The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

I came to this novel with somewhat of a handicap, namely the vague memory of having read that Christie did something remarkable and startling with the set-up of this, her first (so I had thought) published mystery. So I was on the alert for a twist, for the orchestration of a twist, beginning perhaps rather early in the story. You might say I had read the spoiler.


And as I got about halfway through, my memory jelled, I remembered the brilliant twist, and I could spot the murderer. Nevertheless Christie's work was very adroitly done. And what did surprise me was the appearance in this novel of her famed detective Hercule Poirot. If I knew about his arrival, I had forgotten it. He is introduced as already retired and famous, and only persuaded out of his garden by the propinquity of the murdered body in question, and the pleadings of a pretty girl in love.


Some people adore Hercule Poirot. I find him uninspiring. He is not nearly as simply delightful as Miss Marple, though he is a sight better than the utterly annoying Tommy and Tuppence, who do nothing but talk excitedly at each other, for chapter after chapter, about the mystery they are solving. Poirot's magician-like abilities render him more adding machine than even putatively human character. He lurks about as it were off-stage, seeming to come on only occasionally to make revelations in a silly, sing-song, French-flavored English which is meant to be adorable but rings hollow considering that Christie herself claimed in her biography to have been trained to French fluency in girlhood. Surely, bilingual herself, she would have no reason to depict another bilingual person as carrying on like a dance-hall comic.


Anyway. We will leave Poirot alone. What is wonderfully entertaining about The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the setting, so cozy and familiar through a hundred (mostly British) television series and movies that we forget it was probably Christie, in her books, who largely invented it. The little English town. The fine house of the local rich family. Terse, grim parlormaids in sensible shoes. The giddy daughter of the family, engaged to an unsuitable young man. The secretary or companion, unaccountably interested in poisons. English mists wafting over damp English gardens; prying spinster ladies; surreptitious meetings in the summerhouse, at nine-forty-five under a full moon -- but there was no moon. The butler distinctly said he had closed the window because it looked so like rain.


Agatha Christie must have enjoyed life tremendously, writing these delightful stories. If memory serves, she said she set about writing Roger Ackroyd after having read some other author's mystery, and being so disappointed in it that she told herself in amazement and some disgust that she could do better than that. And so she did, I am sure. I don't think I would be equal to all the weavings, thinkings, and tweakings she had to do to make the case come out right -- to get the murder done, the suspects in place, the clues both revealed and disguised, and all motivations, backgrounds, and timeframes made plausible and correct. This is not to speak of all of the foregoing being presented as a puzzle to the detective, who has to plausibly see what others do not see, but not so fast and so perfectly that the reader sees, too, and thus has nothing to chew on. When I realized that Christie had to actually figure out a way to make the murderer show an avuncular concern for a framed suspect's shoes, and more than one pair, well then -- I took off my figurative hat to her (no doubt a smart 1920s cloche).

I am not one of these people who sits down with a mystery with pencil and paper in hand, to try to solve it as I read. I simply meander along, enjoying the tale and the atmosphere as a bystander. What it means is that I can then re-read Christie later, because I've forgotten whodunit. Genuine mystery fans seem to be far more serious. Old reviews of Roger Ackroyd quoted in Wikipedia attest that, in 1926, professionals complained about it. Too many superfluous clues. A disappearance that did not matter (what! surely it did). The reader "sold up" by the ending. Her "most controversial" book, and to some "her masterpiece."

Goodness! Such passions. I hope in her long life she found time to plot a murder mystery at a mystery writers' awards banquet, or a conference of some kind. If she did, and I've already read it, I've forgotten it. Just think what I have to look forward to.

Agrippa's Daughter by Howard Fast

In order to begin to understand this story, it helps to have seen the television drama I, Claudius. That way, you can picture the actor who played Claudius' lifelong friend, the Jewish prince Herod Agrippa, and so you can at least place the heroine of this novel, Berenice, into a family, as Herod Agrippa's daughter.

