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A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang @ the British Library

Want to see the oldest printed book which contains its own date of publication (868 AD)? The earliest known atlas of the night sky produce by any civilisation? See a copy of the Diamond Sutra written in the scribe’s own blood? Read an angry letter written by a wife abandoned by her husband 1,400 years ago? Learn about the life of a 10-year-old Buddhist nun?

If all this pulls your daisy, then come to this small but beautifully designed and fascinating exhibition at the British Library.

Scroll in Sanskrit and Khotanese embellished with an opulent silk painting of birds facing each other (943 AD) © British Library

Background history

The Silk Road was a term invented by German explorer Ferdinand von Richthofen in the 1870s to describe the tangle of trade routes stretching across central Asia from China in the East to the Mediterranean in the west. The silk roads went past the Gobi desert, split up to skirt the Taklamakan desert to the north and south, continued on through the Pamir mountains to Kashgar, then on to Samarkand in modern Uzbekistan, through Persia, Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean in the West. At several points offshoots went south into Tibet or India.

The heyday

The network of silk roads began with the expansion of the Han dynasty (202 BC to 220 AD) into Central Asia around 100 BC, and grew and thrived until the tenth century AD. The blockbuster exhibition about them currently on at the British Museum takes its golden age to have been around 500 to 1000 AD.

Silk roads, plural

These days, modern archaeologists and historians refer to the silk roadS very much in the plural 1) in order to take in subsidiary routes, 2) to extend its length eastwards to the coast of China and Korea and westwards to take in Europe, 3) to include the contemporaneous sea routes from China to the Persian Gulf. All this is explained in some length at the British Museum show. However, this exhibition at the British Library focuses more narrowly on the roads’ core zone, from Chang’an in the East to Samarkand in the West.

Map of the silk roads © the British Library

The significance of Dunhuang

As you can see from this map, if you were heading west from China one of the major splits in the route occurred at a place called Dunhuang, where the route split into two roads skirting to the north and south of the uncrossable, huge and ever-shifting Taklamakan Desert.

The way stations along the northern and southern routes consisted of oases created by water in streams and rivers flowing down from the high mountains of the Tien Shan in the north and the Kunlun Shan in the south. According to Peter Hopkirk in his book ‘Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, one of the reasons the silk roads fell into disuse – apart from political turmoil in China and widespread banditry – was because many of these watersources dried up or moved or were filled with sand and silt. As they were abandoned, sand from the great Taklamakan blew over the ruined settlements and buried them for centuries.

Back to Dunhuang, it also was an oasis town, the last one in China (if you were heading west) the first one in China (if you were arriving from the east) and the place where the two major routes round the Taklamakan divided (or rejoined). It was established in 111 BC as a military outpost, fortified with defensive walls and watchtowers.

Buried treasure

Unlike the oasis settlements lining the desert Dunhuang was never abandoned when the roads fell into disuse, but continued to be a populated settlement up to the present day. But over the troubled centuries much of its silk road heritage was lost, forgotten, covered in sand. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century that a stream of explorer-archaeologists realised that there was buried treasure waiting to be dug up in this vast and remote part of central Asia. The story of the scramble for loot between representatives of Western colonial powers who identified and excavated sites right across the region is told in Hopkirk’s book.

Confessional book of the Manichean Uyghurs (ninth to tenth century) © British Library Board

This is one of the most important and complete manuscripts among the Old Uyghur Manichaean texts, the Xuastuanift, a confessional book of Manichaean Uyghurs, on display for the first time. It is a repentance prayer known as the Xuastwanift, which is widely used by the followers of Mani (216 to 277), a Persian prophet. It is around 4.5 metres long, written in Old Turkic in Manichaean script. The scroll demonstrates the eastwards spread of Manichaeism among the Uyghurs, whose West Uyghur Kingdom was tightly connected to Dunhuang.

The Mogao caves

One of the unique things about Dunhuang is the proximity of the astonishing complex of Buddhist caves, the Mogao cave complex, 15 miles to the south-east. We now know that during the silk road era nearly 500 caves were carved into the cliff face here, most of them by Buddhists, many decorated with beautiful multicoloured frescoes and containing artefacts and manuscripts.

The guardian Wang

Aware of a long tradition of Buddhist worship and relics in the region, the local Chinese authorities at the turn of the 20th century had put a Buddhist monk named Wang Yuanlu in charge of sites around the town. As a devout monk Wang earnestly wanted to raise money to regenerate and preserve the caves and regularly toured and examined them.

Photo of the priest, Wang Yuanlu, taken by Aurel Stein and included in his photographic album, 1907 © British Library Board

Wang discovers the Library Cave

One day Wang discovered a false wall at the back of one of these caves, chipped it away and made one of the great archaeological discoveries of all time. For in this cave, subsequently named The Library Cave and now more prosaically referred to as Cave 17, he discovered tens of thousands of ancient scrolls, manuscripts, printed documents, paintings, diagrams, histories, calendars and star charts from the fifth to the eleventh centuries, rolled up and stored higgledy-piggledy.

These scrolls contained an extraordinary range and diversity of documents, on a wide array of subjects, from huge religious scrolls to personal letters, from diplomatic documents to textbooks on astrology, from wills to instructions for the souls of the dead.

They are written in a surprisingly range of contemporary languages, such as Tibetan, Sogdian, Chinese, Old Uyghur, Phags-pa, Tangut and Turkic.

And they attest not only the predominant religion of the region, Buddhism, but many other faiths including Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and Christianity which, because of them, we now know thrived in the area.

French archaeologist Paul Pelliot examines manuscripts in the library cave (photo by expedition photographer Charles Nouette, 1908)

Western archaeologists pounce

The western explorers I mentioned above, who made various expeditions throughout the 1890s and early 1900s and whose stories are told in Hopkirk’s book, soon heard rumours about a cave of magical discoveries and made the arduous journey to Dunhuang.

Here the western archaeologists, starting with Marc Aurel Stein, schmoozed the site’s curator, Wang, offering him money, technical assistance, promises to renovate the big painted caves and so on, and talked Wang into parting with thousands and thousands of these priceless scrolls. Crates full of them were dispatched by pony back to Kashgar, by train across Russia and then onto the capitals of Europe. Eventually these priceless manuscripts were scattered across 30 or so collections in 8 or so western nations, chief among them the British Museum in London.

