‘Perchance to dream..’: Creating literary masterpieces from dreams (Column: Bookends XCVIII)

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Do you recall where you went or what happened to you while sleeping last night? Did you see fondest wishes come true, or something you dread? Were you among friends or strangers and in a normal and ordinary millieu or one surrealistic and bizarre? You may not recall much of your dreams once awake, save some confused fragments that mystified, enraptured or disturbed you, but these visions have inspired or form the basis of some of the most famous literary works ever.

Dreams, most simply, are a progression of images, ideas, and emotions occurring involuntarily in certain phases of sleep, but their content and purpose has not been understood to any level of certainty, despite best efforts of thinkers from the fields of science, philosophy and religion down the ages. For those interested, see Sigmund Freud’s seminal “Interpretation of Dreams” or his former disciple Carl Gustav Jung’s “The Practical Use of Dream-analysis” (in “The Practice of Psychotherapy”) or “Dreams”.

In literature, dreams as inspirations, settings or plot devices are wide-ranging, right down to J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer.

Among the oldest is Roman philosopher-politician Cicero’s Socratic dialogue on contemporary politics, “De re publica” (54-51 B.C.). Its sixth and final book “Somnium Scipionis (Scipio’s Dream)” has legendary soldier Scipio Africanus Minor thus told his future by his late illustrious grandfather, Scipio Africanus.

Medieval English literature like William Langland’s “Piers Plowman” (late 14th century) freely made use of dreams to advance plot, and in William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (c.1595), dreams are what the two pairs of lovers and poor Nick Bottom – whose head has been transformed into that of a donkey – imagine their adventures to be after awaking from enchanted sleep.

But at the finale, the mischievous Robin Goodfellow/Puck tells the audience: “If we shadows have offended,/Think but this, and all is mended,/That you have but slumber’d here/While these visions did appear./And this weak and idle theme,/No more yielding, but a dream..”

Mary Shelley is said to have dreamt the idea for “Frankenstein” (1818), while a nightmare about a “vampire king” rising from his grave, caused by a too-indulgent dinner of mayonnaise-covered crab or lobster inspired Bram Stoker to write “Dracula” (1897) – though he had been researching vampire folklore for seven years.

Robert Louis Stevenson tried to find story ideas and material from his dreams and it was one of them that inspired “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1886). As a story goes, his wife, seeing that he was having a nightmare, woke him but got no thanks – for ending it as things were getting interesting. Stephenie Meyer has admitted the idea for “Twilight” (2005), the first of her vampire romances, came to her in a dream on June 2, 2003 about a human girl and a vampire who was in love with her but also thirsted for her blood.

But the most famous work with dreams is Charles Lutwidge Dodgson alias Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865) and its sequel, “Through the Looking-Glass” (1871), which, unlike many of their ilk, follow the ‘logic’ of actual dreams, with flexible transitions and causality.

Visions, of both the past and the future, are significant in both J.R.R. Tolkien’s chronicles of Middle Earth and Rowling’s Harry Potter series, where they can also reveal the truth (if our boy wizard had remembered a dream in Book One, it would have gone easier on him).
Some most imaginative use of dreams are in three separate works of engineer-turned-master storyteller Nevil Shute.

“An Old Captivity” (1940) has pilot Donald Ross, on an air survey mission of Greenland for an Oxford don, go into a coma where he dreams he and Alix (the don’s daughter who has come along) were once slaves aboard Viking chief Leif Ericson’s sailing expedition and had travelled up to North America where they left a stone, with their names carved on it. Later, they find it too!

Set in the Australian outback, “In The Wet” (1953) has ill Anglican priest Roger Hargreaves tending to an aged dying ex-pilot Stevie in 1953 when he dreams of a situation three decades hence where Stevie is a decorated Royal Australian Air Force pilot, who aids Queen Elizabeth II deal with anti-monarchial sentiment in Britain. In the end, the narrative shifts back, Stevie is dead and an exhausted Hargreaves tries to make sense, a task more difficult when the child who will become the future pilot is brought to him for christening.

Also set in Australia, “The Rainbow and the Rose” (1958) has pilot Ronnie Clarke, trying to save retired senior Johnnie Pascoe who has crashed on a medical evacuation mission and is seriously injured, dream about the latter’s chequered life while resting overnight in Pascoe’s house after his first attempt to land a doctor there fails.

So if you have literary ambitions, remember your dreams, or wish they get more colourful!

(28.12.2015 – Vikas Datta is an Associate Editor at IANS. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in )

The world’s most popular festival – and the writers who revived it (Column: Bookends XCVII)

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It is the world’s most well-known religious and cultural festival, celebrated worldwide – including even by those who are not adherents of the faith. Many sentiments and customs attached to it have become common worldwide – even where there is no snow, evergreen conifers to hang lights and decorations on, or a chimney for a nocturnal gift-giver to enter. But Christmas celebrations, as we know them today, are quite recent developments – and it is some 19th century authors who were responsible.

Celebrated from the third century A.D. onwards, the festival was however banned in Britain in the mid-17th century after the advent of the Puritans, led by Oliver Cromwell (the closest the country came to be being ruled by Taliban/an Ayotallah, as John O’Farell notes in his irreverent history of England). Though celebrations revived after a generation, it was not the same.

In US too, Puritans banned Christmas, and after the 13 colonies won independence, fell out of favour as a “British custom”.

