I’ve been amateurishly interested in infectious diseases for a long time and have taken every opportunity to incorporate that interest into my professional life as a teacher - classes about medical history are usually rather a big hit (eww, gross!). Pretty soon, I decided to give cholera the award as the most interesting pandemic-causing disease, because it has had such a fascinating impact on the way we live and is so closely linked with the progress, or lack thereof, of modern history. It hit the world at a time when medical science was just beginning to spread its wings, causing a large number of doctors and scientists to get into public rows about what caused it and how best to treat it.
The microbe behind the swift killer cholera is a strain of plucky little Vibrio cholerae, a bacterium that usually coexists peacefully with tiny copepods in the Sundarbans of Bengal. Sonia Shah, in her excellent book Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond (2020) writes about the microbe’s home:
“This was a netherworld of land and sea long hostile to human penetration. Every day, the Bay of Bengal’s salty tides rushed over the Sundarbans’ low-lying mangrove forests and mudflats, pushing seawater as far as five hundred miles inland, creating temporary islands of high ground, called chars, that daily rose and vanished with the tides. Cyclones, poisonous snakes, crocodiles, Javan rhinoceros, wild buffalo, and even Bengal tigers stalked the swamps. The Mughal emperors who ruled the Indian subcontinent up until the seventeenth century prudently left the Sundarbans alone. Nineteenth-century commentators called it “a sort of drowned land, covered with jungle, smitten by malaria, and infested by wild beasts,” and possessed of an “evil fertility.” “ (p.18)
As long as Vibrio cholerae simply cleaned up the excess chitin left behind by the copepods, it was an innocuous enough little microbe, but then a certain turn of events offered it the chance to become a powerful zoonotic disease because of population pressure. And guess whose fault that was?
“But then, in the 1760s, the East India Company took over Bengal and with it the Sundarbans. English settlers, tiger hunters, and colonists streamed into the wetlands. They recruited thousands of locals to chop down the mangroves, build embankments, and plant rice. Within fifty years, nearly eight hundred square miles of Sundarbans forests had been razed. Over the course of the 1800s, human habitations would sprawl over 90 percent of the once untouched, impenetrable, and copepod-rich Sundarbans.” (p. 19)
Stay away from remote animal habitats, humans! It’s a terrible idea to encroach upon them! By offering to be a new host, you’ll give microbes ideas about evolving into something sinister! Plucky little cholera (I really respect its enterprising nature!) acquired a filament to its tail which allowed it to form large colonies, the better to colonize a human gut with. Even worse, it began to produce a toxin that would upset the human gut spectacularly - reversing the normal function of this organ to leach the body of all fluids, so that victims of a cholera infection would shed copious amounts of highly infectious rice-water diarrhoea and effectively dry up, wither and die within hours.
In the early 1800s, thanks in part to the British Empire, people had become much more mobile than before, and therefore plucky little cholera was able to hitch a ride to almost every corner of the earth within a few decades, causing the first pandemic in Bengal in 1817 and reaching Paris in 1832, where it caused a mad frenzy of cholera parties - immortalized via newspaper reports in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death.
In a way, it was the Sundarbans’ revenge for the brutal exploitation of Bengal and the rest of the Indian subcontinent. Except that these things are never intentional, just very predictable.
There’s much more! If anyone wants to hear about the extremely irrational behaviours the various cholera pandemics caused, the frenzied quest to find out what caused it (with a Soho doctor in a starring role as the Sherlock Holmes of cholera research) or the impact it had on cities like London, New York or my own Munich, you need only ask. I’m perfectly capable of tediously droning on for many more pages on the microbe of microbes - plucky little cholera!
Brilliant. Thank you so much! I knew something of John Snow and the Broad St pump, but nothing at all about the science of the destruction of the Sandarbans, and your account alone is worth coming here! (As it happens, there are many rewards for reading these notes, but I am, as you see, especially excited about yours.) Cometh the hour, cometh the microbe.