The setting of this historical romance is therefore already unusual, as historical romances go. Not many take place in antiquity, and still fewer put Jewish characters, and the land of Israel, front and center. The climax of the novel deals with one of the most hideous events of the classical period or indeed Western history, the siege and destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans concluding in the year 70 A.D. (or C.E. if you prefer -- although I've always felt the use of B.C.E. and C.E. is a bit of an intellectual conceit. Granted not everyone wants to say Anno Domini, but what's "common" about the Common Era?).

Throughout this siege, as many as a million Jews were crammed into Jerusalem's few square miles, tragically fighting and murdering each other, starving, and still maintaining the ritual animal sacrifies twice a day inside the Temple, "while the most powerful legions in the world pounded at the gates" (this is not from the novel but from Abraham Leon Sachar's A History of the Jews). Tens of thousands died, thousands of survivors were sold into slavery. This was after the rest of the country, chafing under obnoxious foreign rule, had been subdued and more tens of thousands killed there. The Romans required a 50,000-man army and four years to do the job. The Jewish historian Josephus, who was on the spot in a most interesting way for part of this war, chronicled nightmarish stories of starving women, in Jerusalem's last days, eating their newborns.

(Is it any wonder that not many historical romances "go there"?) But before the Roman general and Emperor Vespasian's son, Titus, razes the ancient city and its Second Temple, we meet and follow the career of the beautiful, red-haired, green-eyed Berenice. She was a real historical figure, a client queen of Judea, or Chalcis, or Cilicia, or Alexandria, depending on whom she married, what liberties Howard Fast has taken with his tale, and depending on how one defines "queen" in an era when the whole Mediterranean world was a confused maelstrom of peoples, religions, and powers all being mixed up and sorted out by Rome. Fast has actually pumped even more complexity into Berenice's story. She was known, it seems, mostly for her scandalous love life -- ancient men writers chronicled her marriages and mentioned incest with her brother, also named Agrippa -- but Fast shunts the brother somewhat aside to give her instead a deep theological soul, and to thrust her into the company of all the political and theological parties blossoming in, or burdening, Jewish life at that time.

In a pit of existential despair after a number of sad adventures, she meets and marries a physician who is the head of the Sanhedrin and of the House of Hillel, a sort of family-run Bible study/farm/consciousness-raising school which would eventually emerge from the ruins of Israel with a moral survival plan for a people who, as of the year 70, would apparently have no more country, religion, God, or reason to exist. Life with Shimeon exposes her to the poor, ill, and enslaved, and to arguments with Shimeon's opposite numbers, spokesmen for real-life Jewish sects like the Zealots, the Sicarii, the House of Shammai (a bit like bad cops to the House of Hillel's good cops) and to the official Temple priesthood, the Sadduccees.

Because Berenice is always a queen, she also must deal with Roman governors and procurators, who can't decide what they want more, her beautiful self humbled before them, or the riches of the Temple filling their coffers at home in Italy. When the tragedy of the Jewish war falls upon the land of Israel and strips her husband from her, Berenice's fate is to fall in love afterward with Titus, who is responsible for the destruction. Though ten years younger than she is, he returns her passions, and this, too, appears to be a real-life incident. The queen actually went to Rome with Titus after the war, lived openly with him and might have married him except that Roman rage against the idea of an Empress from the most violent and impossible province of their world compelled him to stay his hand. He sent her away temporarily, to Gaul, in the novel; after he unexpectedly died, she disappeared from history and that is where Howard Fast also leaves her.

With apologies for the plot spoilers, -- this is no ordinary bodice ripper, obviously. A man's treatment of love, sex, and history in fiction is simply different from a woman's. No woman romance writer that I know of is capable of this insight about Biblical retribution, as early as page 37. The young Berenice is thinking:

She would come to understand that the "good" king is a thing that nature itself derides and deters -- even as it would be a derision to all the natural laws of things for water to flow uphill. Her own people, the Jews, had suffered a thousand years of kings, and if one was wicked, the most cursory reading of history turned up another more wicked. And since iniquity is always unstable and risky, justice appears to be done in the end. "Woe unto thee!" cried the prophets to their rulers, and time proved the logic of their predictions ....