Collectors’ guilt

Two world wars and the decolonisation of most of most of the European empires later, many of these institutions felt guilty about being party to such epic looting of China’s cultural heritage. In 1973 the British Library was founded. In the 1980s the British Museum handed over its hoard of documents from the Library Cave to the British Library.

Founding of the International Dunhuang Programme

In 1994, after much discussion between the various European and American institutions which owned documents from the library cave, the British Library was instrumental in setting up the International Dunhuang Programme (IDP). The IDP is a pioneering international collaboration that brings together online collections from the Eastern Silk Roads and promotes understandings of the history and cultures of the region.

That was 30 years and so this small but beautifully formed exhibition marks the thirtieth birthday of the International Dunhuang Programme. (All this is explained in the final part of the exhibition, which includes a timeline of the events I’ve just summarised.)

The exhibition

The exhibition showcases over 50 manuscripts, printed documents and pictorial works, most though not all, from the ‘Library Cave’ in the cave complex of Mogao and on public display for the first time.

The exhibition is contained in one long room downstairs. The light levels are low to preserve these ancient manuscripts which contributes to the subterranean, treasure-trove vibe.

The show is divided into ten sections, consisting of eight display cases (4 down the middle, 2 embedded in either wall). At the far end there’s a partition cleverly made from shelves piled high with rolled-up paper scrolls, recreating the effect of the original treasure cave. And off to one side there’s a bench seating about 5 people in front of a video projected on the wall which shows general views of the desert, the Mogoao cave complex, and handy maps showing the shifting silk roads and indicating the spread of religious beliefs along them. You can make out most of the elements I’ve listed in the photo below (video on the right, display cases down the middle, the scroll partition is visible at the far left).

Installation view of ‘A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang’ at the British Library

Topics and stories

The key thing about the displays is that the curators have had the bright idea of dividing the documents into sections grouped around typical types of profession from medieval central Asian society. Each case is named after one of these characteristic professions of the time, constellates around the story of a specific named individual who we know of from a scroll, and then groups around it half a dozen other manuscripts from the same subject area. Thus the cases are named after:

The Merchant
The Diplomat
The Fortune-Teller
The Artist
The Scribe
The Printer
The Buddhist Nun
The Lay Buddhist

Installation view of ‘A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang’ at the British Library showing a typical display case, in this instance scrolls relating to The Lay Buddhist (see below) (photo by the author)

As is my usual practice, all the text which follows in italics is direct quotation from the curators’ wall labels.

The Merchant (unnamed)

As a key trade centre on the Silk Roads, Dunhuang attracted merchants from as far afield as central Asia and India. Among these were the Sogdians, a group of Iranian people who dominated commerce in the region from the 4th to the 8th century. From their motherland near Samarkand (present-day Uzbekistan), Sogdian merchants established settlements stretching all the way to China.

Map showing location of Sogdiana © the British Library

This allowed them to act as agents for fellow Sogdians back home and along the trade network. Sogdian merchants sold many prized goods and transmitted religious ideas from their own culture and that of nearby regions.

Earthenware figure from China (7th to 10th century) probably representing a central Asian merchant, possibly of Sogdian origins, as suggested by his large beard and conical hat (photo by the author)

This section focuses on the letter written by an unnamed Sogdian merchant based near Dunhuang, which was addressed to two of his business partners in Samarkand, over 3,000 km to the west. It warns them about the devastating effects of political instability in China. The letter describes the famine that resulted from the sack of several Chinese cities by the Huns, a nomadic people from central Asia.

It also includes a letter from a wife who was abandoned by her husband at Dunhuang and who writes to reproach him in 313 AD. Her name was Miwnay and the letter tells us she moved from Samarkand to Dunhuang with her merchant husband Nanai-dhat. This letter was found in a lost mailbag and complains how, not having not heard from him in three years, Miwnay and her daughter Shayn have become destitute and forced to serve a local Chinese household.

“Behold, I am living wretchedly, and I consider myself dead. […] I obeyed your command and came to Dunhuang and did not observe my mother’s bidding or that of my brothers. Surely the gods were angry with me on the day when I did your bidding! I would rather be a dog’s or a pig’s wife than yours!” (Translated by Nicholas Sims-Williams)

Emphasising the theme of multiculturalism, this section also includes:

one of the oldest surviving Zoroastrian scriptures, consisting of a text about the prophet Zoroaster (born between 1500 and 500 BC) and a transcription of the holy ‘Ashem Vohu’ prayer
a letter from a Christian priest named Sergius to a Turkic government official based at Dunhuang

Dunhuang Limes

I need to digress for a moment about the Dunhuang Limes.

The Dunhuang Limes is a series of military sites spread over a distance of more than 140 miles, and are considered to be parts of the westernmost portion of the Great Wall. The sites begin in Anxi to the east of Dunhuang and extend to the Lop Nor desert to the west, and date back as far as the 2nd century BC [see the map at the top of this review for the line of the Great Wall].

The term limes, usually used to describe Roman military roads and their fortifications, was assigned by Aurel Stein to this series of watchtowers, forts, storehouses, beacon towers, walls, and other defensive structures. The items excavated from the sites reveal much about the daily life and administration of the garrisons stationed at the frontiers of the Chinese Empire. These items include tools, stationery, pottery, arrowheads and textiles, as well as important written documents including the Sogdian ‘ancient letters’.

Hence the shoe:

A shoe made of hemp from Dunhuang Limes © the British Museum

This utilitarian everyday object serves as a poignant reminder of the early settlers who resided along the Dunhuang Limes. These defensive walls and watchtowers, constructed north of the town, protected the territory then ruled by the Chinese Han Empire (206 BC to 220 AD). Doubling as farmers, the soldiers transformed the rugged landscape into cultivated land, while monitoring the desert Silk Roads for potential attacks.

The booklets

Another digression to mention that each of the characters or job types is introduced not only via the usual object labels but in nifty printed booklets (attached to each display case) made of a kind of artificial vellum and decorated with patterns from the period. Some thought and effort went into these and they’re very stylish.

One of the stylish fake-vellum booklets which contain object information in ‘A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang’ at the British Library (photo by the author)

The Diplomat: Ca Kima-sana

From the 10th century, the rulers of Dunhuang strengthened their ties with Khotan, a central Asian kingdom located 1,800 km to the west. Sent by their state, Khotanese envoys frequently travelled to the oasis to help maintain close diplomatic relations, especially by seeking marriage alliances.

