schroeder, Roger P 2004. Constants in context: a theology of mission for today.
• Bhebe, Ngwabi 1979. Christianity and traditional religion in western Zimbabwe 1859-1923.
• Bonk, Jonathan 1989. The theory and practice of missionary identification 1860-1920.
• Burridge, Kenelm 1991. In the Way: a study of Christian missionary endeavours.
• Carter, John 1963. Methods of mission in Southern Africa.
• Cnattingius, Hans 1952. Bishops and societies: a study of Anglican colonial and missionary expansion 1698-1850.
• Dvornik, Francis 1970. Byzantine missions among the Slavs.
• Ellanna, Linda J. & Balluta, Andrew 1992. Nuvendaltin Quht'ana: the people of Nondalton.
• Farmer, Edwin 1900. The Transvaal as a mission field.
• Fraser, Donald 1970 (1914). Winning a primitive people.
• Gerber, Vergil 1979 [1974]. God's way to keep a church going and growing.
• Hesselgrave, David J 1988. Today's choices for tomorrow's mission.
• Jarrett-Kerr, Martin 1961. African pulse: scenes from an African hospital window.
• Kraemer, Hendrik 1956. Religion and the Christian faith.
• Linney, Barry W. 2000. 21st Century Faith: Radical Living in a new Millennium.
• Luzbetak, Louis 1988. The church and cultures: new perspectives in missiological anthropology.
• McGavran, Donald A 1979. Ethnic realities and the church: lessons from India.
• Milner, Clyde A. & McNeil, Floyd A 1985. Churchmen and the Western Indians.
• Nemer, Lawrence 1981. Anglican and Roman Catholic attitudes on missions.
• Niles, D.T. 1963. Upon the Earth.
• Oleksa, Michael (ed.) 1987. Alaskan missionary spirituality.
• Oswalt, Wendell H 1990. Bashful no longer: an Alaskan Eskimo ethnohistory, 1778-1988.

I used quite a number of them for writing my doctoral thesis in missiology, but I seem to have missed the Dr Seusss one. Was my missiology thesis any the worse for that?

Actually one of my favourite missiology books doesn't seem to have made the list, so I'll give it a plug here -- it's Orthodox Alaska by Father Michael Oleksa, and you can read more about it here: Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission by Michael Oleksa | Goodreads.

It too seems to have a rather strange list of "readers also liked" books -- only one of those in the top ten seemed to have anything to do with missiology, but some of them nevertheless seemed quite interesting.

So here;s a challenge to fellow missiologists on GoodReeds. Look at the books on your missiology shelf, and share what the top one is, and how many missiology books appear in your top ten. Perhaps it will show how widely-read missiologists are.

And perhaps it ought to show that, because missiology is an interdisciplinary  field of study, covering theology, history, sociology, anthropology and several other things as well. But fish?

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Over sea, under stone

Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book has been on my "to read" list for about four years now, as has the whole The Dark is Rising series. because friends recommended it, or wrote good reviews of it.

My search became more urgent when a reviewer compared my children's books Of Wheels and Witches and The Enchanted Grove (ISBN 978-1-920707-65-1) to the whole "The Dark is Rising" sequence, and suggested that it might have been an influence on my writing.

It couldn't have been an influence on me, because I hadn't read it yet, but there certainly are similar tropes in both my children's books -- children on a quest, getting separated and searching for each other, an older boy who is a bully, some getting captured by the villains and threatened by them. There is even a hair binding that comes undone causing one character to lose her pony tail. But my influence came more from Alan Garner and I wonder if Susan Cooper's did too. It seems that they did meet, and regarded each other as kindred spirits.

Anyway I found the book a very good read. I liked the characters, the children especially, since more than half the adult characters were evil. It is a story of three children, Simon, Jane and Barney Drew, who go with their parents and a great uncle (who is not really a relative, but rather a friend of the family) to spend a holiday in a house in Cornwall, whose owner has gone off for a holiday somewhere else. They find an abandoned document and map, which they use to play games of seeking treasure, and then find that it is really old, and some evil people are also looking for it. 

In the Good Reads page for the book there was a question about why the book was written in such an old-fashioned way, and so I watched out for that while reading it. As some people remarked, it could be because it was written over 50 years ago, and speech was different then. In the book the children wore "plimsolls", but by the time the Harry Potter books appeared, 30 years later, "plimsolls" had become "trainers", so that would probably have appeared old-fashioned even 25 years ago, when the Harry Potter books first appeared. I was particularly aware of that when I went to England in the 1960s, because I thought of "plimsolls" as marks on ships, and we called such footwear "tackies" (sometimes spelt "takkies"), both then and now -- the term is applied to any shoes with canvas uppers and rubber soles.

