I’m never quite sure which posts I write are going to attract a lot of interest and which are going to be passed over. Lately, I’ve been writing a lot about India and while my mini essay on the Red Fort got a fair amount of attention, others were less popular. I do post occasionally on the joys, or otherwise, of writing. Again, some of these grab attention (at least by my standards) and some don’t. I think this week might be a good time to write about writing, though. Let’s hope you enjoy it.
Like, I imagine, almost all writers, it’s important to me that people read my books. Books are much more likely to be read if they are part of a series and if people can remember the last one you wrote, so there is pressure to turn out the next one.
I write two book series: Galbraith & Pole, which is Urban Fantasy, and James Burke, which is about the adventures of a British spy in Napoleonic times. I really enjoy writing Galbraith & Pole but, with just three books published, that series is yet to establish itself while the seven James Burke books, though hardly bestsellers, have a growing readership. The last book I published, Monsters in the Mist, was a Galbraith & Pole novel, so I really need to get on and write something about James Burke. The problem is finding a historical incident to write the next book around.
The first six James Burke books
Someone on Twitter has been suggesting for a while that I should send Burke to North America to fight in the War of 1812, so I am now busy reading about that conflict. It’s a scrappy little war, much beloved of re-enactors, partly, I think, because many of the battles were quite small and can be re-fought with the sorts of numbers that a re-enactor regiment may well be able to put into the field. I’m learning about native American tribes, and US militia regiments, and desperate fights in tiny long-lost villages (many now buried under 20th century cities). It’s a new world to me and I’m worried that I may make some terrible historical errors, but I am beginning to feel the outlines of a plot. It’s early days and I may yet fail to pull it together. If I can’t, then at least I’ll have learned a lot about a fairly pointless war, best known in this country because of the British burning down the White House. The Americans love talking about it because it is one of their founding myths and they just gloss over the fact that they didn’t achieve any of their war aims. They did beat the British at New Orleans though, although unbeknownst to both sides, the war was over by then.
Fingers crossed that I can find a story that can make some sort of sense out of so many fascinating but disparate incidents. I warn you now that it might be some time. Meanwhile can I recommend that you try out Galbraith & Pole? Or the Williamson Papers, which (being just a trilogy) will never benefit from the series effect. (I wrote about them last week and it would be lovely if you read them.)
Back to 1812 and the Canadian snows. Enjoy your week.
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The picture at the top of the post shows British, Canadian and Mohawk fighters in action at the Battle of Chateauguay in 1813 (by Henri Julien, 1852 – 1908).
I’ve been posting a lot about India over the past few weeks. I think people are getting a bit bored of it by now. (Let me know if I’m wrong. I have several hundred more photos to share.)
Part of the reason for writing is just that, having finally made it to the sub-continent, I was blown away by it and wanted to share some of my experiences. Another reason, though, is the hope that you might be drawn in to want to read more of my writing about India, but this time looking at my historical novels. I’ve mentioned a few times that my personal favourite of my books is Cawnpore, a story set during the events of 1857, usually referred to in England as the Indian Mutiny. It’s one of a trilogy of books that looks again at the glory days of the British Empire and asks if they were as glorious as many people like to think. They’re far from revisionist history and they are full of excitement and battles, love and betrayal. But they are, I hope, a bit more nuanced than a lot of novels set in the Age of Empire.
I knew when I wrote them that they would never have the commercial appeal of my books about James Burke, cheerfully putting the damn French in their place half a century or so earlier. But it has always saddened me that, though they’ve had some lovely reviews, the Williamson Papers (as the trilogy is called) have ever had the readership I like to think they deserve. So here is an unashamed plug for the books. They are each just £3.99 on Kindle, so you can buy the whole series for less than £12. That’s got to be exceptional value for money.
The Williamson Papers
[NB There are major spoilers here, so don’t read on if you don’t want any idea of how things end.]
The first book of the Williamson Papers is The White Rajah. It introduces us to John Williamson, a young man who runs away from farming life in Devon to go to sea in search of adventure. He finds it when he becomes the companion of James Brooke, the first White Rajah of Sarawak.
James Brooke is an amazing figure. (I’ve written about his real-life history HERE.) Brooke arrives in Sarawak (in Borneo) in 1839 and is made ruler by Muda Hassim, the Bendahara of Brunei. He starts with nothing but the most liberal and humane of intentions, yet goes on to preside over a massacre so terrible that it leads to protests half a world away in London. It’s a fascinating story of how the high ideals of some Europeans produced such terrible outcomes when applied to other peoples’ countries.