Map showing location of Khotan © the British Library

Khotanese delegations varied in size and were hosted by the local government. Their members, who spoke an Indo-Iranian dialect, had to operate in a multilingual environment. They were actively engaged in Dunhuang’s Buddhist community as patrons and helped spread medical and geographical knowledge during their visits.

This section is named for two figures: one is Sam Khina Hvam Samgaka, a high-ranking Khotanese official who commissioned a devotional scroll, wishing for a long life and the well-being of his relatives. The manuscript is over 21 metres long and contains six different Buddhist texts. It was embellished with an opulent silk painting.

Scroll in Sanskrit and Khotanese, over 21 metres long, embellished with an opulent silk painting (943 AD) © British Library

The other named figure is the diplomat Ca Kima-sana, also known as Zhang Jinshan. He is represented by a long scroll in which he explains that he led a delegation of over 100 people to secure the hand of a Chinese princess for their king. He also recounts the religious activities he undertook at Dunhuang in exchange for safe return. This section also includes:

a tenth-century Chinese-Khotanese phrasebook
an account of hospitality given to foreign visitors at Dunhuang between 979 and 982
a Khotanese translation of the Siddhasara, a medical text attributed to the ancient Indian physician Ravigupta

The Fortune-Teller: Shenzhi, the Yin and Yang Master

Fortune-tellers, whose practices were regulated by the local administration, helped both the ruling elite and ordinary people navigate daily life. They advised on anything from the best time to start a construction project to the best direction to take on a journey. They also guided people when choosing a life partner, looking for lost things or strategising for battles.

Fortune-tellers produced calendars and other astrological works. These were considered a form of scientific knowledge, normally controlled by China’s imperial court. At the same time, divination traditions from central Asia spread along the Silk Roads and converged at Dunhuang, leading to a unique blend of approaches.

This section includes a striking almanac:

Official almanac showing the 12 spirits of the zodiac animals, portrayed as officials with animals in their hats (978 AD) © British Library Board

An almanac is a yearly publication that typically contains information such as astronomical data and astrological predictions. This incomplete document for the year 978 is a copy of the almanac originally printed by the imperial Chinese Bureau of Astronomy. It shows the 12 spirits of the zodiac animals, portrayed as officials with animals in their hat. They surround the deity Taisui, who is associated with Jupiter and governs people’s destiny in a given year.

This section also contains:

the longest surviving manuscript text in the Old Turkic script, the Irk Bitig or Book of Omens, a 4-metre-long Tibetan divination scroll written in Old Turkic which contains 65 divinations
the oldest star chart from any civilisation which depicts 1,345 stars across 13 maps, dating to the second half of the 7th century
a 4-metre long divination scroll in Tibetan, featuring 12 divination diagrams in the Chinese astrological tradition
eight diagrams linked to a divination form known as the ‘Nine Palaces’ which indicate lucky and unlucky dates and directions for construction work, in a scroll which belonged to Shenzhi,
a Yin and Yang Master and a monk at the Longxing Temple

The Printer: Lei Yanmei, the woodblock carver

Using a method derived from earlier stamping processes, printers chiselled content in reverse into woodblocks. They then inked those blocks and impressed them onto paper. The quality of the prints thus depended on their woodcarving skills. Printing technology emerged in China around the 7th century, about 700 years before appearing in Europe. The work of printers quickly became essential for Buddhists, as a way of enabling the large-scale reproduction of sacred texts and images. As printing spread to East Asia and to central Asia along the Silk Roads, printers set up many local workshops. While some places, like Sichuan, became major printing centres, Dunhuang printers also produced, on a much smaller scale, copies of Buddhist scriptures, prayer sheets and almanacs.

The Diamond Sutra, the world’s earliest printed book with a date, 868 AD

This 5 metre scroll is the oldest complete printed book with a date. Preceding the finely carved text is a depiction of the Buddha preaching to his elder disciple, Subhuti, amid a large assembly. Such sophisticated design attests to a mature printing industry, calling for collaboration between highly skilled artists, scribes and woodcarvers. It is thus possible it came from Chengdu, Sichuan, which was a major printing centre at the time.

This section also includes:

a text containing numerous identical images of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara
a woodblock printed prayer sheet with pigments
a booklet of Diamond Sutra translated by Kumarajiva

The Scribe: Ke’u Monley

Between 786 and 848, Dunhuang came under Tibetan rule. It was transformed into a bustling centre for scribes who worked for the Tibetan empire.

The Tibetan Empire in the 8th to 9th centuries © the British Library

Local scribes, some of whom were from mixed Chinese and Tibetan parentage, produced thousands of copies of Buddhist sutras in Tibetan. These works, presented in a range of formats, were even distributed to monastic libraries in central Tibet. The rules of the scriptorium were stringent and scribes had to manage the resources they received carefully for fear of punishment. They were also taught to write in different styles, tailored to their tasks, such as transcribing sacred texts or drafting official documents.

This section includes:

old Tibetan annals giving a year-by-year account for the period 641 to 764, the earliest surviving historical source on the Tibetan empire
a bilingual manuscript which features the Tibetan version of the Lankavatara Sutra in red ink alongside a Chinese commentary in black ink
a large book of Buddhist scripture titled The Perfection of Wisdom Sutra
a document giving information about the scribe Ke’u Monley who belonged to a team of scribes entrusted with copying the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra for the Tibetan prince
along with some original scribal tools, namely a glue brush and a wooden pen

Tibetan woodslip pen (eighth to tenth century) © British Library Board

The artist: Dong Baode

Artists from different regions shaped Dunhuang’s creative landscape. The projects they were commissioned for ranged from adorning the Mogao Caves with breathtaking murals and stucco figures, to crafting portable paintings on silk, hemp and paper. Surviving sketches, preparatory drawings and tools like stencils offer a window into artists’ creative process. While workshops likely existed earlier, a government-supported painting academy emerged in the 10th century, providing official backing for artistic endeavours. Most artists remained anonymous unless they reached a particularly elevated status. They combined visual traditions and techniques from along the Silk Roads, leaving an enduring legacy through their contributions.

Sketch of protective deities (tenth century) © British Library Board

These two figures, depicted on thick paper, stand dynamically on rocks, almost mirroring each other. Precise lines render their flowing scarves, flexed muscles and facial hair. This type of sketch served as a reference for artists and could have been resized as needed to fit across various compositions. Very similar illustrations are found in Dunhuang manuscripts.