So how did the idea of Christmas time as a holiday season, the home celebrations and feast, the gift-giving and exchanges, the idea of a “Christmas spirit” – exemplifying forgiveness, charity, generosity and redemption, Santa Claus and all come?

Three authors – two Americans and one British – had quite a part to play.

The first was American writer Washington Irving (1783-1859), known mostly for Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow, but also an essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat.

The two tales alluded to appear in his “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.” (1820), a collection of nearly three dozen essays and short stories, of which just half a dozen relate to America.

Among the others are several about ‘Crayon’, Irving’s lightly-disguised literary alter ego, in Britain where he also attends the traditional warm-hearted Christmas celebrations.

These are “Christmas” , where Crayon reflects on the festival’s meaning and its celebration, “The Stage-Coach”, about travelling to a country manor, Bracebridge Hall, and being invited to stay for Christmas, “Christmas Eve”, on celebrations at Squire Bracebridge’s home, “Christmas Day”, having the ‘old, traditional’ festivities continue at Bracebridge Hall, and finally, “Christmas Dinner”, where Crayon enjoys old-fashioned hospitality at the Bracebridge Christmas dinner table.

The book, originally published in serial form in 1819-20, was immensely popular and slowly led to revival of Americans’ interest in Christmas.

It was also helped when the poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas”, by an anonymous author, was published in 1822.

Better known by its first line: “Twas the Night Before Christmas”, it sees a man, wakened by noises while his wife and children sleep on on Christmas Eve, looking out and seeing St. Nicholas’ eight reindeer-pulled flying sleigh land on his roof. Nicholas enters through the chimney with a sack of toys, and the father sees him filling the children’s Christmas stockings, and they share a conspiratorial moment before the saint bounds up the chimney again, after wishing everyone: “Happy Christmas”.

This poem helped to create a standard image of Santa Claus, including his appearance (“dress’d all in fur, from his head to his foot”, “His eyes – how they twinkled! His dimples: how merry,/His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry” and “He had a broad face, and a little round belly/That shook when he laugh’d, like a bowl full of jelly”), the night he visits, his method of transportation, the number and names of his reindeer (“Now! Dasher, now! Dancer, now! Prancer and Vixen,/On! Comet, on! Cupid, on! Donder and Blitzen”); and that he brings toys to children.

The author was Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863), a professor of oriental and Greek literature, as well as divinity and Biblical learning at a leading Protestant seminary in New York, who in 1837, acknowledged he was the author and had written it for his children.

But the author who is most closely associated with the Christmas spirit is Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-70), who did the most to create it, especially through his novella “A Christmas Carol”, published on this day in 1843.

The story of a bitter old miser named Ebenezer Scrooge (“Bah! Humbug!”) and his transformation into a gentler, kindlier man after being visited by the ghosts of his former business partner and of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, it was written in a bid to deal with his mounting debts and not only became a resounding success but made Christmas what it is today. (Read Les Standiford’s “The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirit”, 2008).

But Dickens had more writings on Christmas – “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” in “The Pickwick Papers”, “The Chimes”, “The Cricket on the Hearth”, “The Battle of Life” and various stories in journals “Household Words” and “A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire”.

Now you know whom to thank when you wake up on Christmas and find your sock filled!

(20.12.2015 – Vikas Datta is an Associate Editor at IANS. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in )

Bookworms’ colourful exploits, in and out of books (Column: Bookends XCVI)

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Bookworm is a common, mildly pejorative, term for avid readers with tacit implication that they are unlikely to do well in practical, physical situations (contemporary, more colourful, vocabulary would say geeks, nerds or wimps). But as there are no organisms like bookworms (the various insects attacking books are actually two species of beetles – a louse and a moth), people so labelled, whether real or fictional, are scarcely inert or passive figures they are usually depicted or perceived as.

The reason may be unfathomable, but giving lie to the perception is a wide spectrum of active and courageous ‘bookworms’. From popular culture across various media, there is a studious student witch, a globe-trotting archaeologist, a wizard sent to Middle-Earth to help defeat a tyrant, a historian who foils assassination of the Prince and Princess of Wales, arranges a Soviet nuclear submarine’s defection, and eventually becomes US president , an academician-cum-‘vampire hunter’, a small-town bespectacled lawyer who exhibits great moral strength among others.

But if Hermione Granger from the “Harry Potter” series, Dr. Henry Walton “Indiana” Jones Jr., Gandalf from the “Lord of Rings”, Jack Ryan in Tom Clancy’s techo-thrillers, Abraham Van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” and Atticus Finch from Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” – disregard the older draft published this year – can be dismissed as imaginary, then what about real life cases?

How about a US president who read at least a book a day (usually before breakfast) and wrote many himself, hunted, boxed; a septuagenarian philosopher who stood up to Mike Tyson to save a woman from rape; the children’s author who at a day’s notice managed to round up all enemy nationals in an African town when World War-II began, became a flying ace and helped invent a medical device that helped countless children; the archaeologist who sparked off a successful revolt; the college professor who may have changed a key American Civil War battle’s outcome, and a Marxist theorist who also proved to be a skilled military organiser and commander.

Any of them familiar?

The US president was Theodore Roosevelt of whom it will suffice to say he managed to combine six adventurous lifetimes in his six decades, the philosopher was Sir Alfred Jules (or A.J.) Ayer, the author was Roald Dahl, known among others for “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (1964), the archaeologist was T.E. Lawrence who detailed his adventures in “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” (1922), the professor was Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, hero of Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg (1863) and the Communist Lev Davidovich Bronstein or Leo Trotsky (one oblique representation was Snowball in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”). Marxist poster icon Che Guevara was also quite a prolific literary and philosophical commentator.