WHY READ IT? It’s got pirates and headhunters and battles and loads of excitement. This is the background for a story about a good man who ends up doing terrible things and how this affects the man who loves him. There’s a lesson for today in the story about good and evil in the mid-19th century.
In Cawnpore, Williamson leaves Borneo, unable to live with what he has seen. He sails for India and takes up a post with the East India Company. He is sent to Cawnpore, where he finds himself at the centre of the events that will lead to the siege of the city and a massacre of Europeans unprecedented during colonial rule in the subcontinent. As with The White Rajah, the background to the story is closely based on real historical events. Williamson, ever the outsider, flits between the Indian and European camps, passing himself off as an Indian amongst the sepoys (something that we know Europeans managed to do during the Mutiny). Again, Williamson struggles to reconcile his own liberal principles and the realities of colonial life. This time it is the Europeans who are (in Cawnpore, at least) on the losing side. Williamson becomes one of a handful of people to survive the siege and its bloody aftermath. The experience marks him, though. He has watched his Indian friends massacre women and children without mercy and then been rescued by European soldiers who strike back with awful savagery. Once again he turns his back on a European colony, this time to return to England, where he hopes at last to find peace.
WHY READ IT? The siege of Cawnpore is one of those bits of colonial history that we have decided to forget about but it’s an amazing story – even if nobody involved comes out of it looking good. This lets you top up your historical knowledge and enjoy a good read at the same time. And I can’t help thinking that if more people had known anything about the history of the region, some recent foreign policy adventures might have been given a bit more thought.
Although Cawnpore is my personal favourite, some people prefer Back Home, which brings the cycle back to England. It’s on a much smaller scale than the others, with most of the action set in London’s Seven Dials, but it features the same themes. Williamson finds a country he hardly recognises. Industrialisation at home and military expansion abroad have made Britain into a dynamic political and economic power that dominates the world. Yet Williamson finds the same divide between the poor and the rich that he saw in the Far East. A friend from his youth has tried to escape his poverty by entering a life of crime in the slums of London. Faced with threats of war with France and concern about Communist terrorists, the government needs to smash a foreign plot – and if they can’t find a real foreign plot, they’re quite happy to invent one. Williamson’s friend is caught in the machinations of a Secret Service determined to prove him an enemy agent and, in his attempts to help him escape, Williamson is once again caught between the machinations of the powerful and the resistance of the powerless.
Back Home ends with Williamson back in Devon where he started out in The White Rajah. But will he finally find happiness there?
When we were in India last month, we kept seeing signs in the various historical sites we visited suggesting that a lot of good stuff had been taken by the British in the 19th century and was now tucked away in various London museums. Back home, we decided to go to one of these London museums and see what we could find.
The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A to its many friends) has a collection celebrating the arts of South Asia (that’s India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) which it claims is “recognised as one of the largest and most important in the world”.
The amount of material on display is limited, but it is very beautiful. According to Wikipedia, the V&A is “the world’s largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design”, so I suppose I should not have been surprised at that beauty seems to be the main consideration in organising the display.
It looks very pretty but this assemblage of objects lacks any coherence
The V&A claims that their collection reflects “the rich heritage of South Asia and its complex history of global trade, immigration and colonial rule”. Sadly, I could see little evidence of this. For example, there are some illustrations from the 16th century Akbarnama, a volume commissioned by Akbar, arguably the greatest of the Mughal emperors, to celebrate his rule. The sumptuous pictures are shown without any of the text.
Akbar Receiving an Ambassador
In fairness to the V&A, they were probably removed from the book when it was “acquired” by the Commissioner of Oudh in 1859-62. I did like that “acquired”. The annexation of Oudh (or Avadh, as the pesky Indians of the time called it) was one of the precipitating factors in the Indian Mutiny. The Commissioner’s acquisition might reasonably be described as “loot”. The V&A rather shies away from that detail. To add insult to injury, one of the five pages on display is in a completely separate display case where, presumably, the curators felt that it looked prettier alongside other pictures rather than sitting with the other four where it logically belongs.