The reader can't help but remember that this novel was published in 1964, only twenty years after the Shoah. It's just a historical romance, but the writer is concerned with suffering and with moral issues much beyond establishing the heroine's "spunk" or the glowering hero's development into a modern man who respects her in the morning. It may actually have a theme, which may be this:

In this, the Jews were apart from all the world -- in this defiance of all the tributes and implacabilities of fate; and possibly for this reason more than any other they were never tolerated, only hated or loved. ... The pagan lived in a world where defeat was accepted, where poverty and ignominy and slavery were accepted, where every turn and caprice of fate was accepted -- and where every opportunity for lust, conquest, thievery, or enrichment was also accepted. For this, the Jew despised him ....

Another reader dog-eared that page before I did, which makes me think it struck him, too.

Fast's writing is leisurely and lovely, especially in its descriptions of the scenery and climate of Israel. Sun-warmed stones, clear pools, shady farms, and sparkling morning air abound. He devotes himself to the character of a woman with a skill and sympathy that makes it startling and then irrelevant that he's a man. And what is pleasantly startling to the ignorant modern reader is the realization that, far from one mid-twentieth century author plucking one ancient queen from obscurity for whim's and creation's sake, in fact Berenice has been well-known to creative people for quite some time. Racine ... Corneille ... Mozart (La clemenza di Tito). There is even a constellation in the night sky called Berenice's Hair, but it seems this collection of stars honors the locks of another Berenice entirely, who lived two centuries earlier than our lady. But perhaps she could tell us almost as compelling, if not as horrible a story.

The Knight of Maison-Rouge by Alexandre Dumas; tr. by Julie Rose

"A novel of Marie Antoinette," this book is subtitled, and although she is not quite a main character, the scenes centering on the imprisoned Queen of France are the most vivid and interesting of the tale. I have tried Dumas before, and have unfortunately found, in The Three Musketeers for example, that his endless action, his swordfight-on-every-page style, is not to my taste. He seems to have had a penchant for mysterious figures skulking through the back alleys of historical romances too, pulling strings, being hugely important, and evading capture while never descending to the level of actual human beings themselves. In The Three Musketeers it's "Milady," who I think has somebody killed at a riverside toward the end; in The Knight of Maison Rouge it is the eponymous but disguised hero, who has devoted himself to rescuing Marie Antoinette from her jailers and is also the guardian of the aristocratic heroine aiding him, who falls in love herself with the young republican Revolutionary Maurice, who ought not to want to be remotely involved with rescuing queens or aristocrats, and who is the real hero of the story.



A bit confusing. As it's a French tale, of course the young beautiful heroine is already married, to the stolid and unforgiving M. Dixmer. Passionate denunciations are always coldly polite ("you shall be punished, Madame!"). Meanwhile Maurice has a trusty friend, Lorin, who is also a good revolutionary but ends up throwing in his lot with the Queen's would-be saviors, and declaims poems on the spot to make light of any occasion. Among the fictional characters of tumultuous eighteenth century Paris there is the dreadful real life jailer, Simon, who coached Marie Antoinette's son to sing hideous songs about her after they had been separated; there is the real-life executioner, Sanson, who operated the guillotine so efficiently; and there are a number of real life prosecutors, politicians, and chiefs of police, whom -- it is faintly chilling to realize -- did have and did use real power to overturn all social order and imprison and kill those who disagreed with them.


The translation jars a little. Did Dumas, in the 1840s, really use expressions which can be faithfully translated as "flew the coop" or "pronto"? They contribute to an overall jerky feeling in the prose and dialogue. The book's foreward explains that Dumas wrote most of his novels as newspaper serials in collaboration with one Auguste Maquet, and that does explain a lot. The vivid, interesting scenes -- the Queen in prison, the Queen trying to meet her saviors halfway as they attempt heroic feats to break her out -- perhaps came from the hand of the master. The master, perhaps, was also capable of honest insight into the Majesty he obviously respected:


"...soon, in her dream, bars and bolts fell away; she saw herself in the middle of a great army, somber and pitiless; she ordered the flames to burn, the blades to shoot out of their sheaths; she took her revenge on a people who were not, in the end, her own."


