Header overlay

High Adventure

Publishing can be a dangerous game. On my shelves I keep, as a warning to myself, a non-fiction book – perhaps the only surviving copy – which was written by a respected author, published by a major London house, and ran into awful trouble before it reached the bookshops. (Mine was a review copy, but sending a book out for review amounts to publishing it.) It was about Cold War spies and spying. It named an eminent scientist, said he was dead, and identified him as a spy and a traitor. Two errors there: first, he was very much alive, and second, he was neither a spy nor a traitor. Result: the entire print run was pulped, and undisclosed damages were paid.

And the danger doesn’t disappear when the book is fiction. Forget that routine paragraph about no resemblance intended to any person living or dead. It’s a fig leaf that falls off the instant a novelist libels someone who can be unmistakably identified. I know a novelist who created, as a character, a peer who behaved abominably. A peer of that name existed. The novel swiftly got the chop and the peer got hefty damages (tax-free).

So when I opened The Rose of Tibet and found that the story began in the office of a London publisher where an editor, the managing director and their lawyers all have considerable doubts about how to handle – indeed, whether to handle at all – a book which one of the manuscript readers has described as ‘a bit on the weird side’, I was hooked.

The anxious editor identified himself as Lionel Davidson. In real life, Davidson had in fact been an editor with Gollancz and with Cape. Now, in this novel, he wears two hats: first as sceptical editor, then as the author. On p.1 he says that what follows, although more than a bit weird, ‘is, however, mostly true; it is only because it is mostly true that a few introductory words are called for’

Subscribe or sign in to read the full article

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

Subscribe now or

Publishing can be a dangerous game. On my shelves I keep, as a warning to myself, a non-fiction book – perhaps the only surviving copy – which was written by a respected author, published by a major London house, and ran into awful trouble before it reached the bookshops. (Mine was a review copy, but sending a book out for review amounts to publishing it.) It was about Cold War spies and spying. It named an eminent scientist, said he was dead, and identified him as a spy and a traitor. Two errors there: first, he was very much alive, and second, he was neither a spy nor a traitor. Result: the entire print run was pulped, and undisclosed damages were paid.

And the danger doesn’t disappear when the book is fiction. Forget that routine paragraph about no resemblance intended to any person living or dead. It’s a fig leaf that falls off the instant a novelist libels someone who can be unmistakably identified. I know a novelist who created, as a character, a peer who behaved abominably. A peer of that name existed. The novel swiftly got the chop and the peer got hefty damages (tax-free). So when I opened The Rose of Tibet and found that the story began in the office of a London publisher where an editor, the managing director and their lawyers all have considerable doubts about how to handle – indeed, whether to handle at all – a book which one of the manuscript readers has described as ‘a bit on the weird side’, I was hooked. The anxious editor identified himself as Lionel Davidson. In real life, Davidson had in fact been an editor with Gollancz and with Cape. Now, in this novel, he wears two hats: first as sceptical editor, then as the author. On p.1 he says that what follows, although more than a bit weird, ‘is, however, mostly true; it is only because it is mostly true that a few introductory words are called for’. These words introduce Charles Duguid Houston, who left England for India on 25 January 1950 and flew back on 16 June 1951, ‘on a stretcher, with a sensational story to tell if anybody had been able to get him to tell it’. Nobody did, and Houston, quite alone, went straight to the London Clinic, where he ‘was able to pass the month fairly quietly. He had his right arm off. He sought release with morphia drugs from painful memories. Only occasionally did he worry about the disposition of his half million pounds.’ Back to the publisher’s lawyers: they wouldn’t be satisfied unless parts of the manuscript were ‘treated’. So Davidson (as editor) went to see the elderly Mr Oliphant, without whom ‘there would not be a book’. Or rather, two books. For the book Mr Oliphant was keen on getting published was his Latin primer, and he was keen because he expected to die quite soon. In the best fiction, the reader does half the work. I was on only the third page of The Rose of Tibet and already I wanted to know where Oliphant came in. I wanted to know what Houston had been up to in Tibet and how he had damaged his arm so badly; and where he had got his questionable half-million pounds. Davidson, still speaking as editor, fed me hints and half-answers. I was like a drunk reaching for a glass that always retreated: I had to read on. Davidson didn’t disappoint me. The Rose of Tibet is a beautiful novel: rich in drama, character, passion, adventure, all with a tinge of humour, just enough to take the curse off the ordeal of crossing some Himalayan mountains in a very bad winter. Here’s a taste. Houston, and his 17-year-old Sherpa guide, Ringling, reach a shelter called the Place of Wind Devils:

a mere space of bare rock and ice . . . There was a fantastic roaring, a yowling, a moaning, the winds rushing and meeting from similar clefts in the surrounding rock. He thought he could distinguish with clarity the distinctive notes of a dozen mature cats in the row.