There are some important examples of Indian culture, like this picture of details of the decoration inside the Taj Mahal – all the more interesting because it shows parts of the upper galleries which are not visible to the public. Even here, though, the detail sits alone unsupported by even a photograph of the famous tomb. There is an example of how gemstones are fitted into marble – a key element of the Taj’s decoration – but, again, this is in a separate display with nothing linking the two.
Drawing showing detail of decoration in the Taj Mahal
A photograph I took at the Taj Mahal.
A significant amount of the display space isn’t even, strictly speaking, Indian art. Presumably it is the V&A’s interest in the “complex history of global trade, immigration and colonial rule” that accounts for so many items that have been made specifically for the export trade, like the Fremlin carpet, made around 1640 and incorporating the coats of arms of William Fremlin, an official of the East India Company. The label tells me that it would have been used as a table covering in England, rather than being put on the floor, which is interesting but tells us nothing about how carpets were used in India. (Hung on walls and used as curtains as well as, presumably, on the floor, since you ask.)
The Fremlin carpet
Outside the main room is a corridor where Hindu, Jain, Muslim and pagan religious images again make an attractive display. Time periods, geographical location, and faiths all mingle in Victorian confusion. They’re lovely to look at but tell you little about the cultures that gave rise to them.
I’ve never been a great believer in returning items to the countries they came from, but looking at this distinctively colonial approach to display here, I think of all those notices about Indian artefacts that vanished to England and I wonder if I should change my mind.
What do you think?
A Word from our Sponsor
After most of a lifetime of wanting to visit India, I’m happy to write about it for ages. But the reason for posting these pieces on my blog is to encourage people to read my book, Cawnpore, set during the Indian Mutiny/War of Independence of 1857. People who’ve read it have been very nice about it, but not nearly enough people have read it. I have kept the Kindle price at just £3.99 so as to make it easily affordable. Buy it and let me know what you think.
I’m back from three weeks in India. We went out with an Indian friend who has been talking about us visiting the country together for around 20 years. Finally we all decided that we’re not getting any younger and if we were going to do it, we should do it now.
It was a fantastic experience, visiting her family in Bombay (Mumbai) and then doing the tourist bit: Delhi, Agra, Jaipur and Jodhpur. If you’re not good, I’ll make you look at all of my 500+ photographs.
It was lovely to finally see the country that I’d written about back in 2011 with my book, Cawnpore, set during the war of 1857. It was strange writing a book set in a country I had never seen but, of course, the India of 1857 was very different from the India of today. I relied on accounts of the country by Victorian visitors. (I was writing from the viewpoint of a European living there, so the way that people like Fanny Parks saw the country was particularly useful.) We didn’t go to the city that the British knew at the time as Cawnpore. It’s called Kanpur now and almost all traces of the events of 1857 are gone. We did see some of the famous sites from back then: the Red Fort in Delhi and the fort at Agra (just along the river from the Taj Mahal).
In the Red Fort there are the barrack blocks built by the British on the ruins of some of the Moghul palace, which suffered very badly when Delhi was retaken. And in Agra there are the tiny airless rooms built into one of the corridors dating from when the British ran the province from there. There’s the grave of John Russell Colvin, the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Province, who died in the fort (of cholera) in 1857 and whose dying wish was to be buried there.
1857 was a long time ago and, certainly for most Indians, hardly a burning source of resentment. If anyone wants to badmouth the British, they are most likely to complain about Partition and the damage that did to their country.
In fact, the way that Indians feel about the British seems conflicted. Staying at the Cricket Club of India in Bombay, or visiting the Yacht Club there, I felt closer to the England of the 1950s than I ever do in London.
Cricket Club of India
Yacht Club
For many Indians, speaking English seems a crucial part of middle-class identity. There are adverts for private schools everywhere and most of these stress that education will be provided in English.
You can see why Prime Minister Modi sees de-colonialisation as unfinished business. Seventy-five years after India achieved independence, he is anxious to see the relationship with Britain defined in a more 21st century context.
Modi (with a white beard) presenting modern India
1857 is now celebrated as India’s First War of Independence, with characters like Nana Sahib (who led the Indian forces in Cawnpore) given the sort of uncritical acclaim that the British used to give their military leaders who might, with the wisdom of hindsight, be seen as having had a problematic approach to the way they treated their enemies.