This section contains:

a stencil of a Buddha figure
a scroll relating to the master painter named b who other documents tell us managed a local painting guild, controlled and deployed painting resources
a 1.2 metre tall black ink study representing Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion

The Lay Buddhist: the 80-year-old who wrote in blood

Buddhism left the largest imprint at Dunhuang, although faiths such as Daoism, Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism were also present. With the spread of Buddhism on the Silk Roads, the oasis became a major hub for Buddhist worship and pilgrimage from the 4th century onwards. The worship of images, through portable paintings and other media, held a central place in Buddhism. Copying scriptures was also paramount to Buddhist devotees, as a way of accumulating spiritual benefits. While wealthy patrons could commission elaborately decorated manuscripts, ordinary people wrote sacred texts themselves. Manuscripts served various functions, as reflected by the variety of formats and languages they came in. They could be chanted during ceremonies, worn as talismans and employed in memorial services.

Illustrated Sutra of the Ten Kings (tenth century) © British Library Board

This scripture depicts the purgatory-like period following death. The Ten Kings, shown as magistrates seated at desks, assess the deeds of the departed. The last king spins the wheel of rebirth, deciding how they will be reincarnated. This handscroll is almost 5 metres long. It was likely produced to assist a dead relative in their voyage to the next life and used during memorial services.

This section also contains:

a decorative copy of the Great Parinirvana Sutra
a miniature Tibetan scroll less than 5cm wide, containing verses about the path to liberation from the sufferings of death and rebirth, and a prayer to end the reincarnation cycle
a scroll of the Nilakantha Dharani, dharanis being incantations believed to be protective and to generate spiritual benefits when chanted
a banner painting of a bodhisattva
and three small booklets of the Diamond Sutra in Chinese written by an unknown 80-year-old devotee using his own blood as ink

The Buddhist Nun: Deng Ziyi

Buddhism gradually changed the lives of female devotees by offering them a role beyond those of daughter, mother and wife: they could become nuns. Dunhuang documents give us a glimpse into their experiences, from joining as novices, sometimes before the regulatory age of 12, to embracing the rules of monastic discipline upon being ordained. Between 800 and 1000, there were more nuns than monks living in the town. Censuses provide a sense of the community structure and demographics within nunneries at the time. It was not uncommon for nuns to retain some possessions after embracing monastic life. They could also play a significant role in the local lay community.

Rules of a women’s association (959 AD) © British Library Board

This circular is over 1,000 years old. It defines the objectives, bylaws and structure of a women’s club, established to promote friendship among women. All 15 signatories agreed to these rules by signing a mark under their name. The association was overseen by a nun, underscoring the influential role of nuns within the Dunhuang community.

This section includes:

information about Deng Ziyi who became a nun aged just 10 in 914, including the official permit granting her permission to become a novice
a finely calligraphed scroll copied in 543 by a nun named Xianyu listing the voluntary commitments for fully ordained Buddhist women
a tenth century list of nuns at the Dasheng Temple, the largest of five nunneries at Dunhuang, which had a total of 209 members
a votive painting depicting the 11-headed manifestation of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion
the will, written in 865, of the nun Linghui, written in the presence of witnesses, including close relatives and two officials

The caves

As I mentioned, at the far end of the exhibition space is an alcove partitioned off by a floor-to-ceiling stand containing scores of rolled-up paper mimicking the scrolls found in the famous Library Cave.

Installation view of ‘A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang’ at the British Library showing the scroll partition (photo by the author)

This space gives more detail about the caves, namely:

Away from the busy streets of Dunhuang, 25 km southeast of the town, is a large Buddhist site made up of hundreds of richly decorated caves called the Mogao Caves. It is here that, in 1900, the Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu found a small room containing tens of thousands of manuscripts, paintings and other objects dating from the 5th to 11th century. Known as the ‘Library Cave’ or Cave 17, this extraordinary time capsule is one of the world’s greatest archaeological discoveries. It has revolutionised our knowledge of the Silk Roads, offering glimpses of religious and secular everyday life. Many of the objects in the exhibition are from Cave 17. They were acquired by archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein and taken to the UK.

There’s:

a copy of Stein’s photo album open to the photo he took of Wang
a timeline of key events starting at Wang’s discovery of cave 17 in 1900 and continuing up to the opening of this exhibition
more objects including:
- a confessional book of the Manichaean Uyghurs
- three Buddhist ritual objects, being: a paper-cut flower; a carved wooden figure of a Buddha; a Tibetan tantric ritual implement
a small sculpture by modern artist Xie Xiaoze titled ‘Rain of Languages (Buddhist Sutras)’

Rain of Languages (Buddhist Sutras) by Xie Xiaoze (2023) in ‘A Silk Road Oasis’ at the British Library

Most usefully, there was a small monitor showing photos of some of the decorated caves. These are mind blowing, showing beautifully preserved caves decorated from floor-to-ceiling with complicated colourful motifs and often including one or more statues of the Buddha or Boddhisatvas. I think these should have been included in the short film projection on the wall at the start of the exhibition, they’re too stunning and important to be stashed away here, and on a fairly tiny screen, smaller than a laptop screen.

Photo from the slideshow of photos of the interiors of some of the Mogao cave, complete with explanatory text. Courtesy of Dunhuang Academy, Photo by Sun Zhijun

In fact the friend I showed them to said these are stunning, mind-blowing, amazing – they should have been blown up and printed on the walls life-size. Maybe, although space is limited in this little downstairs gallery. But they certainly impress on you the huge culturual importance of the cave complex, the extravagantly beautiful carvings and frescoes, make you realise it’s up there with the Egyptian Valley of the Kings in terms of priceless decorated ancient interiors.

Music

I haven’t yet mentioned that this room packed full of priceless manuscripts also features a mellow and evocative soundscape. This has been created by a Dr Xiaoshi Wei using recordings from the British Library’s vast sound archive and from the China Database for Traditional Music with a view to recreating the sounds of the ancient Silk Road. Birds sing, gongs sound, monks chant, adding to the atmosphere of peace, calm, civilisation and enlightenment.

This is a small-ish exhibition, but full of wonders and revelations.