Thanks, Sabine!!! I didn’t know any of this and find it very interesting! I am now fascinated in learning more! How wonderful you get to teach about this! I’m a nurse and I once traveled to Mexico with a Rotary Club member delivering a water purifier to an orphanage hit by typhoid. Do you recommend the book you mentioned? It sickens me that the humans came into that swamp area and destroyed it. All that animal habitat destroyed. Ugh!!!!
Yes, I‘d definitely recommend that book, it’s an easy read and gives a great overview over how pandemics come about and how humans behave in them. I read it at the beginning of the Covid pandemic and it prepared me well for some of the more irrational ways in which people reacted.
I worked full time as a nurse in the San Francisco Bay Area- my hospital was slammed with the first COVID positive American tourist coming back from their cruise ships in China. What a wild experience it was! We all got sick! I can’t wait to read the book!
Random thought that occurred to me - These chapters sum up why I prefer books to films. There is no way I could watch a film of all the death & suffering (I’m far too squeamish for all that blood) and if I did I wouldn’t be able to see the humour of the padre or the grape ‘eyeball’ but reading I can feel both the horror and the humour. Fascinating and I loved the tangents - especially the grapes in Afghanistan- strangely I found that the most fascinating of all.
Yes, I see something like Kabul grapes and follow it, and sometimes it leads nowhere, but most of the time I find something totally unexpected and new to me. This is one of the great attractions of a slow read!
I agree: this would be very hard to show on screen. Farrell somehow captures the un-real quality of the violence, as though their brains can't take in what they are seeing. So the horror seems muffled, like you can't look at it directly.
Some of these scenes almost have a Monty Phyton feel to them, when the Padre appears out of nowhere beside Fleury after the bloody fight Fleury has just been through: ‘Think how apt fins are to water.' I had to laugh
I'm glad to know I am in good company with you and Simon, Andrea, in finding much of these battle scenes grotesquely comical. "'Almost everybody appears to be dead', shouted Fleuey in a *discouraged* tone." "Discouraged", what a masterpiece of understatement!!
This section was brilliant for that bizarre kind of juxtaposition, wasn't it? I'm thinking particularly of the completely insane scene where the doctor's sounding off on wound treatment and the injured soldier is singing ballads about 1854...
'Fleury was confronted, as he toiled clumsily with the sponging rod in the dust and smoke, with a simple fact about human nature which he had never considered before: nobody is superior to anyone else, he only may be better at doing a specific thing.' I loved these lines, I hope Fleury will remember it for the rest of his life.
We are at the point at which some are beginning to show some signs of 'desintegrating', to falling a bit apart like the Padre and Dr. Dunstaple, concentrating with all they have on something, one thing (the other doctor, convincing Fleury) blown out of proportion. It will be interesting how all the different characters will deal with the bloody chaos, the fighting around them.
Fleury's woolgathering was a way of coming to terms with what is happening, distancing himself, fleeing in fantasies, in a way this is helping his mind to come to terms somehow, to endure.
I wonder whether if Fleury was alive today would he be a social media influencer? His mind wandering off to imagine how he would be portrayed in The London Illustrated News. He’d not be able to resist being on Instagram.
I’ve also been reading W & P and Harry and Fleury’s excitement at fighting (before the reality) reminds me of the Russians facing Bonaparte.
I wonder how often throughout history, men have been excited because otherwise, they'd be afraid. I've got a horrible feeling Fleury would be on TikTok.
That’s a good point, excitement to mask fear. Possibly also some ignorance with a “they’re natives, how good can they really be at fighting” attitude? There’s some indication in the belief that without their British officers they’ll be hopeless.This of course could be hope over reality. We shall see!
These tangents have already been so educational! My long-deceased great-aunt used to have this saying that was something like, “You have to learn something new everyday, and once you’ve done that, your work is done and you can go to bed.” If that were only true, I could’ve gone back to bed this morning after my coffee! 😂
(((The last Nawab of Awadh was a major patron of the arts and an enthusiast for Hindu culture. He modelled himself on Lord Krishna.)))