Nana Sahib’s sword on display in the Red Fort
In reality, the events of 1857 were complex. Decades of mismanagement by the British had led to a burning resentment of their rule from many elements in Indian society and, once revolt had broken out amongst soldiers serving the British, it spread to encompass the old rulers of India and ordinary Moslems and Hindus who saw their religion under threat They were joined by people with grudges to settle and many prisoners, released by the mob in the early days of the revolt, who simply saw the chance to profit from the unrest. Violence and massacres by the rebels led to retaliation on an almost unimaginable scale from the British. It is a story from which nobody comes out well, although there was extraordinary courage and heroism demonstrated on both side.
The amazing thing is that after 1857 the British continued to rule in India for almost 100 years. Indians even volunteered in large numbers to defend Britain during the First World War.
Memorial tablet to men from Jodhpur who died in WW1
Indians believed that the British had promised independence if Indians went to fight in France. After the war, with no prospect of independence, Indian attitudes hardened. In response, the British introduced repressive legislation allowing them to imprison independence activists with no proper judicial process. Inevitably the Black Bills (as the legislation came to be known) led to protests and one such peaceful protest resulted in troops firing on an unarmed crowd with hundreds of casualties. (The precise number of dead is unknown.) This event, which came to be known as the Amritsar Massacre, is thought by many to have marked a turning point in the fight for independence.
India finally achieved independence on 15 August 1947.
Cawnpore
Although it has a fraction of the readership of my James Burke series, Cawnporeis the book I am most proud of. It’s told from the point of view of John Williamson, a British official in the East India Company’s administration, running India on behalf of the Crown. Williamson is from a working class background and does not fit in well with the men he works alongside. He is happier making friends in the court of the local Indian ruler and immerses himself in the culture and the language. When war breaks out in 1857, he finds himself caught between two camps. As he tries to find a way out of his dilemma, the war becomes more vicious and the bodies begin to pile up.
It’s a story with no heroes and I can see why it will never be as popular as the straightforwardly swashbuckling adventures of Burke, my Napoleonic Wars hero. Even so, I stand by it as the best thing I’ve written. It’s an absurdly cheap £3.99 on Kindle. I’d be very grateful if you could read it.
Years ago I started blogging (originally on Blogger at https://thewhiterajah.blogspot.com/) and I wanted to prove that I could produce something every week. I think I sort of hoped someone would notice that I can turn out a regular column and that I might get some sort of writing gig out of it. Sadly, it turns out that the likes of Jeremy Clarkson and Rod Liddle have cornered the market in those jobs and I am carrying on with the self-inflicted chore of producing my pearls of wisdom every week just from force of habit.
I regularly say I’m going to take a break and, for the next few weeks, I’m going to be away. For this week, though, I’m reposting something that first appeared on Blogger back in 2013. Some of the details have dated (I think the average published writer might clear over £11,000 a year these days) but I stand by the general idea.
I hope you enjoy it anyway.
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A recent post about word count seems to have attracted more interest than most. This set me to wondering why so many writers are quite so obsessive about word count.
I was listening to a programme on Radio Four last week (for US readers, Radio Four is the main UK talk radio channel) and it was discussing the difficulty of defining “work”. It turns out that most people like to be thought of as doing quite a lot of “work” but nobody is quite sure what to include in it. My personal bete noire is when businessmen say that they work 16 hour day in which they include lunch and dinner because they’re talking to colleagues, so this is obviously “work”, isn’t it? When I was working as a freelancer, there was always the question as to whether journey time counted as “work” or not. Given that I might be expected to travel from London to Manchester as part of the job, this was hardly a trivial issue. For writers, the whole question of what is “work” is even more difficult to pin down. Donna Tartt has apparently said in an interview that she “works” all the time, partly on the grounds that she carries a notebook with her and constantly jots down things that she might put into a novel. Given that she has written three novels in 21 years, her definition of “work” does, I think, stretch it about as far as you can. And in that last, ever so slightly bitchy, comment, we come to the nub of the concern about word count. For when I say that three books in 21 years hardly seems like full-time employment, what I am saying is, ultimately, that she doesn’t write a lot each day.
Now I spent my last post ridiculing the idea that your creative effort can be measured in words per day, but here I am, doing just that. Why? Because, like all writers I want to be taken seriously as a writer and, until I win the Booker, how do I define the “work” of writing?