Some language would have appeared old-fashioned even in the 1960s -- I don't recall any children at that time referring to their male parent as "Father" with a capital F. But what really struck me as an anachronism was that one of the characters found two 50 pence pieces in his pocket, in a book published in 1965. Even in 1968, when the edition I read was alleged to have been published, though two of the new decimal coins were beginning to circulate, a 50p piece was not among them, they were still 10-bob notes. So if 10-bob notes miraculously changed into 50p coins, why did plimsolls not change into trainers? Or Father into Dad?

The edition of Over sea, under stone that I read was illustrated by pen and ink drawings by Margery Gill. The illustrations were appropriate to the text, but though the faces were drawn very well, the legs were not, and looked like those of children in pictures used to illustrate children freed from concentration camps suffering from malnutrition. Such legs could not have carried anyone fast enough to do all the running away they had to do from the villains. This particular picture, however, was one of the ones with more realistic legs. 

I recently re-read three of Alan Garner's children's books, and comparing his language to Susan Cooper's, I find his more terse and taut, which conveys a sense of urgency in the way it is written. 

I was inspired to write my children's (and other fiction) by a conversation between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, in which they said that if they wanted to see more of the kind of stories they liked, they should have to write them themselves. And I liked stories by Charles Williams and Alan Garner. But it seems that Susan Cooper has also written the kind of stories I like, and all but two of them are waiting for me to read therm.

Her writings are not entirely new to me, however. Back in the 1960s I did read Mandrake by Susan Cooper, which was adult science fiction rather than children's fantasy. I was reading it on the train from London to Bournemouth at the very time Dr Verwoerd was shot, and it was in fact about an English version of the Verwoerdian dream, where a British prime minister decided that everyone had to go back to their "homeland", and enacted laws to force them to do so. I never saw another book by Susan Cooper in a bookshop after that, though I see she has written quite a lot, and I'm putting more on my "want to read" list. 

I've spent some time commenting on the language in this review, but that's because I found little else to criticise, and because someone asked a question about it. And now I hope I'll be able to find the rest of the series and renew my acquaintance with the characters. 

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Book cover fashions: the headless torso

 I've commented before on the current fashion, in some circles, for having headless male torsos to illustrate book covers -- see Urban fantasy, mediocrity, and the male torso | Notes from underground, but now that I'm thinking of revising and reissuing one of my children's books with a new cover, I'm wondering about the possibilities.

This seems to be a fairly common theme for a cover nowadays...

... though one wonders what the faceless characters are like in the book. 

So I'm wondering if my revised children's adventure-fantasy story should follow a similar theme, something upon these lines.

How important is it that book covers should follow the latest fashions? Will it enhance sales if the book has a headless torso, and diminish sales if it lacks one? And who is attracted to books with headless torsos anyway? Does anybody know?

If I give that picture to a book-cover designer, would they be able to turn it into a suitable cover design? Does it matter that the kid in the picture is blowing bubbles? The protagonist in my story doesn't blow bubbles, but he doesn't lack a head either, in the story.

Are there any other important tropes in book covers that one needs to take into account? If so, what are they?

[Writing a Thriller by Andre Jute
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of the things that I am still a bit confused about is literary genres, and people seem to have so many different names for them that it gets very confusing. Some are used by publishers to say what kinds of books they do or don't publish, and those are reasonably clear -- crime, romance, children's etc. So when I found a couple of books on writing thrillers in the local library,I read them to try to answer the question "What is a thriller?"

The first one I read, Writing the Thriller (my review here), was also because I was doing a final edit on my children's book, The Enchanted Grove. My book is an adventure story, rather than a thriller, but where does one draw the line? And even adventure stories have thrilling scenes in them, where the characters are in danger, don't they?

Writing a Thriller by Andre Jute at least answered that question for me. The adventure story has the characters in danger from external enemies. In the thriller the situation is complicated by betrayal from within. The thriller is therefore more complex.

The only problem with that definition is that many books advertised as thrillers might not actually be thrillers.

I found this book more useful for clarifying that and similar questions that I had. But it is also an older book, and may not be so useful to would-be thriller writers in the information it gives on the publishing process and manuscript submission. Clearly, it was written when word processors were in their infancy, and assumed that most people would be typing their story directly onto paper, and editing the paper typescript, and cutting and pasting literally with scissors and paste, and not in the sense of the Microsoft Windows metaphor.