-- There is a tradition of syncretic Indian culture beyond the many stated divisions of religion. This reminds me of the actor Ben Kingsley whose mother was English and father was Indian Muslim. Ben Kingsley is his stage name, his birth name is Krishna Bhanji. His father was an Ismaili Gujarati Muslim who admired the Hindu god Krishna and named his son after him
I enjoyed the Collector thinking and talking about being a superior civilisation this week, and how women are naturally lesser than men and all that... whereas in reality I suspect Louise or Miriam would have done a significantly better job of helping Harry than the Padre or Fleury. Makes me think of, I believe around the same time period, British women sailors who fought in the Napoleonic Wars being refused medals for it... on the grounds that there were supposedly too many of them to give medals to! You wouldn't know if from the way the Collector talks about them, though I suppose there's a class barrier as well.
That Afghan grape preservation method is oddly fascinating. Thank you for sharing!
The Sam Goodman essay is really fascinating Simon.
I was struck by the suggestion that perhaps Krishnapur as a novel is not just about the history of British India but about Britain in the 1970s -- "the other key theme of many historical novels of the 1970s was that of unrest–a direct response to the political turmoil of the decade"
and
"Bart Moore-Gilbert’s analysis of 1970s fiction in which he argues that British fiction of the era gives ‘the impression of a society on the verge of social disintegration, or civil war’ seems particularly applicable to Farrell whose novels of the period all feature episodes of violent unrest and upheaval"
Back then, Britain was in a kind of civil conflict because of the actual Troubles in Northern Ireland and the IRA campaigns on the mainland, so this is quite understandable.
What struck me is how some might say these same anxieties are present today in Britain.
Yes, that is really interesting. TSOK may have been read differently 20 or 30 years ago, in the Cool Britannia era, but now feels more relevant in the post-Brexit age and the rise again of white nationalism.
I hadn’t thought about themes like this, but it’s ripe ground (can ground be ripe?). One of the huge events of the 1970s was the emergence on the world scene of OPEC, founded over a decade earlier, but suddenly powerful: the producers of oil put up their prices, with devastating effect. I vividly remember a Conservative MP on something like Panorama (a BBC current affairs programme) spluttering “They can’t do this! They’re client states!” That’s what many of the characters are doing here in TSoK: “They can’t do this! They’re an inferior civilization!”
(((Inside, women have invaded the billiard room)))
- This reminds me that one of the products of British India is the game of snooker. There was a lovely TV programme where Dennis Taylor travelled to the hill station in Ooty to play on the actual table where it was first invented and codified. Perhaps the long languorous nature of the game was a product of wanting to have time away from the ladies of the hill station
After the guilty laughing alternating with “ you have to be kidding me!” thoughts I decided to select a few memorable statements from these chapters.
The Collector’s prayer: “Please God, if I’m to die, may I be killed outright and not have to lie in this infernal place.”
Fleury’s thoughts: “It’s wrong to talk of a superior civilization because there isn’t such a thing” and “Fleury was confronted …with a simple fact about human nature which he had never considered before: nobody is superior to anyone else, he only may be better at doing a specific thing.”
Wow! While I still have absolutely no sense of place and don’t understand how the Residency, the Banqueting hall and the tiger shed/hospital fit in with the river and the town, that attack was a brilliant and evocative action scene, with the increasingly mad Padre railing away at the wonders of bees’ probosces (we’re just two years away from On the Origin of Species, aoomething is in the air) while a surprisingly useful Harry and an accidentally victorious Fleury attempt to man the cannon. Fantastic stuff.
If anyone’s interested, I could be terrifically tangential on cholera, a disease I have long held in great respect and know more than the average mother of a medical student about…
Yes, I stuck that map in this week's post with you in mind. Probably didn't help - I've never been too fussed with getting the geography of a story straight in my mind, so it is always interesting to see what other people get snagged by.
Oh, and do provide Cholera footnotes for everyone. I didn't know where to start on that one this week...
I could tell you the exact layout of Bald Hills, as my mind constructed it because I need fictional places to have geographical verisimilitude. Farrell’s descriptions are so lively, but completely untethered from the points of the compass…
I’ll be happy to provide some cholera content - ewww! - tomorrow, must go to bed now.
