The Broken Road by A.E.W. Mason - A Review

The Broken Road by A.E.W. Mason

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Broken Road was sold to me as adventure fiction, but I’m not sure that’s a comfortable label for it to carry. It certainly bears a romantic air that fits the name, and there are moments which are ‘adventurous’, for lack of a better word, but overall there is no single adventure running through it. The hero, if he is one, does very little, while the villain is closer to an antihero in many respects, and is arguably the most sympathetic character for at least a portion of the book. Neither of them ‘get the girl’, who is clearly better off without them, and vice versa – although the ‘villain’ is ruined in figuring that out. Besides a somewhat illusory kidnap attempt, there is very little danger encountered and almost no hardships endured besides the psychological ones suffered by the erstwhile villain.

It starts well enough as an adventure, there’s a siege and a tough-as-nuts hero, but he dies of overexertion and the siege ends, and it’s all a prologue anyway. There’s the expected siege towards the end of the book, but it never happens, and the characters involved are asides, included more for completeness in the narrative than anything else. The war, such as it is, and the hunt for a fugitive across a remote alien land, are dealt with in summation, the latter in a portion of dialogue years after the event. The book is not about adventurous undertakings.

Instead, The Broken Road, is a novel about two young men filled with ideals, who learn through bitter experience that the world simply does not work the way they dreamed. That the main character, in terms of taking up most of the stage, is an Indian prince sent away to England to learn at Eton, gives the novel its central position as a colonial fiction. It is he who, if this were an adventure novel, would be the villain, and he is described as becoming one as events progress, but he is more pathetic in the end than villainous. A mere cog in the wheels of other people’s plans.
It is his progression from proud Oxford graduate who sees himself as White and better than his own people, to religious fanatic avowed to drive the English out of Chiltistan, his fictional home province, and ultimately to sorry drunk removed from any sense of home or identity he once had, that is the centre of the work.

There is much that can be made and said of the book in terms of colonialism and race, but the largely metaphorical nature of the three central characters and the Road itself means there’s no chance of applying a definitive reading on the book – thank goodness. It can be read as sympathetic to subject nations, or not. For my part, it seemed somewhere in the middle. That the British had a position of cultural superiority is not questioned, but that they should therefore force their will upon their supposed subjects – to ‘better’ them – is shown to be ill-fated at best.

Overall, despite some apparent sympathy for the ‘villain’, the sense of English superiority is too strong, and its surrounding narrative too weak, for this to escape the gravity of being ‘colonial’. That said, it is a fascinating read, with strong characters that can give much thought to an open-minded reader.




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Happy Birthday Mr Verne

It's Jules Verne's birthday so I thought I'd reminisce a little about my experiences with the works of this wonderful creative spirit.

I can't remember a time when his name didn't mean something to me, that's probably a slight exaggeration but not much. Hearing about travelling with Captain Nemo in the bookshop at the beginning of The Never-ending Story became synonymous to me with adventure and the excitement you could have reading. I heard there was the man who went around the world in 80 days, and another who went to the centre of the Earth. These were thrilling concepts to my young imagination.

At some point I must have seen some of the 1950s film of Journey to the Centre of the Earth and the dinosaurs and volcanic eruption stayed embedded in my imagination. (So it was very exciting when I found it on DVD in a garage sale).

Despite these early impressions and the resulting desire I had to read his books, I was in my late teens before I read one. Even then it was his lesser known and quite short Master of the World. It's a sequel, to wrap up how bad a choice it was for a place to start, but in some ways it possibly was actually better than diving straight into the sea for an epic voyage. It was short and had plenty of action right from the start. It also had fantastic inventions and a mad genius hellbent on world domination. Thrilling stuff.

Since then I've read a handful more of Verne's novels, most notably 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days. The former is a worthy classic, it has scenes of suspense and drama, the action of fighting off cephalopods is breath-taking and Nemo is a brooding antihero ahead of his time. On the downside, Verne does go into some very nitty-gritty details about the technical aspects and the longitude and latitude etc. It is at times stifling and could interrupt the pleasure of some readers.