It is the case of Ayer that warrants sharing as it may not be that well-known.

“At a party that same year (1987) held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson who was forcing himself upon the (then) little-known model Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, the boxer said: ‘Do you know who the f*** I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world,’ to which Ayer replied: ‘And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.’ Ayer and Tyson then began to talk, while Naomi Campbell slipped out.” (in “A.J. Ayer: A Life”, 1999, by Ben Rogers). Ayer had also served as a secret agent in the Second World War.

Men of science were no less active. Leading theoretical physicist and Nobel winner Niels Bohr was a keen footballer and known for always taking two stairs at once even in old age. Though he appears in science fiction writer Poul Anderson’s “Three Hearts and Three Lions”, he is actually the model for the real hero – a big burly football-playing Danish university graduate, who is thrown across dimensions into the medieval age in a parallel Earth, and uses his scientific skills to know how to kill dragons.

Elsewhere in fiction, several iconic characters are bookworms – detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, who seems an effete aristocrat but is extremely knowledgeable, a decorated war veteran, and judo expert, C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower, who becomes a great sailor by his maths and research skills, Aramis from “The Three Musketeers”, who hankers to be a priest and begins a thesis on the hand positions used for ritual church blessings – despite being a womaniser and elite soldier.

Then CIA researcher Ronald Malcolm beats trained agents at their game in James Grady’s “Six Days of the Condor” (Joe Turner in film adaptation “Three Days of the Condor”), and Rafale Sabatini’s “Scaramouche” is French Revolution-era lawyer Andre-Louis Moreau who becomes an expert swordsman from studying fencing theory in books.

So next time you see someone buried in a book, resist making a snide remark!

(13.12.2015 – Vikas Datta is an Associate Editor at IANS. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in )

Defeating crime, invasions and dinosaurs – the most powerful politician (Column: Bookends XCIV)

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The most powerful man in the world is possibly the president of the United States of America, but does he hold the same status in fiction? There are a host of works, across all media, featuring holders of office, both actual or imaginary, in plots reflecting or mirroring history (with a bit of creative licence) or stemming totally from the creator’s fancy but most portrayals are not very positive. There are however a few exceptions – especially one real-life example with and in his own incredible stories.

Leave aside those created by Frederick Forsyth, Irving Wallace, Jeffrey Archer and Tom Clancy, on TV in “The West Wing” or “Commander in Chief”, or in films like “Deep Impact”, “Salt”, or “Air Force One”, and a range of improbable incumbents ranging from Al Capone to Churchill to Stalin (after his parents immigrated in the 1870s), almost all 43 actual presidents had figured fictionally in some media.

However, only a few – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, both Roosevelts, maybe Andrew Jackson and U.S .Grant – are portrayed heroically. Among them is one whose adventures – crime-solving (including with Sherlock Holmes), fighting Martians or vampires, defeating German invaders, fighting Nazis and hunting a surviving Tyrannosaurus Rex – never seem incongruously fantastic given his colourful life, before, during and after his two-term presidency.

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), who overcame asthma to even box, was a rancher, hunter, New York’s police commissioner and politician, raised and led a volunteer cavalry regiment in the Spanish-American war and wrote 35 books – several deemed the last word on the subject. Made vice president by the party to remove him as New York governor, he became the youngest president – at 42 – after William McKinley’s assassination in 1901.

A progressive aristocrat who battled corruption and sought equality for women, blacks and Jews, he took on business monopolies, encouraged nature conservation, initiated the Panama Canal’s construction, made his country a global power and won a Nobel Peace Prize. He still had time for tennis, jujitsu, a book (or more) a day, and walks where no obstacle could be avoided but had to be gone over, under or through.

Demitting office, he went big-game hunting in East Africa. Back home, he decided his successor was not doing well and decided to run again in 1912 – even after being denied his party nomination. During the campaign, he was shot in an assassination bid but went on to deliver a 90-minute speech before seeking medical aid. Besting the party nominee but losing to his rival, he went exploring in Brazil, campaigned for the US to fight in the First World War, and was dismayed when his request to personally participate was denied. He wanted to run again for president in 1920 and could have won – but was broken after his youngest son’s death in the war.

His exploits can be read in his own words, or in several splendid accounts. Edmund Morris’ three-volume biography (“The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt”, 1979; “Theodore Rex”, 2001; “Colonel Roosevelt”, 2010) is a good overview and many more deal with specific periods or activities like Candice Millard’s “The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey” (2005) about his South American expedition.

Fictionally, prolific author Noel B.Gerson’s “T.R.” (1970) is a biography but others are period-wise. Dealing with Roosevelt at the dawn of his public life is H. Paul Jeffers’ “The Stalwart Companions” (2010) where he teams up with Holmes to foil the then US president’s assassination.

An account of his eventful ranching days in Dakota is Brian Garfield’s “Manifest Destiny” (1989), while Lawrence Alexander’s trilogy – “The Big Stick” (1986), “Speak Softly” (1987), and “The Strenuous Life” (1992) – have him solve complicated mysteries as New York police commissioner.

Also of this period are Caleb Carr’s “The Alienist” (1994) and Mary Kruger’s “Masterpiece of Murder” (1997) where he supports the investigators.

