Ingerlond Their Ingerlond

Not long after I first became a literary editor (at the New Statesman), I ran a glowing lead review of an incendiary first novel: Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. This, I thought, should be the essence of the job: to find and praise fearless new voices and, along the way, annoy the fogeys and the fuddy-duddies.

There was – and is – a place for all that. Soon, though, I realized that my perch gave me a panoramic view of the publishing scene. I could see its shady corners as well as its spotlit peaks. And I came to a humbling realization. Many of the best authors toil far from any limelight: neither fogeys nor firebrands, strangers to celebrity and notoriety, untouched by large advances or low gossip. Call it the despised ‘midlist’ if you will. Here craft, pride and professionalism reign, sustained by a delicate ecology of fragile species: imprints, editors, bookshops, talks, reviews and of course readers. It is a land­scape as precious as hedgerow-lined fields, and quite as vulnerable. Julian Rathbone, who wrote gorgeously about the English countryside, might have forgiven that simile. The harvest of his career amounts to almost forty books published between 1967 and 2007 (he died, aged 73, the following year). Across his broad literary wingspan, from hard-bitten crime to satirical thrillers and historical adventures, he wrote with wit, panache and the untiring verve of a highly dexterous storyteller. He was born into a clan of dissenting Liverpool mer­chants – abolitionists, reformers, philanthropists – and he blended urbane authorial manners with a merrily irreverent old-school radi­calism. He never gave short measures of skill, or style. Not simply ‘middlebrow’, he brought ideas as well as characters entrancingly to life. But the narrative pulse never faltered or faded. Once I had discovered his plotting, and his prose, he came to represent for me a type of under-appreciated author who endures – or should endure – while bestsellers flare and fade. He was never cool, or a modish name to drop, but I began to recommend Rathbone to readers who craved intelligent fun between the covers. He scarcely lacked friends or fans: two novels, King Fisher Lives (1976) and Joseph (1979), reached the Booker shortlist. Still, the flashier honours failed to arrive. Several titles remain in print, but his name has now slipped into the semi-darkness that swallows so many gifted authors after their departure. When I tried to follow one link to a (rare) interview, it took me to what appeared to be a Hungarian health-food site. That would have raised a chuckle from him. As with many male English writers of his generation, Rathbone began with Graham Greene as his literary lodestar. Like Greene, he moved abroad (Turkey, later Spain, in his case), and ever after matched a cosmopolitan taste for border-crossing intrigue and skul­duggery with an insider-outsider’s keen eye for the foibles and follies of his native land. The ancient Wessex landscapes of Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire, where he went to school and later settled, anchored a fictional imagination that also thrived in Spain, France, India, Germany and America. Mystery and detection lent him sturdy vehicles for his scrutiny of people, places and politics: he was, after all, a great-nephew of Basil Rathbone, the definitive screen Sherlock Holmes of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet it was historical fiction that allowed Rathbone to spread the wings of his talent to the utmost. Joseph had recreated the Peninsular War of the 1800s: the Napoleonic era, and the chancers who surfed the waves of European conflict, became a favoured subject. In the 1990s, he pushed further back for his settings: to the destruction of Anglo-Saxon England and the coming of the Normans in the mas­terly The Last English King (1997); then, in 2000, to the Wars of the Roses in Kings of Albion. Start here, with a novel that artfully fuses learning, satire, adventure and an irrepressible gift for a gag, if you seek a door into the Rathbone past. That door opens on to a period vista where scholarly research, action-rich drama, lyrical scene-setting, waspish wit, even Blackadder-style costumed farce, happily mingle. Much of the plot unfolds in the England of 1460–1. A party of visiting foreigners witness, aghast, the carnage and chaos of a land that serves as the gory playground for the dynastic squabbles of Yorkists and Lancastrians. ‘I mean, could you follow all that stuff about Edwards, Richards and Henrys?’ asks one of the narrators (Rathbone does, in fact, clarify the family feuds). Yet the work dances with consciously anachronistic jokes, cleverly stitched into a fifteenth-century backdrop. They range from familiar-sounding foot­ball hooligans to boarding-school cruelties at a place called Eton; there’s even a wise priest who wanders through the spring woods of the Midlands and ponders ‘the origin of species’ in the burgeoning profusion of life. Rathbone’s dialogue – salty, scabrous, even scatological – brings out his Blackadder-ish side. When Hanseatic traders claim a monopoly on the transport of English cloth into the Baltic, the City of London merchants decide – over spiced wine and rabbit stew in Eastcheap – that the Germans have gone ‘over the fucking top this time’. Maybe Rathbone’s fruity repartee goes there too. Readers will be unlikely to complain. For all its sitcom-style high jinks, Kings of Albion