The more labored parts ("Maison-Rouge! Oh! Miserable wretch that I am not to have killed both of them!") perhaps came from the junior partner.




It's a beautiful looking book, but in the end it makes most sense as something fun which Parisians in 1845 amused themselves with -- only half a century after the terrifying events, however! -- as they flipped through the papers and sipped their morning coffee. A compliment to their taste in ephemera, certainly. After that it must have gone to wrap fish, as the saying goes, which is no doubt what the honest Dumas expected. For me, my copy is going back to the local library's used book sale, so that someone else can pick it up for a dollar and enjoy it too.

Ride With Me by Thomas Costain

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest Indiana

Thomas Costain was a prolific Canadian journalist and editor of the mid-twentieth century who, at the age of 57, published his first historical novel, and from then on became a prolific historical novelist. You are more than likely to encounter one of his books, or an anthology edited by him, in any library or at a used book sale. The Silver Chalice and The Tontine are two of his better-known works; The Silver Chalice was made into a movie that is notable, now, mostly for having been the late Paul Newman's debut vehicle.

In 1944 Costain published Ride With Me, a book meant not only to tell a good story but to draw obvious parallels between the dictator Napoleon who threatened England in the early 1800s, and the dictator Hitler who threatened England even as Costain wrote. Though the historic parallels are now many decades out of date, Ride With Me is still a pleasure to read, and that is largely because of its background -- an unusual one for a historical romance. The hero, Frank Ellery, is not a stock, brooding figure but a lame newspaperman in London during these Napoleonic wars. He sees it as his duty to publish articles urging a slothful Regency government to take a firmer stand against "Boney" before it is too late, and French troops and guillotines are already established outside a St. Paul's cathedral transformed into an English Temple of Reason.

Criticizing the government is a dangerous thing to do circa 1810, when even freedom-loving England, aghast at the regicides across the Channel, could still shut down unfriendly, chest-thumping newspapers at home. Frank's life is further complicated by his unrequited love for a beautiful, exiled French aristocrat, and by the machinations of his awful mother, who would prefer that he disappear somewhere and let his handsome younger brother lead the family.

Frank's adventures take him to Spain for a glimpse of Wellington's Peninsular campaign, and then to Russia to see Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. We are in Paris with him after Waterloo, while the city seethes with rage at defeat and occupation. Through minor characters we meet the social problems of the period, like discharged, wounded soldiers begging in London, child labor, prison conditions, and the eternal helplessness of single, impoverished women. The book is also wonderfully rich in those little details about meals and leisure activities which show the author has spent good time in the archives, researching his material.

It's a fine book, and was well-known enough for Costain to be able to bring out, twenty years later, another anthology of fiction -- punningly titled Read With Me.

The Mutiny of the Bounty by Guy Murchie

The first thing to arrest the eye is the title: the Mutiny of the Bounty. Not Mutiny on the Bounty, as the movies made of this event are called. The difference in prepositions might seem meaningless, but the two words do create two different images in the mind. A mutiny on a ship calls up pictures of men arguing, having it out as equals in a public place. A mutiny of a ship suggests the entire thing sailing away, as if it were a creature with one mind choosing to abandon its duty and never be seen again.

Which is what happened. The Bounty sailed from England at Christmastime, 1787, and never returned. Many other of his Majesty's eighteenth-century ships were lost through battle or the hazards of the sea, but a mutiny was something different. Once their crime was bruited about, mutineers were pursued across oceans for years, brought back to court martial in London when found, and hanged if convicted. No nation -- particularly not England at the beginning of the era of the French revolutionary wars -- could afford to let its navy possibly stay intact and functional and possibly not, depending on whether or not the men on board all those expensive ships felt they were being treated well.