Will Henry’s “San Juan Hill” deals with his stint as the Rough Riders’ commander, and in Mark Schorr’s “Bully!” (1985), he, ensnared in a plot by powerful industrialists to discredit his administration, pursues the criminals himself, aided by a loyal buddy from his cowboy days.

Among the more speculative is Mike Resnick’s “The Other Teddy Roosevelts” (2008) where he takes on aliens, vampires and Jack the Ripper, and “The Doctor and the Rough Rider” where he joins Doc Holliday (of OK Corral fame) to ensure America’s continental expansion, Mark Paul Jacobs’ “How Teddy Roosevelt Slew the last Mighty T-Rex” (2013), Harry Turtledove’s ‘Southern Victory’ alternate history series where he leads the Union that lost the Civil War to eventual victory, and Robert Conroy’s “1901” where he has to contend with a German invasion.

Giving his rationale, Resnick says he found TR so fascinating and bigger than life that he decided the only field accommodating a man with those virtues was science fiction, for finding some challenges truly worthy of his talents.

As these examples show, Theodore Roosevelt’s influence in imagination is no less than in reality!

(29.11.2015 – Vikas Datta is an Associate Editor at IANS. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)

Havens, menaces or challenges: Forests in literary imagination (Column: Bookends XCIII)

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From Snow White to Tarzan, Robin Hood to Alice, Lord Rama to the Pandavas, Ali Baba to Winnie the Pooh, Dorothy (of Oz) to Harry Potter, from works of Shakespeare to Henry David Thoreau, Rudyard Kipling to Bill Bryson and Enid Blyton to Cheryl Strayed, there is one common thread, wholly or partly, to some of our most remembered and favourite literature – forests as a setting for key action.

Earth’s dominant terrestrial ecosystem, forests are commonly taken to mean a large area with trees or other woody vegetation though there isn’t any common global definition – 800 definitions are available around the world! What is however more acceptable and indisputable is their role in human imagination and culture, be it folklore, fantastic or legendary, and modern literature, whether children or adult. They can represent a place of refuge or menace, of succour or challenge, of restful contemplation or exciting adventure, a metaphor for nature at its most basic and untrammeled by human civilising, and a source of sustenance – or danger.

But best-served are those who take some benefit from their sojourn in the woods. As a Shakespearean character ruminates: “And this our life, exempt from public haunt,/Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,/Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

This was the Senior Duke, perfectly content in his exile in the Forest or Arden in “As You Like It” (Act II, Scene 1) but forests are not always that welcoming and instructive for the Bard’s other creations. In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, some unwelcome changes afflict various characters, especially poor Nick Bottom in the forest (though everything gets amicably and amenably solved in the end), while in another, the appearance of the Dunsinane forest (or a branch of it, excuse the pun) before Macbeth’s castle spells his doom!

In ancient Hindu epics, Lord Rama and his brother Lakshman first exhibit their mettle by ridding some forests of demons before their eventful exile to the forest, as do the Pandavas who raise their capital after clearing a notorious forest and then spend part of their own exile in forests.

But some of the most memorable and universally-known stories set in the woods – Snow White, Rapunzel, Red Riding Hood, Briar Rose, Hansel and Gretel and many more of brave young princes and fair maidens, both equally unfortunate (till the end) – owe their survival to a pair of brothers in 19th century Germany who specialized in collecting and publishing folklore of their country. Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859) – or the Brothers Grimm as they came to be known – introduced these tales to generations of avid young readers who found more magic in the no less magic pursuit of reading.

Seven editions of “Kinder und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales)” came out between 1812 and 1857 with stories added and subtracted, till the final edition set the number to 211, of which at least, three-fourths were set in wooded environs.

Alice encounters forests in both Wonderland and the land entered “Through the Looking Glass”, while Dorothy finds two of her friends – the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion – in one.

Another beloved childhood story – of honey-loving, teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends in the Hundred-Acre Wood – came out in 1926. Continuing the fantasy tradition was British author Enid Blyton with her Faraway Tree series – “The Enchanted Wood” (1939), “The Magic Faraway Tree” (1943), “The Folk of the Faraway Tree” (1946) and “Up the Faraway Tree” (1951). The series today represent the dictates of changing times with the original names of a more innocent generation – Jo, Bessie, Fannie and Dick – now Joe, Beth, Frannie and Rick, while Dame Slap who used physical chastisement on her students now Dame Snap, who just yells at them.

Harry Potter is what is termed an urban fantasy but a major part of his adventures and tribulations take place in the Forbidden Forest next to Hogwarts.

Set in real life but no less fantastic in their own way are the ballad-derived tales of the Lincoln-Green clad English outlaw Robin Hood, who robs the rich to give to the poor, and his Merry Men of Sherwood Forest.

Forests’ colonial cousins, the jungles of Africa and Asia, host the likes of John Clayton, Viscount Greystoke or Tarzan, who was raised in the African jungles by great apes and rejected civilization to return to the wild; Mowgli, the wolf-raised, animal-taught child in Central India’s jungles and the crime-fighter Phantom or “The Ghost Who Walks”. These were the creations of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling and Lee Falk and debuted in 1914, 1893-4 and 1936.

In travelogues, two of the best rambles through jungles are American Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail” (1998), and Strayed’s “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail” (2012), which take care of both seaboards, have been made into movies and are the best accounts of human’s attempts to survive in the wild (or away from city comforts) after acquiring the needed skills.
As environment suffers from a consumerist culture’s dictates, these works are all the more important to warn us of what we stand to lose.