has serious aims in view. An Indian prince, Harihara, leads a party of travellers to strife-torn ‘Ingerlond’ from his magnificent court in the empire of Vijayanagara. This realm really flourished: you can visit the ruins near Hampi in the state of Karnataka. It had indeed hit, or just passed, a zenith of cultivation and prosperity around the mid- fifteenth century. Muslim sultans threatened this tolerant and pluralistic ‘City of Victory’ from the north. Portuguese traders were looking for an alternative spice route that would sideline the Malabar coast (thanks to Vasco da Gama, they would find one). Fearful of decline and unrest, the Indians dread that the internecine savagery of the ‘Inglysshe’ may lurk in their future too. Rathbone’s paradisal picture of Vijayanagara in its golden age – all swelling fruits, dancing maidens, religious toleration, garden water-features and erotic temple sculptures that celebrate ‘with open joy the act of procreation’ – feels oddly similar to Salman Rushdie’s evocation of the same place and time in his latest novel, Victory City. I very much doubt that Rushdie knows Kings of Albion: the legend of Vijayanagara has long cast a spell over Indian writers, but it did not spread far abroad. Rathbone reports that a British Museum curator, Richard Blurton, first alerted him to this super-civilized culture. An orientalist named ‘Richard Blurton’ sounds like another Rathbone gag. But he actually exists. Rathbone relishes the old satirical trick – practised at least since the eighteenth century – of depicting the barbarians of England and Europe through the bewildered eyes of voyagers from more enlight­ened climes. Prince Harihara, his chamberlain Anish, the Syrian-born merchant Ali and the mysterious Uma – by turns spy, courtesan and priestess – enjoyably negotiate the foul weather, gross food and weird customs of the Inglysshe. Drizzle-soaked Calais, that fortified outpost of Ingerlond, offers a foretaste of the squalor that awaits across the Channel. Harihara can’t believe ‘how messy it all is’. Reputedly ‘the least civilized and most barbaric people on earth’, the unruly folk of Ingerlond may nonetheless prove unbeatable in battle when well led. For the moment, they keep busy by slicing, shooting and spearing one another. Rathbone deftly, often comically, inserts his alien travellers into the tussles of York and Lancaster. Their posh, reckless and charismatic Yorkist buddy Eddie March – who beds the irresistible Uma – bounds from scrape to scrape until he triumphs as King Edward IV. Harihara stays imprisoned in the Tower of London while Uma and Ali cross the land in search of the prince’s long-lost brother Jehani – supposedly marooned near a spot known as Macclesfield. Entertaining glimpses of evergreen Inglysshe life – dodgy boozers, overcooked grub, moody weather, cagey or raucous villagers, braying toffs who ‘set enormous store by wealth and parentage, and little to talent and merit’ – sit beside a heartfelt vision of a deep England where old pagan gods still roam. Rathbone’s radicalism and romanticism come together. Like other literary gents of his age and background (John le Carré, for instance, comes out of the same stable), he scourges the English rul­ing class but can’t shake off the nostalgic, or utopian, dream of a sweet, free and blessed land. Crops ripen, seasons change, and the visitors glimpse the survival of a sturdy, self-sufficient way of life among peasants and artisans plagued by the vanity and violence of their overlords. Ali finds a kindred free-thinking spirit in the scientifically minded Franciscan monk Prior Peter of Oxenford. Kings of Albion spins a delightful tissue of speculation (or maybe just fantasy) about a cross-cultural fraternity of heretics on the margins of medieval Christianity, Islam and Hinduism who find common cause in the beauty and wonder of the material world, and in a repudiation of the clerical dogma that invariably leads to ‘the cruellest, stupidest, meanest and most horrible murders’. In the end, this boisterous comic-historical romp sheds its motley to reveal a philosophical – even mystical – colouring beneath. From birdsong in Cotswold woods to the windswept purple uplands of north Wales (where Uma, inevitably, seduces Owen Tudor), the voy­agers discover everyday happiness and loveliness to offset the brutality of might and faith. That brutality climaxes in a terrifying, virtuoso scene. Yorkists crush Lancastrians at Towton during a Palm Sunday snowstorm in 1461 as tens of thousands of armour-clad human sacri­fices blunder through a nightmare of ‘blood, crushed bones, urine, faeces, fear and intolerable pain’. No battle on British soil has ever taken more lives. While power, dogma and ambition lead to such suffering, Rathbone – through Ali and Uma – speaks up for a free, quiet life on the good earth that nurtures us. Beside the Arabian Sea, Ali tells the tale of his sojourn in Ingerlond to a seafarer called Mah-Lo from Mandalay, who gazes west over the tranquil waterway that ‘seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness’. Rathbone did love his literary allusions. A supreme prose entertainer, he cherished the his­tory, the practice and the sheer pleasure of his craft. As an admirer (though not an imitator) of James Joyce, he knew that fiction needs its occasional Trainspotting. It also needs its Julian Rathbones. These days, who will nurture them?

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 84 © Boyd Tonkin 2024