Having read Alec's first Drabble and Harris thriller - Rule Britannia - I thought I would purchase and read the second and third books in the series whilst on holiday in West Yorkshire. They proved just right for relaxing in the northern sun.
Headline Accent paperback edition - 2020
Set in India in 1937, Sir Percival Harris is hunting tigers with his long-suffering friend, Professor Ernest Drabble. Harris is also due to interview the Maharaja of Bikaner, a friend to the Raj, for his London Newspaper. They are joined by a local journalist, Miss Heinz. But is she all that she seems and, if not, does it matter? In the background (and very quickly in the foreground) is the movement for Indian independence. Once the two men get to Bikaner, they find themselves confined to their quarters and caught up in an assassination plot.
Rather like a John Buchan novel, it is fast, furious and far-fetched. There is a very useful 'Author's Note' at the end of the book, where Marsh delves into the history of the real-life Sir Ganga Singh, the Maharaja of Bikaner (reigned 1887-1943): he was a pioneer in terms of civil engineering but also in terms of civic institutions. He was also a patriot, albeit in the unusual context of British rule in India, and he was a thoroughly good man, even if today we find his ardent sportsmanship distasteful...as described in this story, he went off to fight for the Empire in the Great War, and he was at the peace talks in 1919 and signed the Treaty of Versailles. He really was a statesman on the world stage...
Marsh has no time for any nostalgic feeling about Britain's legacy in the Indian subcontinent, preferring to concentrate on contrition. I wanted to address the darker side of British rule in India, and in a broader sense, colonialism, and to do something to address the slew of nostalgic versions we are assailed with. Too often it is the story of good men - like the fictitious Superintendent Goodlad in the novel - doing bad things...one of the chief sins is the racial bias of the hierarchy and exploitation of the Raj. There writes an early 21st century author and where he might just have a different viewpoint from the Buchan of a century earlier.
Headline Accent paperback edition - 2021
Once again, the reader finds Harris and Drabble travelling down an historical byway, of fact mixed with fiction. This time, it starts in St George's Church, Gravesend in Kent. They are there to assess the despoiled grave of Pocahontas. The scene quickly shifts to the British Museum, where they find that a pipe and a battle shirt, said to have supernatural powers, worn by Chief Sitting Bull at the Battle of Little Bighorn (1876), have both been stolen. The curator is later found murdered! Then Drabble remembers an advertisement he had seen in a newspaper: Tonight - Last Chance to see Col. Grant's Wild West Show at the Earl's Court Exhibition Centre. So off they go, to watch sharpshooter Fanny Howell, Ferguson's Rough Riders, Black Cloud & the Lakota Sioux and a rendition of Custer's Last Stand at Little Big Horn. Coincidence? It climaxes with an elderly chief addressing a spellbound audience of several thousand. My name is Black Cloud. I was yet two moons from my sixteenth birthday when the Battle of the Greasy Grass - that is the what you call the Battle of Little Bighorn or Custer's last stand - took place. Well, you could have knocked audience members down with one of his feathers.
There is something very fishy about these coincidences; so fishy, that the intrepid duo find themselves embarked on the SS Empress of the Atlantic for New York, along with the entire Wild West troupe. At the Captain's table, Harris and Drabble are introduced to Mr Wheelock, of the United States government, and Major Sakamoto of the Japanese Embassy in London - both are to play important roles in the story's development. Black Cloud gives Harris a detailed account of his early life (born in the moon of Black Cherries etc.); Harris emerges from the interview in sombre spirits: The Americans...what a bunch of bastards. Christ alive. They're practically as bad as the Belgians...the poor old Indians. I mean, I've always understood them to be a bunch of wild savages. But it's obviously nothing like that at all. They're clearly a remarkable people. Harris is, however, about to find out that minor prying can lead to personal disaster. He experiences a horrifying encounter and when the ship docks is nowhere to be found.
Luckily, his pal Professor Drabble has met up with Dr Charlotte Moore, a research fellow at Oxford, daughter of a Professor Moore who gave lectures when Drabble himself was an undergraduate. They hit it off famously and are together for the rest of the tale. Once again, Marsh ends his novel with some 'Author's Notes' and he uses them to castigate severely the incoming Europeans' treatment of the indigenous population, who went from enjoying a free rein across an entire continent to being shepherded into several hundred reservations....The horrific story of what happened between 1600 and 1900 is at the heart of this novel and deliberately personified in the character of Black Cloud. Marsh describes his background reading as a thunderous march through the bloody and remorseless history of United States-Native Indian relations. His novel, which describes a grand plan for the Sioux tribes (with Japanese military aid) to launch a separatist bid for freedom in the 1930s, is just a work of fiction, but it is clearly inspired by real anger on the author's part for the Native Americans position then.
It is interesting that Drabble gets his girl - I see that a fourth novel in the series, After the Flood, has just been published (24th July), and it starts with Drabble and Charlotte on their honeymoon in Istanbul in 1938. Of course, Harris is with them; he was best man. I get the feeling that Harris, with his drinking, his foolhardiness, his pro-Empire views, is partly in the novels for the author to poke fun at and, even, to be an Aunt Sally for his outdated views. Personally, I would prefer him not to be in the books at all!
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