(22.11.2015 – Vikas Datta is an Associate Editor at IANS. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)

Bagpipes at dawn and other challenges for Scottish soldiers (Column: Bookends XCI)

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Can a story about soldiers in peacetime be of any interest for an ordinary reader? What attraction could a fairly predictable routine of a regimented life, with repetitive tasks and drills under stern discipline, have for civillians? But remember “Humour in Uniform” in “Reader’s Digest”?

Soldiers too can find themselves facing situations for which no training or manual can prepare them – this young officer is tasked to manage a football team, change a baby’s nappies, guard a haunted fort, defend regimental honour in a general knowledge quiz, and have the dirtiest soldier in the world under him.

All this – and much more – was the lot of author George MacDonald Fraser, who was commissioned as an officer towards close of the Second World War (after serving in the ranks during the Burma campaign). And luckily for us, he thought it would make for some good stories.

Even as the first installments of his eventually most famous work were appearing – the Flashman series about a cowardly, lecherous anti-hero in various trouble spots throughout the 19th century – Fraser also penned a collection of “fictionalised” stories of life in a Highland regiment.

“The General Danced at Dawn” (1970) has many unforgettable characters – the apparently easy-going but perceptive colonel, the effervescent adjutant, the pessimistic padre, the meticulous sergeant-major, and so on. Fraser appears as Dand McNeill (a play on regimental motto “Bydand” or standfast in Gaelic), while others also appear under different names.

“Monsoon Selection Board” details his torturous route to officerhood and efforts to fit in his new regiment, posted in Libya, in “Silence in the Ranks” – which also introduces the dirtiest soldier – Pvt. J. McAuslan: ” … he lurched into my office (even in his best tunic and tartan he looked like a fugitive from Culloden who had been hiding in a peat bog) …”

Among the funniest are “Play Up, Play Up and Get Tore In” where MacNeill, shepherding the battalion football team around the Mediterranean, has to deal with a naval officer gambling heavily on the team including with official funds, “The General Danced at Dawn”, where a general on inspection likes their Highland dancing, joins in and attempts to set a record – for which, by dawn, are drawn in the neighbouring Fusiliers, military policemen, an Italian cafe proprietor, a few Senussi tribesmen, and three German prisoners of war, “Night Run to Palestine” about commanding an overnight troop train to strife-hit Jerusalem, and not only having to look out for Zionist saboteurs but also interfering seniors, women auxilliaries, a chaplain worried about morals, an army wife with twins and an Arab Legion soldier who locks himself in the toilet (as MacNeill learns on coming across a small group singing “Oh Dear What Can the Matter Be?” outside) and “McAuslan’s Court-Martial” – a study in inspired, clever advocacy – while the presiding officer finds the abuses very interesting!

“McAuslan in the Rough” (1974) has, among others, “Bo Geesty” where MacNeill’s platoon manning a fort on Sahara’s edge, finds strange things happening when they try to drill a well, “Johnnie Cope in the Morning” about being woken every Friday by the band going full blast outside but also about a new recruit (a Negro) wanting to join the band and the complicated discussions – one of the funniest passages in English – it entails (he is eventually allowed), “General Knowledge, Private Information” about the quiz contest where McAuslan saves the day, “Parfit Gentil Knight, But” about McAuslan falling in love, and “McAuslan in the Rough”, where the battalion back in Britain, gets drawn into a golf challenge – and the slovenly McAuslan is the caddy for the impeccable regimental sergeant major.

“The Sheikh and the Dustbin” (1988) has among others “Captain Errol” where a new officer is so nicknamed since he resembles actor Errol Flynn, and has the same casual, reckless approach – until a crisis pops up, “The Constipation of O’Brien” where a night exercise descends into farce, the title story about the battalion saddled with an Arab rebel from contiguous French territory till he can be shipped back to the Devil’s Island, and “The Gordon Women”, a superbly comic tale involving poachers and illicit distillers set in Scotland. Finally, Fraser writes about meeting the colonel, now an octogenarian, and both reminiscing how some of the most improbable stories are the most true and the colonel (identified as R.G. Lees – who was second in command at the Japanese POW camp whose story inspired the film “The Bridge on the River Kwai”) stumping him by correctly identifying all the characters.

A valuable picture of the postwar world as the British empire was in retreat and a whole way of life was changing, the books are an engaging account of an army that fought throughout WWII and emerged victorious. They are also among the funniest.

(08.11.2015 – Vikas Datta is an Associate Editor at IANS. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in )

Painting a wide panorama of WWII, pioneering popular history (Column: Bookends XC)

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It is a rare feat to pen a chronicle of a historical event which is not only the first introduction for succeeding generations but also the most vivid and enduring. And an Irish-born journalist did it thrice – aided by two of these works becoming well-known films. In the process, he also became a pioneer of “popular history” or one meant for the general reader and complementing the big picture with personal experiences across the board from all sides and a rich amount of detail, instead of analysis.

If your first introduction to the D-Day (the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944) is the 1962 big-screen spectacle with a John Wayne as a US colonel fighting on despite a broken ankle, Richard Burton as a RAF pilot on the edge, and an American paratrooper trapped on a church tower as a firefight rages in the village square below, Cornelius Ryan is responsible.

The same if all you know of Operation Market Garden is from seeing Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, Robert Redford, James Caan and Ryan O’ Neal in a desperate fight to grab Dutch bridges while the likes of Maximilian Schell and Hardy Kruger do their best to foil them.