The book also cites some of the thrillers that the author himself has written as examples, Reverse Negative and Sinkhole, but I notice that neither has a single review or rating on GoodReads. And, on a personal note, the author seems to have a strong prejudice against missionaries, and as a missiologist, I have a particular interest in missionaries, but that is just a personal prejudice and shouldn't affect one's evaluation of the book.

If you're thinking of writing a thriller, it could be a useful book to read, bearing in mind that it deals with dated technology. But the actual writing advice is generally useful.

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Earworms and dreams

 Odd how thoughts develop. I find myself humming the tune of What a friend we have in Jesus, and the name Joseph Medlicott Scriven pops into my head. He wrote either the words or music, I forget which, and I know that because it was printed in the Methodist Hymn Book that we had at St Stithians College. And I recall that the first line of the preface said "Methodism was born in song". So that is the main thing I know about Methodism. I did learn some things in my six years at St Stithians, and those are some of them.

Then last night I had an interesting dream, well interesting to me at least, it's probably boring to most people.

I was at a conference (why do I always dream about conferences?) where we were all issued with fat books containing a report on South African Foreign Policy, and I rejected it because it immediately made me think of Pik Botha, then wondered why I thought that, because Pik Botha has been dead for years and has had no
influence on foreign policy for a long time.

Anyway, that's what I wrote in my diary today. We write mostly boring stuff like that in diaries because under Covid lockdowns we don't go out much and nothing much happens. We hear what our friends are doing on Facebook and other social media, and we post pictures of sunrises and sunsets, Here's my picture of the sunrise this morning. I posted it on Facebook too. My cousin Jenny in Durban did get out today, however. She went to the dentist. She posted a picture of a tollbooth in the rain which she passed on the way.

Speaking of Pik Botha, one of the best political jokes I've ever heard was about him. 

It was when Benny Alexander changed his name to KhoiSan-X, And someone remarked that if Benny Alexander was KhoiSan-X, then Pik Botha must be Guronsan-C. 

But then I haven't seen Guronsan-C advertised for a long time. It was advertised as something that could revitalise decrepit old fogeys like me.

But the best thing that happened to me today is that Dan'l Danehy-Oakes read one of my books and wrote a review of it. If you're a member of GoodReads and feeling benevolent, go and read and "like" his review. If you're feeling especially benevolent, you could comment on it.  

And then I saw this on Twitter:

Phil Gentry

@pmgentry

·

Apr 5

A professor of mine went to go hear Derrida speak once. The entire talk was about cows; everyone was flummoxed but listened carefully, and took notes about...cows. There was a short break, and when Derrida came back, he was like, “I’m told it is pronounced ‘chaos.’”

I once went to hear Derrida speak. Should I put that on my CV?

Have a nice uneventful day!

 

 

 

Reading old books

March 21 is commemorated as Human Rights Day in South Africa, and it also commemorates the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960. Yet a survey showed that very few young people know what the Sharpeville massacre was.

A similar question was asked a few years ago about how many books people have read that were published before they were born. It's similar not in that it has to do with knowledge of a specific historical event, but rather enables one to realise that the past is another country, a different world, with a different culture. Reading books published at different times can be almost as broadening as travelling to different countries, perhaps even more so.

Since then I have tried to keep a record of the books I have read that were published before I was born, and here's my list over the last five years. How many of them have you read, and which others have you read that were published before you were born?

• Ballantyne, R.M. . 1966 [1857] The Coral Island.
• Conrad, Joseph. 1955 [1904] Nostromo.
• Dickens, Charles. 1981. Bleak House.
• Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1959 [1880] The brothers Karamazov.
• Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 2009. Devils.
• Eliot, George. s.a. Adam Bede.
• Greene, Graham. 1974 [1936] A gun for sale.
• Haggard, H. Rider. 1965 [1910] Queen Sheba's ring.
• Haggard, H. Rider. 1972. Jess.
• Haggard, H. Rider. 1979. King Solomon's mines.
• Huxley, Aldous. 1994 [1926] Jesting Pilate: the diary of a journey.
• Kingsley, Charles. s.a. The Heroes.
• Kipling, Rudyard. 1994. Puck of Pook's Hill.
• Montgomery, L.M. 1994 [1908] Anne of Green Gables.
• Nesbit, E. 1978. Five children and It.
• Nesbit, E. 1978. The Phoenix and the Carpet.
• Nesbit, E. 1986 [1899] The story of the treasure seekers.
• Sayers, Dorothy. 1970 [1931] The Five Red Herrings.
• Steinbeck, John. 1967 [1939] Cannery Row.
• Sterne, Lawrence. 1948. Tristram Shandy.
• Tolstoy, Leo. 1926 [1899] Resurrection.
• Turgenev, Ivan. 1967. On the Eve.
• Turgenev, Ivan. 2015 [1862] Fathers and sons.