Lines like that – and Davidson is very sparing with them – remind us that Houston is not a professional adventurer. He is a youngish schoolteacher from Baron’s Court whose half-brother went into Tibet with a film party and didn’t come out. What lifts Houston’s search above the standard adventure story is Davidson’s astonishing realism. He turns the biting cold into a truly savage enemy and the mountains into one damn thing after another until they feel like a test to destruction. They survived. ‘They came to a valley, alive with flights of multi-coloured birds and aflame with rhododendrons, and he laughed aloud with pure delight.’ What they looked down on were the village and monastery of Yamdring, and the spectacle makes Shangri-la seem ordinary. In a narrow lake, which ‘lay like a green cheval glass in the cleft of the valley’, is a shrine with ‘glittering white walls inclining inwards to a green roof which sloped steeply away into a thread-like gold spire’. Ringling tells Houston that pilgrims visit this shrine to pray to the monkey, and he explains the legend: the monkey came from India, found the benevolent she-devil, tempted her, carried her to the island and coupled with her.
‘They did it there,’ the boy said, pointing, ‘just there where the shrine is now.’ ‘I see. So that’s how Tibetans were made.’ ‘Yes, sir. By the monkey. He is my father,’ the boy said simply. ‘Mine, too,’ Houston said wryly. ‘Or maybe that was another monkey.’ ‘Yes, sir, another monkey. This one is still here.’
Or rather, his body is. The she-devil grieved over his death:

‘She wept, and the tears turned the lake green in his memory. Then she built the shrine as another memory. She went to live there,’ he said, pointing to the lowest level of the monastery. ‘She lived there nine hundred years.’

This was the Rose of Tibet who is central to the story. However, Houston’s search was for his half-brother; if alive he too was probably in the monastery, a hugely secretive and well-guarded place.  But pilgrims were allowed into the lower levels. Houston and Ringling joined the queue, shuffled past the guards and got inside. The result was a let-down. It was like St Pancras station:

a vast, vaulted place echoing with metallic noise and the sound of scurrying feet. Butter lamps hung in festoons, and in their dim light stood old gilt idols like neglected advertisements. A group of priestesses lugged a trestle table decked with monastery merchandise, and here and there about the hall pilgrims trooped into gated chapels like conducted parties on to railway platforms.

Davidson’s creation is often surprising and always convincing: he knows every detail, from the curious habits of priestesses to the horrors of amputee beggars, from the dodgy food to the toilet buckets, from the deathless religion to the easy sex. And, of course, there is the Rose herself, the best thing to happen to Houston and very nearly the worst. The biggest surprise of all is that the real Lionel Davidson never set foot in Tibet. He was born in Hull, in 1922, the youngest of nine children. His mother came from Lithuania and was illiterate. His father, a poor tailor, was a Jewish refugee from Poland; he died when Lionel was 2. Not the ideal start for someone who was one day to be rated by Graham Greene as the world’s best writer of high adventure. But the boy was soon at home with the English language. When he was 6, the family moved to London and, using an old copy of Goodbye, Mr Chips, he taught his mother to read and write. His first job was as office boy at the Spectator. By the age of 17 he was churning out syndicated stuff for an agency. After the war – he was a telegraphist in submarines – he joined a press agency and bluffed his way into (and got deported from) Prague in 1947, just as the Iron Curtain descended. At 33 he was fiction editor of the popular weekly John Bull and learning what readers wanted: two climaxes and a resolution per story. His first novel, The Night of Wenceslas (1960), recycled his knowledge of Prague: a young Englishman gets blackmailed into spying and all goes elaborately wrong. Wenceslas won him a Penguin contract, a Gold Dagger award and a film deal. Two years later came The Rose of Tibet. Wenceslas belonged in a recognizable genre: the Cold War thriller; but The Rose of Tibet is in a class of its own. Davidson prepared for it in public libraries. He hunted down obscure reference books and soaked up the detail until he knew the tastes and smells and colours of Tibet as if he’d grown up there. Rebecca West said he was a young Kipling. He was all that and a lot more. He moved to Israel and wrote several more novels, mostly set in that country: best known is A Long Way to Shiloh. He never again attempted anything on the scale of The Rose of Tibet. Maybe nothing as rich in high adventure ever seized him as that book did. His reputation faded until, in September 2009, the Independent placed him thirty-seventh in its list of Forgotten Authors. He died a month later. He deserves to be remembered, and read. Graham Greene said it best: ‘I hadn’t realized how much I had missed the genuine adventure story until I read The Rose of Tibet.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 32 © Derek Robinson 2011


About the contributor

Derek Robinson’s novels are either about the RFC and the RAF, or about conartists. When publishing houses lost interest in him he began self-publishing. It’s all on www.derekrobinson.info.

Comments & Reviews

Leave a comment

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.