World War II not only saw authors like John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and Edgar Rice Burroughs become journalists but also journalists like Australians Alan Moorehead and Chester Wilmot and Soviet Vasily Grossman turn authors. Ryan, one of the latter group, was the most famous.

Born in Dublin in 1920, he moved to London in 1940 and became a war correspondent, flying along over a dozen bombing missions with the US Air Force, before being attached to Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army. This did not take part in D-Day, but only came into action after the breakout from Normandy, when it chased German forces right to the German border before lack of supplies led to a halt.

Ryan, however, had himself been in Normandy twice on D-Day (which came a day after he turned 24) – first in a bomber over the beaches and then on a patrol boat back to Normandy after landing in England.

In 1947, he emigrated to the US and worked for Time (for whom he reported on US nuclear bomb tests and the First Arab-Israeli War) and then Collier’s Weekly. At a loose end after this folded in 1956, Ryan, who had proposed a book on D-Day two hours after the invasion began and grew further determined after a Normandy visit in 1949, set to work on earnest. An ad “Personal: Were You There on 6 June 1944?” elicited thousands of responses.

This was followed up with a three-page questionnaire, and on basis of replies, thousands of interviews – of Allied and German soldiers and commanders and French resistance members and civilians – were taken and hundreds of accounts were used to construct a gripping narrative of the hours leading to and of that eventful day in all its panorama of anticipation, danger, heroism and fear.

“The Longest Day: 6 June 1944 D-Day” (1959), divided into three parts – “The Wait”, “The Night” and “The Day” – begins on a misty dawn on June 4, 1944, in the coastal village of La Roche-Guyon, which we learn is the most occupied in occupied France with three German soldiers in and around for each of its 543 inhabitants, and then into the office of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who has the task of foiling the anticipated invasion.

It ends in the same village late on June 6, 1944, after a whirlwind journey – to the Allied High Command deliberating on the final nod, British and American paras girding up for a night drop, French resistance on sabotage missions, German officers trying to gauge if the increased activity is the invasion in earnest or a diversion, and finally, the huge Allied armada setting forth and the desperate fight on the beaches.

Ryan’s next was “The Last Battle” (1966) about the Battle of Berlin in 1945, for which he not only interviewed hundreds of Western Allied and German participants but was also given the rare privilege of access to Soviet archives and Soviet generals involved.

But what became as famous as his first was “A Bridge Too Far” (1974) about the gallant but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to shorten the war by the largest airborne drop on the Dutch-German border. Ryan, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1970, wrote the book during his illness and died a mere two months after its publication. The film came in 1977.

Ryan, who had written three books earlier including two on Gen Douglas McArthur, left a posthumous account of his struggle with his fatal illness in “A Private Battle” (1979), co-written by his wife on the basis of his notes.

Some journalists never learned to stop working!

(01.11.2015 – Vikas Datta is an Associate Editor at IANS. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)

Crime, Disaster – and an Author (Column: Bookends LXXXVIII)

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They can plan and commit the most perfect crimes and, on the other hand, solve the trickiest conundrum or unravel the most twisted conspiracies – on paper! But can mystery writers exhibit their skill they imbue their detectives with in real life too?

Leaving alone detectives-turned-authors – a prime example was Dashiell “The Maltese Falcon” Hammett, who was once a Pinkerton agent – there have been only a few who tried to do so.

Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle probed cases of two men (including half-Parsi London solicitor George Edalji) who he believed were unjustly convicted and succeeded in getting them exonerated. Others seeking to solve some sensational unsolved crimes – Jack the Ripper’s identity for one – were not successful and faced derision for their efforts, be it Edgar Allan Poe, P.D. James and Patricia Cornwell, creator of forensic sleuth Kay Scarpetta.

But have there been cases we don’t know about – where some renowned writers happened to be around when a foul murder took place, were summoned or volunteered to help and solved the crime – but at the cusp of a major incident that ensured their accomplishments would be overshadowed?

Seems a fascinating idea, doesn’t it? And such is the curious pattern of human life, call it coincidence or whatever you like, some prominent writers were present in some of the most unforgettable tragedies of the 20th century’s first half – a celebrated author was aboard the Titanic, the original grand dame of crime was in London when it faced fierce German bombing during the Second World War and another renowned author, though not of mysteries, was in Pearl Harbor that fateful first week of December 1941.

This was all needed by prolific American mystery writer Max Allan Collins (b.1948) to create his “Disaster” series where murders – occurring prior or during some famous disasters – are solved by the likes of Agatha Christie, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leslie Charteris, Jacques Futrelle, S.S. Van Dine and Walter B. Gibson (the last four may seem somewhat unfamiliar to most modern readers but were most famous in their time, and two of them arguably had a hand of sorts in development of iconic characters like James Bond, and Superman and Batman).

It begins with most famous ship disaster of all time – fresh in our memories even after a century – especially due to the James Cameron’s 1997 film, which in a way, was an inspiration for the series.

Wondering if it wouldn’t be interesting to have Titanic passenger Futrelle, creator of Prof. Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen or “The Thinking Machine” who solved crimes by inexorable logic, solve a locked room murder of the sort he wrote about just as an iceberg loomed, led to “The Titanic Murders” (1999), which draws in two otherwise blameless passengers as villains and ends as just the alarm is sounded.