Around the World in 80 Days has fewer passages which really slow the action and romance. It's an action novel right through, but with a lovely whimsy to it, making it very accessible.

So with all that, what is the legacy of Verne for me? I think it's the sheer creative energy he had. He poured himself into writing his books, he gladly and openly tried to forge a new genre and was quite put out when HG Wells started getting credit for it too. His stories are fantastic yet nailed down with his reasoning, he could bring exciting adventure with serious drama, or send us on a whimsical romp. What he didn't seem to do was small. His stories are so vivid and full of adventure that even their echoes in our culture stirs the imagination. So happy birthday Jules Verne and thank you for the spark of dreams.

Keep dreaming!

ERB - Master of Adventure

One thing I did during the period I wasn't blogging was go to Hobart to see some of Dark MoFo, which I hope to blog about soon. While there we (my family and I) of course went to the Salamanca Markets, and, of course, I looked at a lot of second-hand books. I managed to resist many temptations but there was one old paperback that caught my eye. I tried to resist - I told my wife I'd leave it and if no-one had bought it before we came back that way, then I would buy it.

The book, which you have guessed I bought, is Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure by Richard A Lupoff. It caught my eye because of the cover illustration which was clearly a Frank Frazetta painting and I can't resist any work by that man. If it was just a Burroughs' novel I could have resisted but this is much more.

It's a scholarly look at the collected works of ERB considering them individually and as series and as a whole in terms of their success both on their own terms and in terms of their influence on the genre.

Burroughs seems almost forgotten now, although his major creations are remembered. Tarzan is of course the most famous and Lupoff does a good job pointing out how the Tarzan most of us are familiar with is not the one Burroughs wrote. For one thing he never spoke in the "Me Tarzan, you Jane" style, it was more a "My name is Tarzan, pleased to meet you Jane." Although, he had to learn English from a Frenchman, since he spoke French first. Yes, Tarzan was trilingual if you include 'beast', bilingual if you don't.

His second most famous series were his Barsoom novels, Barsoom being the name Martians have for Mars. These have recently suffered through the horrible Disney film John Carter, which I can see no justification for. There are scenes in it which prove the people behind the film had read the book so why they proceeded to ignore its heart, rip out its soul and mutilate its corpse is beyond me.

But, once you get to what the real Tarzan and Barsoom stories are you still don't come away with literary brilliance. These are unapologetic adventure stories written primarily to entertain. ERB himself said he didn't write because he wanted to be a novelist or create great art. He was poor, he had a family, so in the evenings he wrote on the back of envelopes and managed to sell the result for a few hundred dollars to one of the pulps of the day - a big sum in 1912.

As such ERB wrote slavishly, but didn't spend hours and hours poring over his work refining it. This led to a high output, most of his books took him a couple of months to write, but also many flaws. There is no contention that Burroughs was a particularly skilled writer. His stories are full of plot holes and rely heavily on coincidence to turn out. But, for the most part, they are exciting adventure stories filled with outlandish beings and lost civilisations.

And where his plots may be full of holes, his civilisations are full of detail with rich histories and cultures. Outlandish yes, but rich.

Lupoff also places ERB in a chronology, looking at some of his sources and considering some of the influences he had - suggesting that even sword and sorcery is deeply indebted to Tarzan, despite it not being the genre of Lord Greystoke. I think there could be debate on how strong the influences Lupoff discusses were but it's always interesting to consider the development of genres over time.

Lupoff finishes by pondering the longevity of ERB's works and suggests that, as a character, Tarzan had a good chance to outlive the other modern 'supermen' of literature - Superman and Sherlock Holmes. Back in the 60s maybe that was possible, but clearly it hasn't come true. Maybe if his film incarnations hadn't been such pale reflections of their source material he'd have done better. And the abovementioned disgrace to John Carter certainly won't help ERB's reputation.

But Lupoff has encouraged me to read more of these adventures, and I hope the adaptations can be forgotten without us losing the source material completely. There are fantastic vistas to visit within those pages, let's do some travelling.

Keep dreaming!