Related reviews

Silk Roads @ the British Museum (September 2024)

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by Simon on November 2, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, History

Tagged Anxi, archaeologists, Archaeology, Ashem Vohu, astrology, Aurel Stein, Avalokiteshvara, bodhisattva, Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, Book of Omens, British Library, British Museum, Buddhism, Buddhist nun, Ca Kima-sana, calendars, Cave 17, Central Asia, Charles Nouette, Chengdu, China, China Database for Traditional Music, Chinese, Chinese Bureau of Astronomy, Chinese Empire, Chinese-Khotanese phrasebook, Christianity, Daoism, Dark Ages, Deng Ziyi, dharani, diagrams, Diamond Sutra, Dong Baode, Dr Xiaoshi Wei, Dunhuang, Dunhuang Limes, early middle ages, exhibition, Ferdinand von Richthofen, Great Wall of China, Han Empire, histories, IDP, Indo-Iranian, International Dunhuang Programme, Iraq, Irk Bitig, Kashgar, Ke’u Monley, Khotan, Khotanese, Kumarajiva, Kunlun Shan, Lankavatara Sutra, Lei Yanmei, Library Cave, Longxing Temple, Lop Nor, Mani, Manichaean, Manichaean Uyghurs, Manichaeism, Manichean Uyghurs, manicheanism, manuscript atlas, Marc Aurel Stein, Middle Ages, Miwnay, Mogao caves, Nicholas Sims-Williams, Old Turkic, Old Uyghur, paintings, Pamir mountains, Paul Pelliot, Persia, Peter Hopkirk, Phags-pa, printed book, Rain of Languages, Ravigupta, Sam Khina Hvam Samgaka, Samarkand, Sanskrit, scrolls, Sergius, Shayn, Shenzhi, Sichuan, Siddhasara, Silk Road, Silk Roads, Sinkiang, Sogdian, star charts, Subhuti, Sun Zhijun, Sutra of the Ten Kings, Taisui, Taklamakan desert, Tangut, the Dasheng Temple, The Diamond Sutra, the Great Parinirvana Sutra, The Huns, the Mogao Caves, the Nilakantha Dharani, The Perfection of Wisdom Sutra, the Xuastuanift, Tibet, Tibetan empire, Tien Shan, Turkic, Uyghurs, Uzbekistan, Wang Yuanlu, West Uyghur Kingdom, Xianyu, Xie Xiaoze, Zhang Jinshan, zodiac, Zoroaster, Zoroastrianism

Posted by Simon on November 2, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/11/02/a-silk-road-oasis-life-in-ancient-dunhuang-the-british-library/

Stand Up Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas (1975)

His eyes were red. His penis hung like a limp lighthouse. He was a poor sight.
(Stand Up Virgin Soldiers, page 4)

Third in the ‘Virgin Soldiers’ trilogy and the least satisfactory. It opens with an extremely brief, 3-page prologue telling us that it is 1974 and the hero of the first two novels, John Brigg, is back in Singapore, remembering being the original virgin soldier doing his National Service in 1949/50, i.e. 25 years earlier. Now he’s back as a middle-aged staff sergeant, ‘a ghost of other days’, sent to help supervise the shutting down of the British garrison in Singapore.

But barely have we taken this in and accustomed ourselves to Singapore 1975 than… surprise, surprise, the entire text flashes back to 1950 and the original Virgin Soldiers moment, in fact right back to the exact moment when the first novel ended. If you remember, the original Virgin Soldiers novel ended with Brigg and the other surviving conscripts, their service complete, leaving the barracks at Panglin in a big lorry en route to Singapore to catch a boat home.

In this rewriting of the story, they get to the port only to discover that, due to the unexpected start of the Korean War (25 June 1950), their period of service has been extended by six months (pages 5, 12, 22). Thus, with a stroke of his pen, Thomas is able to rustle up six more months of virgin soldier narrative to bolt onto the end of his original narrative. Well, he was a business-like writer and the brand was selling well. So why not?

Cast

Page numbers are when we first hear a character speak or get a decent description of them, as opposed to just a namecheck.

John Brigg – our hero, all the way from Kilburn, north London
Harold Tasker – his best mate and wingman (p.7), from Shoreditch (p.284)
Lantry
Sandy Jacobs – Glasgow Jew
Gravy Browning – table tennis addict
Patsy Foster and Sidney Villiers – gay couple, their camp dialogue reminiscent of Kenneth Williams, Villiers has a lisp (p.75)
Corporal Eggington – fan of fancy ointments and porn mags, nicknamed ‘the Calamine Kid’, aged 30 (p.224), very fat (p.257)
Private Quentin Fundrum – looks like an unkempt tree, surprisingly learned and articulate (p.96), nicknamed ‘Brainy’ (p.279)
Private Conway – from Belfast, jigsaw addict (p.83)
Lance-Corporal Williams – reading through a complete set of encyclopedias (p.82)
Corporal Field – big Siegfried Sassoon fan with a flat Midlands accent, five feet two tall
one-eyed Lieutenant Colonel Bromley Pickering (p.21) – his wife is the Southern Counties’ Women’s League Champion jam-maker (p.88)
his stammering Adjutant, Reginald ‘Reggie’
Regimental Sergeant Major Woods – who suffers from bad feet
Sergeant Wellbeloved – roundly hated by all
Lieutenant Grainger – freshly posted (p.19), 20 years old (p.75)
Lieutenant Wilson – a short stodgy officer from the pay department (p.19)
Longley – a slow-thinking private with vicious acne and a tendency to lean to one side due to a bad hip
Lieutenant Perkins – officer in charge of the Pay office where Brigg and the rest work
Sergeant Bass – NCO in charge of the Pay office where Brigg and the rest work (p.79)
Major Bilking – the medical officer (p.103)
Bernice ‘Bernie’ Harrison – Cockney nurse (p.114), stocky, ‘pretty but podgy’ (p.274)
Corporal Lunes – the medical orderly, rumoured to be mad (p.127)
Sergeant-Major Ringbold – commanding the mongrel force brought together to protect the depot at Johore Baru (p.152)
Sparkles – one of the contingent at Johore (p.155), astonishingly ignorant and stupid man, from Walsall
Corporal Dobbie – Catering Corps man at Johore (p.184), from Dorset, shot dead in the attack in the Rajit
Miss Phillimore – mad old lady who sells Brigg tennis gear (p.231)

The book’s cons

Tired

Stand Up Virgin Soldiers is OK, very funny in some places, but it feels tired, tired of itself, like the later Carry On films. It doesn’t help that it starts in an atmosphere of general gloom and depression as all the squaddies mooch around, stunned by the news they have to serve an extra six months.