But as the publisher wanted a series, Collins was forced to delve deeper. “The Hindenburg Murders” (2000), postulating a possible cause of the blaze that reduced the airship to ash, stars British-Chinese author Leslie Charteris but with a little artistic licence – the creator of the sophisticated Simon Templar alias Saint who made the leap to radio, comic books, TV (played by Roger Moore) and film – did travel on the airship but not on its last voyage in 1937.

As far as “The Pearl Harbor Murders” (2001) was concerned, Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, was in Honolulu that week Japan attacked while “The Lusitania Murders” (2002), with Willard Huntington Wright ‘S.S. Van Dine’, again takes a slight liberty – he sailed on the luxury liner but not in 1915 when it came in the sights of a U-boat.

“The London Blitz Murders” (2004) actually deals with the spike in crime that took place in the blackout, particularly a string of murders with a sexual motive, where jumps in Agatha Christie Mallowan, after prevailing on celebrated pathologist Sir Bernard Spillsbury to let her accompany him to some crime scenes.

A fitting finale is “The War of the World Murders” (2005), in which William B. Gibson, a one-time disciple of Houdini and creator of “The Shadow, ‘who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men’ “, tasked with solving a crime in the time Orson Welles scares a nation with his dramatic, contemporary radio adaption of H.G. Wells’ Martian invasion.

Collins, best known for his Nathan Heller series of a hard-boiled investigator rubbing shoulders with quite a few of the famous and infamous in pre-WWII US, replicates his magic here too. He builds a fine head of tension by restricting the timeframe to just a few days, while the meticulous research, spotless evocation of the era portrayed – and for good measure, replicating style and ethos of the author being featured, make for a most satisfying read and provide the best example of literary historical crime fiction – in all senses!

(18.10.2015 – Vikas Datta is an Associate Editor at IANS. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)

Laughter on the pitch and pavillion: Cricket in its humour (Column: Bookends LXXXVII)

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It now figures in fiction for all the wrong reasons now – controversies, conspiracies, crimes and even worse, distracting amorous dalliances, but cricket, in the days when it was still a gentleman’s game and not a money-spinning, over-analysed entertainment spectacle, had an honoured place in English literature, with some great authors and avid players writing about it – some tickling the funny bone mercilessly while at it.

Humour, did you think? What role does it have in a game chiefly requiring superlative skills, agility and power, of an ability for inspired, intricate stroke play, or dispatching thunderbolts at the batsman or beguiling him with spin?

An initial look is not promising. Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt played the game but didn’t write on it, nor did it figure humorously in writings of J.M. “Peter Pan” Barrie and his team ‘Allahakbarries’ (named on a mistaken belief that the religious invocation meant “Heaven help us”) comprising Jerome K. Jerome, A.E.W. Mason, Arthur Conan Doyle, E.W. Hornung (whose gentleman-criminal Raffles was an ace cricketer), H.G. Wells, A.A. “Winnie the Pooh” Milne and P.G. Wodehouse (save maybe “Picadilly Jim”).

Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey actually solves a crime during a game in “Murder Must Advertise” (1933) and Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” quintet has a most unsettling account of its origins. Laughs also don’t figure in more recent works, be it Anuja Chauhan’s “The Zoya Factor” (2008), Joseph O’Neill’s haunting “Netherland” (2008) about a lonely Dutch business executive in post 9/11 New York finding a sense of belonging by joining a cricket club, Tarquin Hall’s “The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken” (2012) or Timeri N. Murari’s “The Taliban Cricket Club” (2012).

“The Goat, the Sofa & Mr Swami” (2010), R. Chandrashekhar’s matchless synthesis of politics, diplomacy, bureaucracy and cricket – which is what the sport is now – does however succeed with its riotous finale in a Delhi stadium.

The first humorous treatment is in Charles Dickens’ rollicking, voluminous debut “The Pickwick Papers” (1836), whose chapter seven sees the Pickwickians at the Dingley Dell Cricket Club vs All-Muggleton game. Also introduced is the game’s first commentator, who – to give him credit – is admirably succinct “Capital game-well played-some strokes admirable.”

Mr Jingle, with his singular speech, has also played in the West Indies: “Warm!-red hot-scorching-glowing. Played a match once-single wicket-friend the colonel – Sir Thomas Blazo – who should get the greatest number of runs – won the toss-first innings-seven o’clock A.M.-six natives to look out-went in; kept in-heat intense-natives all fainted-taken away-fresh half-dozen ordered-fainted also-Blazo bowling-supported by two natives-couldn’t bowl me out-fainted too-cleared away the colonel-wouldn’t give in-faithful attendant-Quanko Samba-last man left-sun so hot, bat in blisters, ball scorched brown-five hundred and seventy runs-rather exhausted-Quanko mustered up last remaining strength-bowled me out-had a bath, and went out to dinner.”

Pune-born Archibald Gordon (A.G.) Macdonell’s neglected classic “England, Their England” (1933) has, also in its chapter seven, a match pitting a London team against locals in a Kentish village, with a titanic contest between a fast bowler and a soft-looking but lusty-hitting author – and what happens when the bowler feels compelled to make a supreme effort but the umpire feels mischievous. It sadly is too long to fit here but if you can’t get the book, Ruskin Bond-edited “The Rupa Laughter Omnibus” has it.

But high levels of sportsmanship were not always seen.