I've also been reading books about writing, and find it interesting to see the contradictory advice given to writers on what they should be reading to imporve their writing. One said that one should only read books published in the last couple of years, because that way you will know what kind of books are currently popular and will sell well. 

Others, as I said, point out that your own writing will have greater depth and greater human sympathy if you read books published before you were born. 

Want to give it a try?

Read this:

Read a book published before you were born this year

Jess by H. Rider Haggard: love story or political rant?

Jess by H. Rider Haggard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

H. Rider Haggard is probably best known for his fantasy-adventure stories of imaginary peoples in unknown lands. This one is romance-adventure in a known land -- known to Rider Haggard anyway -- the Transvaal before, during and after the First Anglo-Boer War.

Rider Haggard was there, for at least part of the time. He was the one who raised the British flag when a litlle group of part-time soldiers ands civil servants from Natal marched to Pretoria and annexed the South African Republic as the Transvaal, with hardly a mutter of protest from the eastwhile republican citizens.

A few years later, however, some of the republicans, dissatisfied with British rule, rebelled, and the result was the First Anglo-Boer War. The war lasted less than six months, from December 1880 to March 1881, and resulted in the retrocession of the Transvaal, which, this book makes clear, was a huge disappointment to Haggard.

In the story, John Niel goes to work on a farm near Wakkerstroom, owned by an old Englishman, Silas Croft, whose two orphaned nieces live with him. John Niel falls in love with both nieces, first one and then the other, and they both fall in love with him, and the main theme of the book is the conflicting romantic interests. The outbreak of war complicates things, and disrupts their relationships, and enables the chief villain of the story, Frank Muller, who has a crush on Bessie, to manipulate things in his favour..

This book, far more than his fantasy stories, is permeated with Haggard's racism and imperialism, and can be seen at one level as a piece of of political propaganda disguised as a love story.

The political background is this: Lord Carnarvon, who was Conservative Secretary of State for the Colonies 1874-1878, impressed by the Confederation of Canada in 1867, wanted to achieve a similar confederation in South Africa, which was then a patchwork of British colonies, Boer republics, and independent African principalities and kingdoms, the most powerful of which was Zululand under King Cetshwayo. Political tensions between these often led to British military intervention at great expense to the British taxpayer, and uniting them under one political authority on the Canadian model would, Carnarvon thought, reduce causes of conflict, and enable them to pay for their own military.

The first step to achieving this was to take over the Boer South African Republic (ZAR), which became the Transvaal Colony, where, as previously stated, H.Rider Haggard had raised the British flag. There had been a border dispute between the ZAR and Zululand, which the Natal colony adjudicated and found in favour of Zululand (the Keate Award), but having taken over the Transvaal they became a party to the dispute and reneged on the agreement. Britain therefore provoked a war with Zululand (the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879) in pursuit of the Confederation ideal, and having neutralised Zulu power also reduced the desire of Transvalers for British rule and protection, hence the rebellion of the Transvaal Boers, which became the first Anglo-Boer War, or the First War of Independence for the Transvaal Boers. During the two wars, in 1879 and 1881, the British military suffered its biggest defeats of the 19th century -- first at Isandlwana in the Anglo-Zulu War, and two years later at Majuba (near Wakkerstroom) in the Anglo-Boer War.

At the same time the Conservative government in Britain was replaced by a Liberal one, with William Gladstone as Prime Minister. The Liberals were far less imperialist than the Conservatives, and thought that Lord Carnarvon's Confederation plan was totally impractical and far too expensive, and so handed back the Transvaal to the victorious Boers, much to Rider Haggard's chagrin, expressed throughout Jess.

But the Liberal interlude was merely the calm before the storm. By the mid-1880s the New Imperialism and the Scramble for Africa had got under way, with Haggard's approval, expressed in a footnote in my edition of the book.

These words were written ten years ago, but since then, with all gratitude, be it said, a change has come over the spirit of the nation, or rather the spirit of the nation has re-asserted itself. Though the 'little England' party [ie the less-imperialist Liberals] still lingers, it exists upon the edge of its own grave. The dominance and responsibilities of our Empire are no longer a question of party politics and among the Radicals of today [ie the 1890s] we find some of the most ardent imperialists [eg the Conservative Secretary of State for Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, who was a Radical 'gas and water socialist;']. So may it ever be! H.R.H. 1896.