Reviving finished relationships

Nor the way all the relationships, such as with the hated Sergeant Wellbeloved or the sentimental CO Colonel Pickering, which had reached a natural end in the first novel, have to be revived, pumped up like leaky old bicycle tyres. While other relationships – such as with Phillipa whose love affair dominates the first book – are never mentioned, disappear without trace.

Resurrecting Lucy

The worst resurrection of all is of ‘Juicy Lucy’. This was the nickname given to the Chinese prostitute (herself aged only 20, p.169) who showed Brigg how to have sex i.e. took his virginity in the first book. In a very intense, prolonged and moving passage in the first book, Brigg discovers she’s dead, has been kicked to death by squaddies. This (believe it or not) suited the edgy feel of the first novel, which ends in a welter of violence, but also felt complicatedly appropriate for her role in his sex life, somehow. It evoked complicated, intense and tragic emotions.

Anyway, in a move which feels cheap and shallow, Thomas simply resurrects her. Writes a sentence saying it wasn’t her but some other hooker who was kicked to death, Lucy had just gone off with a rich businessman for a while, then she came back. Which, at a stroke, destroys the intense psychological resonance her death created in the first book (p.29).

Forgetting what we’ve learned

Also, trying to get back into the mindset of Brigg 1950 requires the huge effort of putting out of your minds everything we read about Brigg 1970, as described in the second book of the trilogy, ‘Onward Virgin Soldiers’ – about his wife, her tragic death, his problematic son, his posting to Hong Kong, and the touching love affair with a lonely American woman. Basically, there’s a whole lot of stowing away what we know from books 1 and 2 of the trilogy which is required before we can really settle down to engage with this retread.

Sexism

Lastly, pretty much all the attitudes displayed by the swaggering protagonists of the book – Private John Brigg, his wingman, Harold Tasker, and the new character, the American named Clay – are completely and utterly unacceptable these days.

Indeed, from one perspective the book amounts to a sustained exercise in the objectification of every woman it describes. It’s a kind of embodiment of the male gaze, as our testosterone-driven heroes size up every woman they encounter, assessing their figures and features in purely sexual terms.

A tiny Chinese girl from the village, brown, calm-faced, walked by them, two tin cans hung from a bamboo pole on her shoulder. Also on the pole was a small lantern to light her path. Both men let her go by and then turned to watch her backside, tidy and tight in her peasant trousers. (p.123)

Lots and lots of moments like that.

Racism

And, because they spend a lot of time going to bars frequented entirely by local prostitutes, you can add outrageous racism to the charge sheet as well.

She had good legs for a Chinese girl, not splayed or muscular, and they now slid lazily from beneath the robe as she sat. (p.41)

Plus plenty of other stereotyping of the native Malays, the Chinese, the Indians and so on. It’s not deliberate, conscious, or hateful white supremacist racism – generally the opposite, as the Chinese, Malays and especially Indians are generally shown to be much cleverer, calmer and more sensible than the irresponsible, incompetent white soldiers (the only person who reacts sensibly in the Rajit shooting scene is the Indian shopkeeper, p.190) – but I think it comes under the kind of passive racial stereotyping which is, these days unacceptable in any context. And calling all the natives ‘Bongos’ doesn’t help (p.163). Or ‘wogs’ (p.251).

The Chinese eye may be narrow but it observes much. (p.255)

Ouch. Maybe this is why my local library service doesn’t have a single copy of any of Thomas’s 27 novels. Maybe someone quietly burned them all.

Except that this is now, from our perspective, a historical novel, as it was when he wrote it in 1974 or so, harking back to 1950. That’s 73 years ago and, presumably, how people spoke back then. Thomas is a novelist not a moral philosopher, and his novels contain all kinds of uncomfortable attitudes, make a point of ‘subverting’ bourgeois behaviour, telling uncomfortable truths. In a way, what’s surprising about it is the lack of racist attitudes; a handful of unacceptable terms, maybe, but by and large Briggs and the sympathetic characters like the natives and often acknowledge their superiority.

And also this is an old-style comedy, largely made up of familiar stereotypes of everyone, extending just as much to the white characters – the bumbling colonel, the posh adjutant, the sadistic sergeant major, and a host of regional stereotypes among the squaddies (the slow Northerner, the depressed Midlander, the peevish Welshman, the stingy Scot and so on).

Homophobia

While we’re listing Thomas’s sins against contemporary sensibilities, I suppose I should add the stereotyping of the two ‘pansies’ among the squaddies, Patsy Foster and Sidney Villiers. What surprised me in the original novel and in this one, too, is the very relaxed attitudes of all the other squaddies and NCOs to this pair i.e. a bit of banter, a few jokes, but they get off much easier than a lot of the other soldiers who are mercilessly teased, lampooned and sometimes beaten up. Whatever anyone says, Patsy and Sidney ‘were never put out’ (p.74), and always ready with a disarming riposte. Their occasional snippets of camp dialogue or witty put-downs of thick officers reminded me of Kenneth Williams.

The pros

That’s the negatives. As to the positives, Thomas is a very amiable writer. He just gets on with it and so do his characters. Somehow the original novel felt full of the vim and breakthrough excitement of the 1960s. This one feels like the tired sexist humour of the 1970s. Modern young readers shouldn’t waste their time on it. I only bought it to complete my reading of the Virgin Soldiers trilogy which I only started reading because I was looking for fiction about the Malaya Emergency.

I’ve registered all the cons listed above but I’m a completer-finished so had to relax and enjoy it for what it is, 1970s middle-brow entertainment, as packed with unacceptable attitudes as all those 1970s sitcoms. The complete haplessness of a bunch of young men in the army far from home kept reminding me of the sitcom ‘It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum’, which was first broadcast in 1974, and as packed with (sometimes very uncomfortable) stereotypes. A guilty pleasure.

But, despite everything, it is often very funny. Thomas is a gifted comedian. I smiled and I laughed. In these grim times, that’s a gift.

The main events

Mostly the narrative is made up of a series of comic scenes. The squaddies lament the extension of their contracts. Brigg and Tasker go to a bar-brothel looking for Juicy Lucy, dance with a few hookers, make casually racist, sexist jokes, then Brigg goes to find Lucy at her apartment and discovers she is still alive! She cries. They make love etc. Pretty much all the drama and emotion surrounding her from the first book is, thus, destroyed.