Same here with Bald Hills! And same with the Residency, I guess. I just don't need the author to tell me, my mind does the creative work and creates the spaces in which it walks.
Ha, don't use the c work here. Content. But more cholera is welcome....!
LOL, Simon... here's a story/tangent for you & Sabine! I worked in corporate/employee communications, on the staff newsmagazine (for an international/Canadian-based bank of about 50,000 employees, at the time). Headline/title writing was NOT my forte, and I sometimes resorted to alliteration for something catchy-sounding.
Branches from across Canada and around the world would submit little news items about what the bank was doing in their particular community -- and the branch from a town called Summerside submitted an item about how their branch was chosen the community's best/favourite bank, along with a photo of the branch manager and two assistant managers. I wrote up the item and a headline that read "The sweethearts of Summerside."
A few months later, I found out from an executive in charge of that area (whom I knew personally) that that little item had created quite a kerfuffle: apparently two of the employees in the photo (male & female) had been having an affair!! It became known publicly in the office and in the community, and the scandal had JUST died down -- and then the newsmagazine landed on their desks with their photo and THAT headline!! Everyone was abuzz: "What did you tell them?? Did you say anything?? I didn't say anything!"
Oh my gosh, I was horrified!! (And couldn't stop laughing at the same time!!) This was probably 30 years ago now, and I still tell people that story!
Needless to say, that kind of killed my enthusiasm for using alliteration, especially in headlines!
Sabine, I am very interested in anything you can contribute about cholera! I found the supplemental articles Simon posted fascinating. Especially the detailed medical research Farrell undertook to contrast the opposing views on cholera with the Empire vs native Indian message throughout this story.
I found Sam Goodman’s essay really interesting. One passage that particularly struck me was: “By making his colonial Victorians ridiculous, Farrell strives not just to lampoon them and their views but also to make his contemporary audience consider how their own actions and judgments may one day too be assessed.” Considering that our U.S. politicians just confirmed a completely unqualified quack to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, I wonder just how much damage he’ll be able to do before we too are made to look ridiculous. Also, the article on mustard comes from the Lloyd Library here in Cincinnati, Ohio. I’ve long intended to visit it and now I’ll try harder to get there!
Thanks, Simon, for including the Sam Goodman article on colonial medicine and Imperialism. Wow! What an incredible supplement to show how Farrell utilized the many source materials of the 1800’s to craft his story. Actual diaries in which some of his characters and their antics are based as well as medical journals for accurate details of common medical opinions and remedies. I’m always curious about how an author is inspired to write what they write and the research they do to supplement their story, especially historical fiction. I’ve now been inspired to read his other works knowing how much research he does to authenticate the details.
Wow, there’s so much in this book. This week I felt for Harry. That feeling of being the only sane head… and giving cannon lessons on the fly. I was also fascinated by Harry‘s tutorial about how to judge distance by sight. I’m assuming it’s accurate but does anybody know?
Also, this may be a red herring (no spoilers!) but I did notice a lot of flies and/or dust settling on certain characters in this section and can’t help wondering if it’s a foreshadowing of their fate. But maybe not!
Oh and I spluttered over Harry and Fleury, talking about ‘fallen’ Lucy over the “silken brass skin of their cannon”. Oh boys… 😆
I had to have a rest after ch 12 and am saving ch 13 for today. What an amazing chapter, with all that action, astonishing rising tension, the impossibility of being saved in general but then, a miracle, and Fleury being saved in the specific by Harry in a scene that surely has been shown in every Indiana Jones movie. Boys' own adventure indeed!
Spine pads were worn to alleviate harmful effects of the sun on the spine. I would have thought that the extra insulation from the quilted pad would Increase the temperature of the spine, not cool it.
You asked for it! So here’s:
Cholera: the Origin Story
I’ve been amateurishly interested in infectious diseases for a long time and have taken every opportunity to incorporate that interest into my professional life as a teacher - classes about medical history are usually rather a big hit (eww, gross!). Pretty soon, I decided to give cholera the award as the most interesting pandemic-causing disease, because it has had such a fascinating impact on the way we live and is so closely linked with the progress, or lack thereof, of modern history. It hit the world at a time when medical science was just beginning to spread its wings, causing a large number of doctors and scientists to get into public rows about what caused it and how best to treat it.