.
In Jess therefore, Haggard portrays the Boers in the worst possible light, since they are the enemies of the British empire. Most of the Boers in the book are caricatures, including the villain, Frank Muller. The Zulus fare slightly better, having been defeated by the British two years earlier (than the time of the story), but are still, in Haggard's eyes, very much an inferior race compared with the British, as are the Hottentots.

The villain, Frank Muller, seems a bit over the top. He oscillates wildly between uttering flattering endearments and violent threats to Bessie, whom he claims to love. No one in his right mind would imagine that such threats could persuade someone to love them; they are utterly incompatible with any kind of love. But perhaps Frank Muller is a rather extreme example of a psychopath and is portrayed rather well. If a psychopath is someone who has no conception of love at all, but is a person whose every utterance is calculated to manipulate other people, then perhaps Rider Haggard has portrayed Frank Muller very well as such a character.

I enjoyed the book at two levels: first, as a love story, it was well-written and had plenty of drama. Secondly, for its historical interest, it shows the British imperialist reaction to events of the late 1870s and early 1880s. Though his main characters may be fictional, the contemporary political figures Haggard mentions: Carnarvon, Gladstone, Shepstone, Lanyon, Kruger and others, are real, and we can learn something of Haggard's reaction to them as an ardent imperialist. Haggard clearly expected his readers to know who these people were and what they had done, because in this book he tells us in no uncertain terms what he thought of what they had done. On the other hand, Haggard's philosophical asides tend to become rambling and rather tedious, but perhaps that reflects the current taste for the "show don't tell" fashion of fiction writing.


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The Enchanted Grove

 My children's book, The Enchanted Grove, is available in paperback (ISBN 978-1-920707-63-7) from Lulu Bookshop. It is suitable for kids aged 9-12 (and also for those kids over 25 who enjoy children's stories like the Narnia books).

It is also available as an ebook (ISBN 978-1-920707-65-1) in various formats from most ebook retailers, like Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo etc. and from Smashwords. A Kindle version (ISBN 978-1-920707-64-4) is also available from Amazon.

Jeffery, Janet and Catherine spend their summer school holidays swimming and riding horses in the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains of South Africa. But then they have to deal with bullying teenagers who are into witchcraft, poachers, and the strange guardian of a cave of Bushman paintings. And just when it seems that things couldn’t possibly get worse, the children stumble across a secret government project that the police think they know far too much about. 

The story is set in December 1964, in the southern Drakensberg, in the fictional village of Pineville (so no one will be tempted to try to identify any of the characters, other than contemporary political leaders, with actual historical characters).

The Enchanted Grove is a sequel to Of Wheels and Witches, which is about an earlier adventure of Jeffery, Janet and Catherine and their friend Sipho. But each story stands on its own, and they do not need to be read in any particular order.

Read a sample chapter here:

ISBN

978-1-920707-63-7 Lulu (paperback)
978-1-920707-64-4 Kindle e-book
978-1-920707-65-1 Smashwords ebook

Of Wheels and Witches is out of print at present, but a second edition is in preparation at Shack Simple Press.

If you have read The Enchanted Grove I would be grateful if you write a review, on your blog, or in any journal or magazine you contribute to, or on the Smashwords page or the GoodReads page for the book.

Historical mysteries, adventure tales, and books inspired by them

She by H. Rider Haggard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book twice when I was at school, and thought it the best book by H. Rider Haggard that I had read. Reading it again as an adult I could remember little but the horrible end of the eponymous "She", but as I read through it I wondered how it was that I remembered it with such fondness, because there were long passages of religious and quasi-philosophical reflection that must surely have been boring to a child. The actual adventure is mainly in the last 50 pages or so.

Part of the appeal, for me at least, lies in the setting, the meta-story, as it were, which involves a historical mystery. Horace Holly, a Cambridge don, is asked by a dying friend to be guardian of his young son, Leo Vincey, and is given a box to be opened on Leo's 25th birthday. The box contains the story of Leo's descent from an ancient Egyptian priest, and a love triangle that results in his death at the hands of a mysterious woman living somewhere in central Africa.

As a result Holly and Leo Vincey travel to central Africa in the hope of solving the historical mystery, using clues scrawled on an ancient potsherd in ancient Greek. I suppose that it was enjoying such stories as a child that gave me a taste for history and historical research, so that I still enjoy solving the puzzles one encounters in family history and other historical research, where each mystery solved leads to a fresh mystery that seems to defy solution. And I suppose that is why I still enjoyed this book several decades later.

And such stories of ancient mysteries leading to modern adventures still seem to appeal to later tastes, as the series of Indiana Jones films produced about a century later shows.