Any retelling of the Bounty's tale must revolve, therefore, around the character of Captain (technically Lieutenant) William Bligh, and on what he must have been or done to so outrage his crew -- some of them -- that they gave up everything to overturn his months' or, at most, few years' worth of authority over them. The best they could hope for, upon committing their hideous crime, was freedom but eternal exile from home on some island somewhere -- and not on big, lovely Tahiti, their original destination and the place where they found women. It was far too much a British port of call already. There seems to have been no possibility of their sailing to England, with him in tow, to explain themselves and live. Why not use a little more patience? What did Bligh do to make them desperate?

Judging by the diaries officers and crew kept -- Bligh judiciously edited his before publishing years later -- the unforgivable things he seems to have done involved food and drink in some way, the theft of it, accusations that they (especially Fletcher Christian, the aristocrat) had stolen from him, and threats, carried out, to reduce everyone to near-starvation rations if thefts were not made good and accusations admitted. Murchie's book, which is in large part a series of quotations from these sources, repeats for example the scene that moviegoers will remember from the old Charles Laughton and Clark Gable movie: here the men learn, even before they sail, that the captain has commandeered some cheeses meant to sustain them on the voyage and has sent them to his own house for safekeeping and, presumably, for sale later. Later they were made to eat pumpkins instead of biscuit. Grog rations were reduced to almost nil as punishment for some group offense or other. Much later, Bligh accused Christian of stealing coconuts. Floggings, though Bligh's were exceptionally bad, and the brutalities of any sea voyage seem to have been things they could tolerate. It was the quarrels over food and theft, and Bligh's feverishly obnoxious language, that were the beginning of being too much.

It's hard to imagine what must have been the misery of military service aboard a sailing ship in the days before steam power, and to imagine the knowledge it took to pilot these vessels around the planet and home again over the course of voyages lasting years. Bligh's instructions were to sail from England across the Atlantic, around the tip of South America, up to Tahiti, pick up some breadfruit trees, and then sail across the rest of the Pacific, through the East Indies, across the Indian Ocean, around the tip of southern Africa, across the Atlantic again to Jamaica, there to deposit the breadfruit trees (good food for slaves, it was hoped), "refresh your people," and then return straight across the Atlantic to England, "repairing to Spithead." No power but the power of the wind in one's sails; no technology but the knowledge of currents, stars, and the position of the sun in the sky, knowing north from east and geometry and such. Any modern person would be as helpless as a baby. Bligh found "Otaheite," though he had to go the other way around the bottom of the world to do it, the westerly winds at Cape Horn being impossible to fight. Fletcher Christian found Pitcairn Island, not by accident but because he had read of its existence and wanted to take refuge there. When Bligh and his eighteen loyal sailors were put off from the Bounty in an open boat in the middle of the Pacific in April 1789, he kept them all alive on rations of a few spoonfuls of bread and water a day, and brought them to refuge in Dutch Timor after a three-thousand-mile voyage lasting a month and a half. The loyal souls in the open boat ended up almost mutinying, too. (Years later Bligh was an object of two more mutinies, once as a commander in a British fleet and once as a colonial governor in Australia.)

Naval service was horrific, and could turn even worse at any time. But there must have been something in particular about Bligh, or perhaps about the conditions of this voyage, which led the judges at the court martial to have some mercy when the mutineers were hunted down in the South Pacific and brought back to England. After his mid-ocean, apparently spur-of-the-moment mutiny, Fletcher Christian had taken the Bounty back to Tahiti, dropped off some men who wanted to stay there even at risk of discovery and arrest, had picked up twelve native women and six native men, and sailed for "uninhabited" Pitcairn with only eight remaining shipmates. Of the ten caught on Tahiti and tried for mutiny in London (they were shipwrecked on the way), only three were convicted and hanged in October 1792, not quite five years after the Bounty had first sailed. Some were acquitted; a few were simply pardoned.