The microbe behind the swift killer cholera is a strain of plucky little Vibrio cholerae, a bacterium that usually coexists peacefully with tiny copepods in the Sundarbans of Bengal. Sonia Shah, in her excellent book Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond (2020) writes about the microbe’s home:
“This was a netherworld of land and sea long hostile to human penetration. Every day, the Bay of Bengal’s salty tides rushed over the Sundarbans’ low-lying mangrove forests and mudflats, pushing seawater as far as five hundred miles inland, creating temporary islands of high ground, called chars, that daily rose and vanished with the tides. Cyclones, poisonous snakes, crocodiles, Javan rhinoceros, wild buffalo, and even Bengal tigers stalked the swamps. The Mughal emperors who ruled the Indian subcontinent up until the seventeenth century prudently left the Sundarbans alone. Nineteenth-century commentators called it “a sort of drowned land, covered with jungle, smitten by malaria, and infested by wild beasts,” and possessed of an “evil fertility.” “ (p.18)
As long as Vibrio cholerae simply cleaned up the excess chitin left behind by the copepods, it was an innocuous enough little microbe, but then a certain turn of events offered it the chance to become a powerful zoonotic disease because of population pressure. And guess whose fault that was?
“But then, in the 1760s, the East India Company took over Bengal and with it the Sundarbans. English settlers, tiger hunters, and colonists streamed into the wetlands. They recruited thousands of locals to chop down the mangroves, build embankments, and plant rice. Within fifty years, nearly eight hundred square miles of Sundarbans forests had been razed. Over the course of the 1800s, human habitations would sprawl over 90 percent of the once untouched, impenetrable, and copepod-rich Sundarbans.” (p. 19)
Stay away from remote animal habitats, humans! It’s a terrible idea to encroach upon them! By offering to be a new host, you’ll give microbes ideas about evolving into something sinister! Plucky little cholera (I really respect its enterprising nature!) acquired a filament to its tail which allowed it to form large colonies, the better to colonize a human gut with. Even worse, it began to produce a toxin that would upset the human gut spectacularly - reversing the normal function of this organ to leach the body of all fluids, so that victims of a cholera infection would shed copious amounts of highly infectious rice-water diarrhoea and effectively dry up, wither and die within hours.
In the early 1800s, thanks in part to the British Empire, people had become much more mobile than before, and therefore plucky little cholera was able to hitch a ride to almost every corner of the earth within a few decades, causing the first pandemic in Bengal in 1817 and reaching Paris in 1832, where it caused a mad frenzy of cholera parties - immortalized via newspaper reports in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death.
In a way, it was the Sundarbans’ revenge for the brutal exploitation of Bengal and the rest of the Indian subcontinent. Except that these things are never intentional, just very predictable.
There’s much more! If anyone wants to hear about the extremely irrational behaviours the various cholera pandemics caused, the frenzied quest to find out what caused it (with a Soho doctor in a starring role as the Sherlock Holmes of cholera research) or the impact it had on cities like London, New York or my own Munich, you need only ask. I’m perfectly capable of tediously droning on for many more pages on the microbe of microbes - plucky little cholera!
Brilliant. Thank you so much! I knew something of John Snow and the Broad St pump, but nothing at all about the science of the destruction of the Sandarbans, and your account alone is worth coming here! (As it happens, there are many rewards for reading these notes, but I am, as you see, especially excited about yours.) Cometh the hour, cometh the microbe.
Thanks, Sabine!!! I didn’t know any of this and find it very interesting! I am now fascinated in learning more! How wonderful you get to teach about this! I’m a nurse and I once traveled to Mexico with a Rotary Club member delivering a water purifier to an orphanage hit by typhoid. Do you recommend the book you mentioned? It sickens me that the humans came into that swamp area and destroyed it. All that animal habitat destroyed. Ugh!!!!
My library has the Sonia Shaw book so I just placed it on hold! Thanks for your post!!!