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But, as many books do, this one sparked off thoughts that go beyond a mere review. In this case it led me to wonder whether C.S. Lewis had read She, and whether it had given him some inspiration in writing The Magician's Nephew, which is now next on my re-reading list.

The bit about The Magician's Nephew was sparked off by reading this passage, in which She proposes to marry Leo (whom she confuses with his remote ancestor Kallikrates), go with him back to England, and make him king and herself queen: 

“But we have a queen already," broke in Leo, hastily. “It is naught, it is naught,” said Ayesha ; "she can be overthrown."

At this we both broke out into an exclamation of dismay, and explained that we should as soon think of overthrowing ourselves.

“But here is a strange thing,” said Ayesha, in astonishment -- "а
queen whom her people love! Surely the world must have changed since I dwelt in Kôr."

Again we explained that it was the character of monarchs that had changed, and that the one under whom we lived was venerated and beloved by all right-thinking people in her vast realms. Also, we told her that real power in our country rested in the hands of the people, and that we were in fact ruled by the votes of the lower and least educated classes of the community.

“Ah,” she said, "a democracy -- then surely there is a tyrant, for I have long since seen that democracies, having no clear will of their own, in the end set up a tyrant, and worship him.

“Yes,” I said, " we have our tyrants.

“Well," she answered resignedly, we can at any rate destroy these tyrants, and Kallikrates shall rule the land.”

I instantly informed Ayesha that in England "blasting" was not an amusement that could be indulged in with impunity, and that any such attempt would meet with the consideration of the law and probably end upon a scaffold.

"The law," she laughed with scorn -- "the law! Canst thou not understand, O Holly, that I am above the law, and so shall Kallikrates be also ? All human law will be to us as the north wind to a mountain. Does the wind bend the mountain, or the mountain the wind ?

This appears very similar to the attitude of Jadis, the former Queen of the dead world Charn, when she comes to England, and later to Narnia.

And I suppose I was inspired by reading books like this as a child to incorporate the trope of ancient mysteries inspiring or contributing to modern adventures into my own story The Year of the Dragon, where I used the legend of Lobengula's treasure in a similar way. 

In this case, the real life event was a story found in the archives about John Jacobs. In 1908 Jacobs persuaded Susman, a Jewish trader at Lialui, and later of Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia, to search for Lobengula's treasure in Portuguese territory. Susman said after travelling for 3 months, Jacobs became more and more hazy about their goal. Eventually Susman flogged Jacobs, and was fined in court. Jacobs was deported from Northern Rhodesia in 1909. Then Jacobs persuaded Samuel Brander (the founder of the Ethiopian Catholic Church in Zion) to go on a similar treasure hunt, and they travelled there in 1917, but left without finding any treasure. On the way back Jacobs was arrested in Southern Rhodesia and charged under the immigration laws This story is found in a Memorandum from the Secretary for Native Affairs in Livingstone, dated 5 Aug 1917, in the Tshwane Archives Depot at NTS 1420 5/214.

And it was just such stories that authors like Rider Haggard used as triggers for adventure. John Jacobs was doubtless a con man, but the fantasies of con men can lead to interesting adventure stories.

Historical novel and fantasy subgenre

The Golden Horde by Peter Morwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I bought this book cheap on a sale 21 years ago and never read it because when I got home I discovered that it was part of a series, and we did not have the first two parts. Then, with the library closed because of Covid, I took it off the shelf where it had sat all these years, and discovered that it is a mixture of two genres -- the historical novel and the fantasy/fairy story. As most of my attempts to write fiction have been in the same sub-genre, and the one I've been writing most recently has a similar setting, I thought it was time I read it if only to see how someone else handles that particular genre, and how they handle similar tropes. 

The Golden Horde is set in Russia in the 13th century, in the time of the Mongol invasions, and to begin with I did not like it very much and nearly abandoned it after the first couple of chapters, but then it seemed to improve. There are references to the preceding volumes in the series, which I still don't have, but it stands up quite well as a stand-alone story.

So much for my actual review of the book -- to say much more would reveal too much of the plot, so if you haven't read it and might want to, stop reading here.

I didn't much like the way Peter Morwood handled some of the historical figures mentioned, and some of the tropes. Perhaps that is prejudice on my part; for example, as an Orthodox Christian I was sorry that he had nothing good to say about St Alexander Nevsky. Now Alexander Nevsky is not my favourite saint, mainly because, as a pacifist, I am not drawn to soldier saints very much, or at least I am more drawn to the ones who, like St Martin of Tours, became conscientious objectors. But the Orthodox Church is not a "peace church" like the Quakers and the Mennonites. It has as both soldier saints and peacenik saints. And in the times in which St Alexander Nevsky lived, it was almost impossible for anyone in political leadership not to be drawn into wars. But Peter Morwood seems to think that sorcery is the better option, and his portrayal of St Alexander Nevsky is entirely negative.