Christian and the men with him on Pitcairn, whites and native Polynesians, ended up mostly dying violently in fights over the women. Christian and four other whites were all shot on one day; strangely enough, so many men killed each other that the little community in a few years was comprised of four surviving white men and ten native women and assorted children. Eventually, the women learned to decamp into the recesses of the island, taking the men's guns with them, whenever they were annoyed. Meanwhile, the men made a still and began producing hard liquor from the "tee root." Two more men died. The last two got religion. Pitcairn and its people having been discovered by an American ship in 1808, the last surviving mutineer was agreed by other mariners to be " 'whatever his errors or crimes ... at present a very worthy man and useful to navigators who traverse this immense ocean.' "

As for Bligh, at the time without question the hero of the Bounty, he lived out a glorious naval career, achieved the rank of vice admiral of the blue -- the rank of a man who presides over court martials -- and "died in England in 1817 at the age of 63."



View Larger Map

Pitcairn Island: roughly, just to the right and just below dead center of the map.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Originally appeared in The Times of Northwest Indiana

The definition of originality has been said to be, not that you create something new, but that you create something that cannot be imitated. Raymond Chandler did this when he wrote his four Philip Marlowe detective novels, beginning with The Big Sleep (1939). Here we meet Marlowe, the solitary, hard-drinking, tough-talking private eye working the seamier side of Los Angeles, solving crimes two or three steps ahead of the police (and the reader), and fending off crazed blondes with calm professionalism as he goes. What starts out as a case of blackmail quickly balloons into several interlocking cases involving porn, gambling, missing persons, and of course, murder. All of this takes place in a decidedly un-glamorous and strangely unpeopled L.A., full only of shabby office buildings, anonymous mom and pop diners, and plain frame houses amid drifting Pacific fogs. It rains perpetually.

There are great lines in the book -- "you have to hold your teeth clamped around Hollywood to keep from chewing on stray blondes," a voice was "as false as an usherette's eyelashes" -- and the mystery is mostly beautifully paced. But Marlowe, and Chandler's whole style, have become so iconic that it is hard to appreciate how original it all may have been. True novelty may be impossible to imitate, but it can be parodied (Steve Martin's film Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid comes to mind), and when it comes to lines about an usherette's eyelashes, it's hard not to find this beginning to be unintentionally funny. Marlowe himself, with his deadpan, I-shoulda-known-better narration, actually began to remind me of Bertie Wooster, the cheery, bewildered twit of P.G. Wodehouse's comic Jeeves and Wooster novels. There is little difference in tone between: "I was in the bathroom, wondering what there was going to be for breakfast while I massaged the spine with a rough towel" (Wooster) and "If you have anything that's worrying you beyond endurance, drop up ... I'll be oiling my machine gun" (Marlowe). Since both characters date from the same era, it may be that the slang of the time accounts for superficial resemblances between them. Gals "leg it," a detective is a "peeper," and when things are good they're "jakeloo." It is a bit distracting.

The question is, can anybody read The Big Sleep with pure delight today, just as a great tale? I found the solution to the mystery disappointing -- Chandler seems to have been known for messy plots, including totally unvisited subsidiary murders right in the middle of things -- and I doubt I will move on after this to Farewell, My Lovely, or the other two novels in this particular omnibus collection. It is all a piece of Americana, certainly, but as such has a kind of stale museum air to it that is, in the long run, uninviting. Maybe Chandler was original to a fault. He can be parodied, but not imitated and maybe not surpassed -- but, after one dose, he also can't be much further explored.

A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World? by Simon Schama

A book published in 2000 would not seem to qualify as "an old volume shaking its vellum head, and tantalizing just so," but then, time does march on. The book is already eight years old, and ended up recently in my library's book sale, Withdrawn stamped on its title page. Having only been checked out nine times in seven years, and not at all for the most recent three years running, is grounds for dismissal here.


The book tells an old-fashioned history, the kind that used to be so pleasant, full of famous people, events, and stories. The Roman occupation -- Boadicea -- Christianity, St. Patrick, Lindisfarne -- possibly Arthur -- the Normans, King John, Magna Carta -- the Black Death, the Black Prince -- Henry V, Agincourt, the Tudors, Good Queen Bess. It stops there. 1603.