Yes, I‘d definitely recommend that book, it’s an easy read and gives a great overview over how pandemics come about and how humans behave in them. I read it at the beginning of the Covid pandemic and it prepared me well for some of the more irrational ways in which people reacted.
I worked full time as a nurse in the San Francisco Bay Area- my hospital was slammed with the first COVID positive American tourist coming back from their cruise ships in China. What a wild experience it was! We all got sick! I can’t wait to read the book!
Random thought that occurred to me - These chapters sum up why I prefer books to films. There is no way I could watch a film of all the death & suffering (I’m far too squeamish for all that blood) and if I did I wouldn’t be able to see the humour of the padre or the grape ‘eyeball’ but reading I can feel both the horror and the humour. Fascinating and I loved the tangents - especially the grapes in Afghanistan- strangely I found that the most fascinating of all.
Yes, I see something like Kabul grapes and follow it, and sometimes it leads nowhere, but most of the time I find something totally unexpected and new to me. This is one of the great attractions of a slow read!
I agree: this would be very hard to show on screen. Farrell somehow captures the un-real quality of the violence, as though their brains can't take in what they are seeing. So the horror seems muffled, like you can't look at it directly.
💯 with you on this, Hilary.
Some of these scenes almost have a Monty Phyton feel to them, when the Padre appears out of nowhere beside Fleury after the bloody fight Fleury has just been through: ‘Think how apt fins are to water.' I had to laugh
I've thought of Monty Python a lot while reading this!
It's often so absurd, but in a good way of telling the story, don't know how to explain
I'm glad to know I am in good company with you and Simon, Andrea, in finding much of these battle scenes grotesquely comical. "'Almost everybody appears to be dead', shouted Fleuey in a *discouraged* tone." "Discouraged", what a masterpiece of understatement!!
This section was brilliant for that bizarre kind of juxtaposition, wasn't it? I'm thinking particularly of the completely insane scene where the doctor's sounding off on wound treatment and the injured soldier is singing ballads about 1854...
Yes, that was another brilliant scene!
I have to admit I laughed out aloud at the thought of treading on an eyeball only to realise it was a grape.
I was thinking along similar lines--thought this could be a Wes Anderson movie.
'Fleury was confronted, as he toiled clumsily with the sponging rod in the dust and smoke, with a simple fact about human nature which he had never considered before: nobody is superior to anyone else, he only may be better at doing a specific thing.' I loved these lines, I hope Fleury will remember it for the rest of his life.
We are at the point at which some are beginning to show some signs of 'desintegrating', to falling a bit apart like the Padre and Dr. Dunstaple, concentrating with all they have on something, one thing (the other doctor, convincing Fleury) blown out of proportion. It will be interesting how all the different characters will deal with the bloody chaos, the fighting around them.
Fleury's woolgathering was a way of coming to terms with what is happening, distancing himself, fleeing in fantasies, in a way this is helping his mind to come to terms somehow, to endure.
I wonder whether if Fleury was alive today would he be a social media influencer? His mind wandering off to imagine how he would be portrayed in The London Illustrated News. He’d not be able to resist being on Instagram.
I’ve also been reading W & P and Harry and Fleury’s excitement at fighting (before the reality) reminds me of the Russians facing Bonaparte.
I wonder how often throughout history, men have been excited because otherwise, they'd be afraid. I've got a horrible feeling Fleury would be on TikTok.
That’s a good point, excitement to mask fear. Possibly also some ignorance with a “they’re natives, how good can they really be at fighting” attitude? There’s some indication in the belief that without their British officers they’ll be hopeless.This of course could be hope over reality. We shall see!
These tangents have already been so educational! My long-deceased great-aunt used to have this saying that was something like, “You have to learn something new everyday, and once you’ve done that, your work is done and you can go to bed.” If that were only true, I could’ve gone back to bed this morning after my coffee! 😂
(((The last Nawab of Awadh was a major patron of the arts and an enthusiast for Hindu culture. He modelled himself on Lord Krishna.)))