I could, of course, just say that a writer is anybody who writes. But, every so often, someone comes up with the idea that almost literally everybody in the country has, at some stage, started to write a book. I can quite believe it. I have even seen computer programs being sold that claim to enable you to turn your brilliant idea into prose even if you do not really have a plot, any characters or the first clue of how to write. On this definition, we are all, it appears, writers now.
I have a friend with an English degree who decided that she would like to write. She joined a Writers Circle, because people in a Writers Circle will be writers, yes? After weeks of listening to a group of not noticeably talented people reading their Special Words to each other, she gave up. The worst thing, she suggested, was the unspoken social contract whereby you agreed that the other person’s Special Words were evidence of real talent in exchange for them doing the same for you. It’s quite possible that some of the people in the group had real potential, but in the atmosphere of mutual onanism, nobody was ever going to find out. It does seem fair to say, though, that membership of a Circle does not make you a writer.
Once upon a time, the test of whether or not you were a writer was whether or not you had a book published. But that’s hardly a test any more. Many really rather good writers are self-published or published by independent publishers that no one has ever heard of. Unfortunately, so are some people whose work, by any standard other than their own, would struggle to be judged as a “proper book”. Some people have tried to replace the test of “had a book published” with “had a book published by a mainstream publisher”. But, looking at the books published by mainstream publishers, I don’t see that as being any test of quality either. Even after you’ve taken out the celebrity books (often written by someone whose name is not on the cover) you are left with some works of dubious worth. I’ll name no names because it’s a grey area, but we can all think of some very doubtful stuff that is getting mainstream publication these days.
So if the test isn’t “I’ve had a book published”, what defines somebody as a “real” writer? It would be nice to suggest that it is whether or not you make a living out of writing. Unfortunately (he said with feeling), the last time I looked, which was, admittedly a few years ago, the average amount made by somebody who actually writes for money was £7000 a year. Obviously Dan Brown and JK Rowling manage rather more than that, but for most writers, the idea of it paying a living wage is just ridiculous. At one level, this is quite a good definition of a writer, but it suffers from the opposite problem of defining it as “somebody who writes”. While almost everybody is in the first category, practically nobody is in the latter.
I think it is the absence of any useful definition that makes us so obsessive about word counts. It’s almost as if, in the community of “serious writers who haven’t had a bestseller yet”, we define a writer as “somebody who writes down about 1000 words a day”. It’s a measure of our insecurity. And we are all so very insecure. It’s a lonely life and we look for all the validation we can get. And in the absence of Amazon reviews (hint, hint) and massive sales (even bigger hint), we look to our word count for the validation we aren’t getting anywhere else.
Here we are, five days into the New Year. How’s it going for you?
We started the year’s tango early with an afternoon of dancing locally on New Year’s Day but I must admit that, with that on top of the excesses of New Year’s Eve, Tuesday was a bit of a blur. Despite this, it’s been a good New Year so far, with a lovely review of Eat the Poor turning up on amazon.com (“Two of the best written characters ever”) and one for Something Wicked from Rosie Amber’s Book Review Team (“Clever, with sharp edged humour that is sure to delight”). It’s fantastic to see my Galbraith & Pole Urban Fantasy books getting some love. Will 2024 be the year they take off?
Speaking of Urban Fantasy, my son gave me three short graphic novels spun off from Ben Aaronovich’s Rivers of London series. I do love his books (there’s a review HERE), even if the plots are becoming insanely convoluted. I discovered them when a friend said that the Galbraith & Pole books reminded him of them. There’s a definite similarity, but I swear I wrote G&P before I read Aaronovitch.
A more weighty Xmas gift was ‘A Mohawk Memoir from the War of 1812’. It’s hardly a fun read but I’m reading my way into that war because there is just a chance that James Burke might find himself in North America. It will be a while though. It’s going to take time before I know enough about the 1812 conflict for me to feel comfortable writing about it.
That’s all for the future, anyway. For now I am quite enjoying not having to get up and pound at the word processor. It turns out that while I was writing two books last year there was a certain amount of domestic administration that wasn’t getting done, so 2024 is going to see quite a lot in the way of builders and decorators.
Like a lot of people (at least among my friends) I felt that 2023 didn’t fill me with enthusiasm. I had fun certainly. But life wasn’t notably better at the end of 2023 than at the beginning. I’m hoping that a certain amount of clearing away of dead wood and making some space in life could mean a much more exciting 2024. I live in hope, anyway.
Does anybody else have exciting plans for the year ahead?