The arrival of Morris Morris, a mountain of a man, Welsh and extremely pissed off at being conscripted to fight ‘SOME FUCKING WAR’, as he puts it, a manic-depressive giant, a big rich comic character (p.47).

Tense but ultimately farcical raid on the local village looking for Chinese terrorists (CTs). Farce when there’s an outburst of machine gun fire and the entire troop throw themselves on the muddy ground in a panic, then Chinese toddlers come up to look at the funny white men lying in the mud and some customers come out of the nearby cinema where an American crime movie is playing, and that turns out to have been the source of the gunfire which scared them all.

During this village raid Lieutenant Grainger proves himself a psychopath by firing Brigg’s rifle just a foot over his head and then claiming he could have Brigg court-martialled for undisciplined use of a firearm. Brigg is shaken, horrified, then fearful of what this lunatic will do next.

The daily ritual of the soldiers working in the Admin office (pages 80 to 81).

A single American who’s become detached from his unit sent to Korea is posted on them, much to the Colonel’s disgust. Private William Clay (p.90).

Morris Morris organises a concert which is predictably dire, but not given the full setpiece treatment as the concert in ‘Onward Virgin Soldiers’. The main moment is when four nurses come on to do the can-can, with the all-male audience going predictably wild, but then Morris invites volunteers from the audience and Brigg, Clay, Tasker and another fight their way onstage to dance with the girls. Brigg likes his one who’s a feisty Cockney named Bernie. Afterwards, to their frustration, Lieutenant Grainger goes to the girls changing room with champagne and Wellbeloved tells them to clear off. Out the back a comedy pyramid of men climbing over each other to see in the window for a glimpse of naked flesh. Men. Testosterone. Brigg and Clay come up with a plan, to feign the symptoms of VD in order to be sent to the hospital where they can enquire after ‘their’ nurses.

Clay and Brigg lie to the MO about having STDs, so are packed off to the ambulance to be driven to the Singapore hospital. On the way two old lags give detailed descriptions of the spikes and hooks they use on your penis until Brigg is pale with fear and a young squaddie in the corner is crying. Turns out to be a wind-up, all the medical officer wants is a little blood sample. Brigg finds out from a tea orderly that the nurse called Bernie is Bernice Harrison who works in Casualty (p.137). So Brigg and Clay saunter off in that direction with a view to chatting up her and her mate, but the doors swing open, almost smacking them in the face, as Bernie, other nurses and a doctor hurry through two trolleys occupied by badly wounded young men. Christ! Humbled and ashamed our two Romeos get the ambulance back to barracks and thank their lucky stars.

Lantry and Clay are scheduled for guard duty, go for a drink beforehand, get hammered and, while on guard duty, their simmering rivalry erupts into a full-on fight. Until they hear officers shouting and approaching and stand up straight, smartish.

Brigg and Tasker are selected to be sent for three days depot guard duty at Johore Baru, up-country.

Before they leave, Brigg has a free afternoon and night with Lucy. For the first time they have an outing together, taking her 2-year-old nephew to the beach, the toddler playing in the surf while they chat. At one point the boy needs a poo and Brigg takes him along to the very nearby RAF base where a series of soldiers refuse him use of the loo and the little boy poos himself in tears. Brigg is furious at the rule-bound uselessness of the British. That night, they make love in a way Brigg feels is special, homely, though it’s doubtful whether Lucy the pro feels the same.

Brigg and Tasker are sent to the nearby village of Rajit to get provisions, along with the not-very-bright Private Spark and the dull Dorset man from the Catering Corps, Corporal Dobbie. Surprisingly, in the village they are attacked by snipers. Brigg, Tasker and Sparkle are in a store and survive but Dobbie was in the open by the lorry and is shot dead.

Next day Brigg and Tasker return to Pinglin and pull rank as old timers who’ve seen war. They are greeted with the tragic news that the Colonel’s stamp collection has gone missing! This seems trivial. Clay tells Brigg that in his absence he went to the nurses’ accommodation, tracked down Nurse Bernie and got two tickets to the Red Cross ball! At which point evil Sergeant Wellbeloved enters to dormitory tom tell the boys that, as the Colonel’s stamps have not been found, all leave for the following weekend is cancelled i.e. the day of the ball. This is a transparent set-up for more farcical goings-on.

First development is that some soldiers are allowed out, so long as they are going to support Gravy Browning as he competes in the Inter-Services Table Tennis Championships. Gravy is no fool and charges each of the dozen ‘supporters’ he selects ten dollars as he knows none of them give a monkeys about table tennis. On the first, Friday, night of the championships, Brigg, Clay, Tasker and the rest cheer their heads off, because they desperately want him to get through to the Saturday round, which he does.

Clay and Brigg dress in ludicrously ill-fitting evening dress ‘borrowed’ for the night from the village laundry, and set off with Browning’s other ten ‘supporters’ before skiving off to meet their dates, Bernie who we’ve met and her friend, Valerie Porter (p.214). Broad comedy because Clay’s trousers are so extremely tight that he can’t dance without risking them splitting. They look like Keystone Cops. At the end of the evening both men get a little kiss before the nurses turn and go, leaving our heroes frustrated.

‘Christ, I just touched her on the tit, hardly felt it, and she told me to be a good boy.’ (p.222)

But a few days later he calls Bernie from St James-the-Less Rest Home for British Soldiers and, to his surprise, she offers to come along and play tennis. Obviously he doesn’t have any kit nor know how to play so there’s a panic-stricken run around to buy the gear, from a mad old lady, spindly Miss Phillimore, who keeps reminiscing about the good old days of the Raj.

A digression about sex

Then they go to the chalet he’s rented where, after some snogging, she reveals that she’s a virgin and scared to death. What most strikes me about the (fairly graphic) descriptions of sex Thomas has in his novels is the way there’s little or no foreplay and no attempt at lubrication. Most times I’ve had sex with a woman it has required a lot of foreplay, kissing and stroking etc and very often additional lubrication from the wide variety of lubrication products available everywhere these days i.e. all high street supermarkets.

My point is that there’s none of that in Thomas’s descriptions, none. There’s a bit of kissing, he suckles one or other nipple, then kneels between the woman’s legs, lowers onto and into the woman and gets shagging. That’s it. Every time. The variety and inventiveness of sex we’ve got used to over the past generation or so, not just from manuals and guides but just from telly and the movies, simply doesn’t exist in these books.