A minor unlikable character in Thomas Hughes’ “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” (where cricket plays a major part), arch-cad Flashman (who got his own series courtesy author George MacDonald Fraser), is once prevailed to play for the alumni at Lords and performs the game’s first hat-trick – dismissing Nicholas Felix, Fuller Pilch (the greatest batsman of his time) and Alfred Mynn by skill, sheer luck, and straight cheating. “I’m not sure that the sincerest tribute I got wasn’t Fuller Pilch’s knitted brow and steady glare as he sat on a bench with his tankard, looking me up and down for a full two minutes and never saying a word,” he records in “Flashman’s Lady” (1977).

Adrian Allington’s “The Amazing Test Match Crime” (1939) lampoons not only the game but English society and crime too as Europe’s most notorious gang “The Bad Men” (including an Englishman damned for knowing the rules but not playing by them) scheme to disrupt England’s final test match against Imperia to decide the Ashes but are foiled by an unlikely and unexpected protagonist.

The antagonistic Herecombe and Therecombe village sides play a match that lasts till midnight but only see two balls bowled – and the first where a fielding side appeals against poor light. You can learn what happened in “The Bad-Tempered Cricket Match” in “Herbert Farjeon’s Cricket Bag” (1946).

Don’t dismiss all these as anachronistic curiosities but a testament to a pastime now reduced to a tense occupation by unconscionable commercialisation.

(11.10.2015 – Vikas Datta is an Associate Editor at IANS. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in )

Policing books – from the inside (Column: Bookends LXXXVI)

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In this universe, England is now a republic and the United Kingdom doesn’t exist (next door is the Socialist Republic of Wales), the Crimean War raged until 1985, time travel, cloning and genetic engineering exist (dodos are common household pets and Neanderthals resurrected) but not personal computers or jet aircraft, cheese is exorbitantly costly, a shadowy corporation exerts great influence, and literature, especially classical, is revered – and has an entire police department devoted to its service.

Then we learn there is a dimension within literature where all books are “constructed” and also house the characters who, aware they are in a book, act out their roles when being read but live their own lives the rest of the time. And the line between these two worlds can be crossed – by some.

This is the setting for the seven volume (so far) Thursday Next series, a rollicking meta-fictional, fourth-wall breaking romp through books, genres and tropes – classics, police procedurals, espionage, science fiction, comic fantasy, conspiracy theories, apocalyptic scenarios and even fairy tales – as author Jasper Fforde (b.1961) delves into the workings of imagination and literary inspiration, the relationship between fiction and its audience and the mechanics (and magic) of reading.

“The Eyre Affair” (2001) introduces the doughty, appealing and resourceful Thursday Next, a 36-year-old single, Crimean War veteran, working in 1985 London with SpecOps 27, the Literary Detectives (or ‘LiteraTecs’), the agency responsible for dealing with forged or stolen manuscripts and literary works. Wounded in an attempt to capture mysterious criminal mastermind Acheron Hades, she seeks a transfer to hometown Swindon (on the advice of a future version of herself).

Hades has meanwhile begun to kidnap characters from fiction for ransom – with Jane Eyre his latest victim. Thursday finds a way into the book and in a fiery encounter on Thornfield Hall’s roof, kills Hades while also rewriting the ending to reunite Jane and Rochester (or the version we know). She later also ends the Crimean War, traps her unwanted Goliath Corporation partner in an Edgar Allan Poe poem, and marries her estranged fiancee.

The series really kicks in with “Lost in a Good Book” (2002), where Goliath have eradicated her husband from the timeline to blackmail her into rescuing their trapped operative. Learning to read herself into a book, Thursday finds herself in the 26-floor Great Library, which contains all published English books, and is inducted into the book world’s police – “JurisFiction”, which comprises operatives both fictional such as the Cheshire Cat (now the Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat due to redrawing of county boundaries), and non-fictional. She does Goliath’s bidding but is double-crossed, while there is Hades’ vengeance-seeking sister, an insidious political conspiracy and a looming end of the world to be dealt with.

Facing multiple threats in her world, Thursday, now pregnant, takes refuge in an unfinished detective novel in “The Well of Lost Plots” (2003), or a 26-level world beneath the Great Library where unpublished or unfinished works exist. There she has to keep her memory of her missing husband alive, train a couple of generics, and unearth what the ‘Book Operating System’s’ latest upgrade will entail for reading.

After two years as JurisFiction chief, she heads back to the real world with her two-year-old son Friday in “Something Rotten” (2004). Tagging along is Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, on a fact-finding mission. But out there, another huge political conspiracy is on, getting her husband back is tricky, her mother is hosting guests like Otto von Bismarck, she ends up being targeted by an assassin and the Minotaur, and the fate of her country and the world depend on her surviving a trip to the Underworld and winning a croquet match (here it is not the genteel sport you were thinking).

The next three, set over a decade in the future, comprise a new arc, slightly edgier and much more confusing with paradoxes of time travel and identity abounding. “First Among Sequels” (2008) deals with her struggle to convince her son, “now a teenage cliche” to take a job, tackle dramatically plunging attention spans that impinge reading and deal with her two book versions. She even doesn’t appear until the end in “One of our Thursdays is Missing” (2011), where the narrator is her book version. “The Woman Who Died a Lot (2012)” sees a recuperating Thursday deal with a new set of problems including a revived Goliath. The story will continue in “Dark Reading Matter” but its current status is unclear.

Don’t dismiss Thursday’s exploits as a book-lover’s wildest dreams come true or a multitude of puns, also read them for a trenchant satire on issues like corporate greed, our celebrity-obsessed, reality show watching culture, devious politics, proliferating bureaucracy and other ills of our world!

(04.10.2015 – Vikas Datta is an Associate Editor at IANS. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)