-- There is a tradition of syncretic Indian culture beyond the many stated divisions of religion. This reminds me of the actor Ben Kingsley whose mother was English and father was Indian Muslim. Ben Kingsley is his stage name, his birth name is Krishna Bhanji. His father was an Ismaili Gujarati Muslim who admired the Hindu god Krishna and named his son after him
Nice little tangent!
I enjoyed the Collector thinking and talking about being a superior civilisation this week, and how women are naturally lesser than men and all that... whereas in reality I suspect Louise or Miriam would have done a significantly better job of helping Harry than the Padre or Fleury. Makes me think of, I believe around the same time period, British women sailors who fought in the Napoleonic Wars being refused medals for it... on the grounds that there were supposedly too many of them to give medals to! You wouldn't know if from the way the Collector talks about them, though I suppose there's a class barrier as well.
That Afghan grape preservation method is oddly fascinating. Thank you for sharing!
The Sam Goodman essay is really fascinating Simon.
I was struck by the suggestion that perhaps Krishnapur as a novel is not just about the history of British India but about Britain in the 1970s -- "the other key theme of many historical novels of the 1970s was that of unrest–a direct response to the political turmoil of the decade"
and
"Bart Moore-Gilbert’s analysis of 1970s fiction in which he argues that British fiction of the era gives ‘the impression of a society on the verge of social disintegration, or civil war’ seems particularly applicable to Farrell whose novels of the period all feature episodes of violent unrest and upheaval"
Back then, Britain was in a kind of civil conflict because of the actual Troubles in Northern Ireland and the IRA campaigns on the mainland, so this is quite understandable.
What struck me is how some might say these same anxieties are present today in Britain.
Yes, that is really interesting. TSOK may have been read differently 20 or 30 years ago, in the Cool Britannia era, but now feels more relevant in the post-Brexit age and the rise again of white nationalism.
I hadn’t thought about themes like this, but it’s ripe ground (can ground be ripe?). One of the huge events of the 1970s was the emergence on the world scene of OPEC, founded over a decade earlier, but suddenly powerful: the producers of oil put up their prices, with devastating effect. I vividly remember a Conservative MP on something like Panorama (a BBC current affairs programme) spluttering “They can’t do this! They’re client states!” That’s what many of the characters are doing here in TSoK: “They can’t do this! They’re an inferior civilization!”
(((Inside, women have invaded the billiard room)))
- This reminds me that one of the products of British India is the game of snooker. There was a lovely TV programme where Dennis Taylor travelled to the hill station in Ooty to play on the actual table where it was first invented and codified. Perhaps the long languorous nature of the game was a product of wanting to have time away from the ladies of the hill station
After the guilty laughing alternating with “ you have to be kidding me!” thoughts I decided to select a few memorable statements from these chapters.
The Collector’s prayer: “Please God, if I’m to die, may I be killed outright and not have to lie in this infernal place.”
Fleury’s thoughts: “It’s wrong to talk of a superior civilization because there isn’t such a thing” and “Fleury was confronted …with a simple fact about human nature which he had never considered before: nobody is superior to anyone else, he only may be better at doing a specific thing.”
Wow! While I still have absolutely no sense of place and don’t understand how the Residency, the Banqueting hall and the tiger shed/hospital fit in with the river and the town, that attack was a brilliant and evocative action scene, with the increasingly mad Padre railing away at the wonders of bees’ probosces (we’re just two years away from On the Origin of Species, aoomething is in the air) while a surprisingly useful Harry and an accidentally victorious Fleury attempt to man the cannon. Fantastic stuff.
If anyone’s interested, I could be terrifically tangential on cholera, a disease I have long held in great respect and know more than the average mother of a medical student about…
Yes, I stuck that map in this week's post with you in mind. Probably didn't help - I've never been too fussed with getting the geography of a story straight in my mind, so it is always interesting to see what other people get snagged by.
Oh, and do provide Cholera footnotes for everyone. I didn't know where to start on that one this week...
I could tell you the exact layout of Bald Hills, as my mind constructed it because I need fictional places to have geographical verisimilitude. Farrell’s descriptions are so lively, but completely untethered from the points of the compass…
I’ll be happy to provide some cholera content - ewww! - tomorrow, must go to bed now.