In other tropes, however, there is a hint of the Inklings, especially the novels of Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis in his novel That Hideous Strength. Batu, Khan of the Golden Horde, collects the crowns of the Russian princes he conquers. Those who surrender hand over their crowns voluntarily, in acknowledgement that henceforth they rule at the Khan's pleasure. Those who do not surrender their crowns have them taken by force. And the accumulation of crowns represents a dangerous accumulation of power, which irrupts into the world in Charles Williams fashion when a group of Russian nobles decide to offer a sacrifice to Chernibog, an old Russian pagan god. 

To counter this, the Princess and sorceress Mar'ya Morevna uses her grimoire to summon Byelobog, the white god of ancient Russia. As Morwood describes it:

To the Tatars, that was Tangri the Eternal Blue Sky fighting Erlik Khan with his thunderbolt, though Ivan knew there was at least one old servant who had come with him down from Khorlov who would see Othinn or Thorr wielding spear or hammer against their old adversary Jorungandr  the Midgarth-serpent. To some of the Russians, it would be Byelobog struggling with Chernobog, but the rest would see the Archangel Mikhail come to do battle against the darkness and the old serpent, not for them alone, but for all thee wide white world.

... echoes of the scene in That Hideous Strength where the gods of the planets descended on Belbury, where all the evil in Thulcandra has gathered.

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Enid Blyton and the "Famous Five"

Five Go to Demon's Rock by Enid Blyton
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book has all the usual Enid Blyton trade marks -- a superfluity of exclamation marks, stilted and unconvincing dialogue, and an adventure that doesn't begin until two-thirds of the way through the book. It also, however, has a weak and unconvincing plot.

So why did I buy it and read it?

We went to the library last Tuesday and it was closed -- a member of staff had tested positive for Covid-19, so all the rest of the staff were in quarantine. So we went to a second-hand bookshop to get something to read. I found  a few books, and then asked for their children's book section, but they only pointed me to a teenage books section. Then when I was paying for the other books, I saw this one in a pile on the counter, and picked it up. The woman in front of me in the queue said, "Ah, Enid Blyton, the Famous Five and the Secret Seven" and that started a conversation with a couple of staff members as well, who also recalled the Famous Five and the Secret Seven.

And I wondered about that. As a child, I read and enjoyed some books by Enid Blyton, but the Famous Five and the Secret Seven were not among them. I had read one or two Famous Five books and found them boring and unmemorable, and did not read any more. Now, as an adult, I bought this book mainly to see what the appeal was. And this one had all the faults of Enif Blyton's writing with none of the good points of her better children's adventure stories, like The Secret of Kilimooin and The Mountain of Adventure.

Arthur Ransome wrote some children's stories where the "adventure" was simply going and camping out on their own, so the adventure in this case, the children's encounter with some criminals, need not necessarily be the main part of the story, but even the camping part Arthur Ransome wrote so much better. He even, sometimes, included encounters with criminals, for example in The Big Six. But in this one the story was weak, and I didn't much like the characters either.

I bought this one, therefore, partly to see why I hadn't much liked the Famous Five as a child, and to see why the Famous Five were the first thing most people thought of if you mentioned Enid Blyton, or even children's adventure stories in general. And this one was a long way from being among the best of children's adventure stories, and also a long way from being among the best of Enid Blyton's ones.

The other reason for reading this one now is that I wrote a children's adventure story, which some reviewers compared with the Famous Five, and I rather hope that mine was a bit better than this one. 

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The REAL Benedict option

In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I started reading this book, I did not expect it to be so good. But when bookshops and libraries were closed during the Covid lockdown I began making a list of books on our shelves that I had not read. I don't even know how this one got there -- I think it may have been one I inherited when my mother died. Bit I had no hesitation in giving it five stars.

It's about a fictitious Benedictine monastery in England, and gives what seems to me a remarkably accurate picture of Christian monastic life. I knew some things about Benedictines. I knew a few people who had entered Benedictine monasteries, but found the monastic life wasn't for them. I have even visited the female Benedictine monastery at Inkamana near Vryheid in KZN, and a male one at Egmont in the Netherlands. I knew that male Benedictine monks were addressed as "Dom". But I did not know that professed female Benedictines were addressed as "Dame". nor that they had "claustral" sisters. That I learnt from this book.