It is, Schama writes in his preface, the kind of history that drew "hoots of derision" from him and his youthful university friends in the 1950s and '60s, when the enlightened young understood that true history was the study of the worldwide masses, oppressed and rebellious, while the didoes of individual kings and churches made only for a silly patriotic opium to lull the suffering to sleep. So what made him write this hoary -- whore-y -- kind of history in the year 2000? Memories of being impressed by the "gorgeous rhetoric" and good sense of Macaulay and Churchill, even though they wrote mostly about kings; memories of his parents' generation, who stood firmly against Hitler because they did see themselves as English, therefore different, yes therefore better, possessing better laws and government and a history that taught them how to keep them, than their fellow struggling plebs in Germany.


He wrote it, also, as a way of putting a finger in the dike holding back the tides of "self-inflicted, collective memory loss" otherwise apparently threatening to sweep over Britain. If Britons don't learn what was ever special, good, or heroic in British history, he says, then they will have no way of knowing what it means to be British. They will just be citizens of of a "globalized world," eternal children (as he says Cicero warned) not knowing where they have been or where they are going. And unable to argue with people who aren't just globalized themselves, but also loathe Britishness. He doesn't say this outright. You must infer it from other clues later on.


In fact if will be helpful if you have already done some homework before you try to make head or tail of Schama's preface, which is the most interesting chapter in the book despite its timidity. He is an apostate struggling to get free of progressive, academic, history-less orthodoxy for one thing, and for another he is a modern observer looking at modern Britain, seeing a place that Macaulay and Churchill would not have recognized -- and trying to say it's all right because the aim of being globalized and almost identity-less really is right and good. One just don't want total national amnesia. He excuses his new retelling of stories of kings and battles on the grounds that, after all, history can include many records, not just the proper records of the poor and oppressed. And he writes (a groat for those who can decipher these two sentences):

"The colonised, promised by Westminster that the British legacy would be parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, took the promise at face value and decided to move to the source to enjoy those blessings, which was not exactly what the proconculs had meant. Omdurman Gardens all over the country are now populated by precisely the people whose subjugation the street names commemorate, and for them, the imperial triumphalism of the saga of what Churchill repeatedly called 'the island race' is understandably at best incomprehensible and at worst egregiously offensive."


I'll try to earn the groat. Sentence one: people from the former British colonies have moved there en masse. Sentence two: having moved there, they find British culture and British pride "egregiously offensive," and that's okay. Unspoken fact: by the way, they're Muslim. A pair of exquisitely written sentences, but psychologically and morally, what a mess they make.

From this preface, Schama goes on to retrace the great familiar stories that appeared in American schoolchildren's McGuffey's Readers, and probably in magazines like Boy's Life, and to this day in a thousand women's romance novels as well. But those two sentences about the egregiously offended in Omdurman Gardens stuck in my head as I read the book, and so I ended up seeing this British history as a history of vulnerability, invasion, and cultural defeat. Romans displace Celtic British tribesmen -- who themselves displaced God knows whom -- Angles, Picts, Saxons, and Jutes displace Romans. Vikings next. Normans next. Britain as a medieval Darfur: long centuries when ambitious men know that the whole point of life is to own more land, and the way to conquer a piece of land is to go there and kill all the people and animals. Then it becomes yours. In time conquered Britain becomes the conqueror, and English kings bring Darfur to Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Then comes the Plague, and then Protestantism. (Schama seems to be one of those historians who laments the disappearance from history of colorful, Catholic England, Robin Hood's England of fluttering pennons and grey stone church towers under the Pope's blue sky, and who believes that this, too, was a change imposed from above. More cultural defeat.)

The book closes with England's survival of the Spanish Armada and then the death of Queen Elizabeth I. This brings the tale to the eve of the era whose imperial English excitements and English progress in law and personal liberties future, chest-thumping historians would celebrate, and Schama's generation would later loftily deride. It brings us, finally, to the era of the egregiously offended in Omdurman Gardens, and to an Archbishop of Canterbury opining that the imposition of sharia, Islamic law, in Britain will eventually prove unavoidable.

Macaulay and Churchill would spin in their graves. But Schama's history, from preface to close, makes the possibility seem normal. In his telling, the Island Race, whoever they were, have been drowned by outside forces so many times that a new inundation really seems long overdue. Is this the lesson he intended to teach?