Same here with Bald Hills! And same with the Residency, I guess. I just don't need the author to tell me, my mind does the creative work and creates the spaces in which it walks.
Ha, don't use the c work here. Content. But more cholera is welcome....!
There was that alliteration, though - I was too weak to resist its lure.
If in doubt, alliterate.
LOL, Simon... here's a story/tangent for you & Sabine! I worked in corporate/employee communications, on the staff newsmagazine (for an international/Canadian-based bank of about 50,000 employees, at the time). Headline/title writing was NOT my forte, and I sometimes resorted to alliteration for something catchy-sounding.
Branches from across Canada and around the world would submit little news items about what the bank was doing in their particular community -- and the branch from a town called Summerside submitted an item about how their branch was chosen the community's best/favourite bank, along with a photo of the branch manager and two assistant managers. I wrote up the item and a headline that read "The sweethearts of Summerside."
A few months later, I found out from an executive in charge of that area (whom I knew personally) that that little item had created quite a kerfuffle: apparently two of the employees in the photo (male & female) had been having an affair!! It became known publicly in the office and in the community, and the scandal had JUST died down -- and then the newsmagazine landed on their desks with their photo and THAT headline!! Everyone was abuzz: "What did you tell them?? Did you say anything?? I didn't say anything!"
Oh my gosh, I was horrified!! (And couldn't stop laughing at the same time!!) This was probably 30 years ago now, and I still tell people that story!
Needless to say, that kind of killed my enthusiasm for using alliteration, especially in headlines!
Sabine, I am very interested in anything you can contribute about cholera! I found the supplemental articles Simon posted fascinating. Especially the detailed medical research Farrell undertook to contrast the opposing views on cholera with the Empire vs native Indian message throughout this story.
I found Sam Goodman’s essay really interesting. One passage that particularly struck me was: “By making his colonial Victorians ridiculous, Farrell strives not just to lampoon them and their views but also to make his contemporary audience consider how their own actions and judgments may one day too be assessed.” Considering that our U.S. politicians just confirmed a completely unqualified quack to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, I wonder just how much damage he’ll be able to do before we too are made to look ridiculous. Also, the article on mustard comes from the Lloyd Library here in Cincinnati, Ohio. I’ve long intended to visit it and now I’ll try harder to get there!
Thanks, Simon, for including the Sam Goodman article on colonial medicine and Imperialism. Wow! What an incredible supplement to show how Farrell utilized the many source materials of the 1800’s to craft his story. Actual diaries in which some of his characters and their antics are based as well as medical journals for accurate details of common medical opinions and remedies. I’m always curious about how an author is inspired to write what they write and the research they do to supplement their story, especially historical fiction. I’ve now been inspired to read his other works knowing how much research he does to authenticate the details.
Wow, there’s so much in this book. This week I felt for Harry. That feeling of being the only sane head… and giving cannon lessons on the fly. I was also fascinated by Harry‘s tutorial about how to judge distance by sight. I’m assuming it’s accurate but does anybody know?
Also, this may be a red herring (no spoilers!) but I did notice a lot of flies and/or dust settling on certain characters in this section and can’t help wondering if it’s a foreshadowing of their fate. But maybe not!
Oh and I spluttered over Harry and Fleury, talking about ‘fallen’ Lucy over the “silken brass skin of their cannon”. Oh boys… 😆
I had to have a rest after ch 12 and am saving ch 13 for today. What an amazing chapter, with all that action, astonishing rising tension, the impossibility of being saved in general but then, a miracle, and Fleury being saved in the specific by Harry in a scene that surely has been shown in every Indiana Jones movie. Boys' own adventure indeed!
Some domestic details:
Charpoy was a rope bed. I found many pictures of these “vintage” beds, some at high prices. In the day they were probably quite cheap.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charpai
Spine pads were worn to alleviate harmful effects of the sun on the spine. I would have thought that the extra insulation from the quilted pad would Increase the temperature of the spine, not cool it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spine_pad
Thanks, Kristin!