In spite of its informativeness, however, it is not simply an "info dump" (that bane of would-be fiction writers), but it is a human story, and the characters stand out as real human beings.

It also brings out clearly how the monastic life, though more intense, is not essentially different from the Christian life in general. One scene that brought this out particularly strongly was when a novice nun receives letters from a man who had been in love with her for a long time. He addressed her by her secular name, pleading with her to leave the monastery, abandon the monastic life and marry him. She would not reply to his letters, saying she would only do so if he addressed her by her monastic name, thus acknowledging her decision and her right to make it. She asked the Abbess if that was not right. "It's right," said the Abbess, "but is it kind?"

That reminded me of the saying, quite commonly uttered in the time that the story is set (the 1950s and 1960s), that it is better to do wrong for the sake of love than to insist on doing right because of my lack of it.

There is sometimes a perception that it is easier to be a Christian in a monastery, because one is protected from the temptations of the world, but this book does nothing to promote that view. Orthodox monastics I have known have often spoken of the monastic life as "my repentance", and that is more its distinguishing feature. In the monastic life it is no easier than anywhere else to become perfect. It is, however, easier to become aware of one's imperfections.

Western monasticism, or perhaps one should rather say "religious life", differs from Orthodox monasticism in having many different forms. There are monks, sisters, canons regular, mendicant friars and a whole lot of others.

By contrast, Orthodox monasteries all work more or less on the same lines. Most, however, seem to agree that Benedictines are monks, and they seem to be the closest to Orthodox monasticism. It is therefore rather strange to see Orthodox Christians advocating something called the Benedict option when it is very un-Benedictine. If you are Orthodox, please read this book to understand what the Benedict option really means. And it might also give some insight5 into Orthodox monasticism too, though I would be interested in hearing the views of Orthodox monastics who have read this book.






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Travelling in Tibet in the 1990s: colonialism and neocolonialism

Naked Spirits: A Journey Into Occupied Tibet by Adrian Abbotts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I recently read Magic and Mystery in Tibet, written by a western visitor who illegally entered Tibet in the early 20th century. This book is about a couple of western visitors to Tibet 75 years later, when it was under Chinese occupation. And at the same time I was reading Orientalism, on how to deconstruct western views of "the Orient".

The earlier visitor, [author Alexandra David-Neel], had a couple of advantages. She could speak Tibetan, and she had also spent several years in Tibetan monasteries. And though she was an illegal immigrant, she was seeing a relatively independent Tibet, where Tibetans were free to be themselves. She was, nevertheless, also seeing Tibet through western eyes, and even, at one point, described herself as an Orientalist.

But the authors of Naked Spirits were tourists in the 1990s, when Tibet had been under Chinese rule for 40 years, and while foreign tourists could roam relatively freely in China proper, the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) was closed to all but expensive organised tour groups, who were kept isolated from the Tibetan people, and only allowed to see what their tour guides would allow them to see. Adrian Abbotts and his wife Maria therefore spent a great deal of time applying for permits to go to this or that place, and describe their dealings with Chinese officialdom and bureaucracy, and at that point it all seemed very familiar indeed. Tibet under Chinese rule reminded me of nothing so much as Namibia under South African rule, which I experienced from I went to Namibia in 1969 until I was deported from there in 1972.

The parallels between Chinese rule in Tibet and South African rule in Namibia were amazing, especially the attitudes and reactions of government officials to whom one applied for various permits and permissions to visit or travel through places. There were many parts of the book where I thought "Been there, done that." And Adrian Abbots and his wife evidently learned the lesson that we learned in Namibia: it is easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.

Also similar was the naked racism. The white South African rulers thought themselves superior to the native Namibians just as the Han Chinese rulers saw themselves as superior to the native Tibetans, and tried to make their language dominant.

There are differences too. In Namibia the South African rulers at least pretended to a kind of respect for local cultures, and encouraged them to "develop on their own lines" (the lines, of course, being lad down by the South African government). In Tibet there was no such pretence. Within Tibet all higher education was in Chinese and for Chinese. Tibetans who wanted higher education had to travel to China proper, and be immersed for several years in Han culture before they could return home, a policy that seemed more akin to that of Sheldon Jackson in Alaska than to the South African Department of Bantu Education.

So the book was particularly interesting to read in the light of the recent growth of Chinese economic activity in Africa, which looks suspiciously like neocolonialism. This includes the destruction of Namibian forest by Chinese logging, and, just over the border in Botswana, the threat of fracking in the Okavango Delta by a Canadian mining firm. It doesn't matter if the neocolonialism is Western or Eastern, there is little difference.






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