By the same token, on the occasion when they’re in bed together and he can’t get an erection, Brigg asks Bernie ‘to sort of play about with him a bit’ (p.269). That’s it, that’s as much as he can think of.

Sorry to be so graphic, but I found this complete absence of sexual sophistication, and the lack of awareness of female anatomy or needs, a fascinating part of the book’s social history. I suppose Brigg is meant to be 19, has only himself just lost his virginity, lacks any kind of maturity, so shouldn’t be taken as any kind of evidence of sexual knowledge in 1950 or 1975, but still…

Anyway, Brigg takes Bernie’s virginity in an extended scene conveyed entirely through their dialogue, as she describes his erection entering her, how it hurts, how it’s too big, how she’s crying, does he really love her etc and then, in seconds, he climaxes and it’s all over.

God, to think that in the old days we relied on books like this for our information about sex (porn being almost completely inaccessible and sex education useless). The waste…

Back to the plot

Now they’ve had their brief crude intercourse poor Bernie thinks they’re in love and are going to get married or such, while we know that Brigg is actually still in love with Lucy, so Bernie’s heading for a bad disillusionment.

Clay comes to Brigg for advice. They agree to take the girls out on a double date. They go to a dire dance hall but the girls insist they move on so Clay takes them to a club. Excruciatingly, it’s the one where Lucy works, the Liberty Club. The white girls go to the loo together and Brigg runs over to Lucy to tell her he’s only performing a duty, he’s been tasked with entertaining some officer’s wives. She treats him as if she’s never met him and coolly tells him to fuck off. Back at the table he is even more upset to learn that Clay, who watched the exchange, has himself had sex with Lucy a few times.

The evening ends in farce when they notice Eggington, who had earlier made a big deal about trying a new Japanese mud treatment for spots, dancing by himself on the dancefloor, completely drunk and celebrating that his spots have, in fact, disappeared. Brigg is desperate when the beautiful Lucy deliberately punishes him by dancing with fat, ugly, sweating Eggington, but then he goes mad and starts a striptease, eventually completely naked and waving his big schlong at their table screaming ‘No spots, no sports!’ as Valerie and Bernie scream with delight.

Bouncers converge on the fat man, the soldiers go to his defence and it dissolves into a massive fight, until the Military Police arrive and everyone finds themselves on the pavement outside helpless with hilarity.

A comic scene where Clay and Valerie, Brigg and Bernie break into the grounds of St James-the-Less Rest Home, with the help of a comically punctilious Indian watchman who loans him a ladder for five dollars.

That night they bicker because Bernie saw the way he looked at Lucy and her feminine intuition did the rest. He can’t get an erection and they don’t have sex. However, next morning they’re woken by Miss Phillimore and two elderly friends delivering tea to each chalet with a hymn and him standing and singing (while Bernie hides) makes her laugh so much they proceed to have genuinely relaxed sex and, for the first time in her life, she has an orgasm (p.272). Only then does she reveal that she and Valerie have put in for a transfer and are going to move to a hospital in Colombo, Ceylon, on Christmas Eve. They both pretend to be upset but deep down Briggs suspects they’re both relieved.

Christmas morning and the squaddies in their dormitory have a good old moan. There’s an interesting passage where the Jew, Jacobs, rubbishes Christianity for being a fairy story and the others say well it all started with ‘his mob’, all said without any animosity, just because they’re irritable and missing home (p.277).

On Christmas morning all the privates in the barrack put on an impromptu fancy dress parade, marching up the hill to the CO’s mansion for his one-eyed blessing. During the confusion someone deposits the stolen stamp collection on his sundial.

There’s an epic Christmas lunch with the officers serving the men, who become maudlin. Mad Lieutenant Grainger comes over and kills all mirth by informing them that they’ll be going to back to the depot for stints of guard duty. Then he goes and deliberately spills boiling custard over sergeant Wellbeloved’s bare legs. ‘He’s mad, that bastard,’ mutters Brigg (p.288).

We learn that Bernie’s gone, flown away. Just like that (p.292). End of the affair which had seemed central to the narrative. Briggs is back itching after Lucy.

On Boxing Day after some bickering, Clay says he needs a breath of fresh air. Briggs is convinced he’s going to see Lucy, so gets a taxi into town. He finds him at the Liberty Club but Lucy’s not there and the Yank runs off. This turns into a comic race between the two rickshaws they’ve hired.

But when they both arrive at Lucy’s flat it’s to find her seriously ill, too weak to move, a lake of vomit by her bed. Clay runs to fetch help, while Brigg tries to make her drink water but she’s almost unconscious. Ambulance arrives and takes her to hospital. three hours later our sad boys know it was attempted suicide. Why?

Cut to Brigg in the office closely supervised by officers. The officer supervisor announces that he, along with his cronies Clay, Tasker, Morris Morris, even Sergeant Wellbeloved, have been selected for another round of guard duty at the Johore depot.

They’ve barely arrived at the depot and dumped their kit before Grainger is round to tell them about the wild pig hunt. Thomas had Grainger mention this a couple of times back at Pinglin, his enthusiasm to go and hunt wild boar in the forest, bring it back, roast and eat it. Now, as this is page 414 of a 444-page book, we know this is probably going to be the Big Climactic Scenes. Give Thomas’s form in the other three novels I’ve read (i.e. there are grisly deaths) I fully expect someone to get killed during this ‘wild pig hunt’.

All the men are too scared of Grainger, too cowardly and too sensible to do anything. But remember that tiny detail of how, at the Christmas lunch, Grainger accidentally-on-purpose tipped scalding custard over his junior, Sergeant Wellbeloved. Well, my money was on Wellbeloved shooting Grainger.

But it doesn’t turn out that way. Grainger leads the men off on a long and exhausting trek through dense jungle along narrow paths, breaking occasionally for rest and food. On the way back they come to a clearing and to everyone’s terror a huge wild boar bursts out of the wall of jungle and makes a run at them as they all leap aside. Once it’s got to the end of the clearing it turns for another run and the others watched astonished as Grainger plants his feet like a matador and taunts it. When it charges Grainger waits till it’s half way to him then fires a long burst on his Sten gun and kills it, its momentum making it plough into the ground at his feet.

Unfortunately, that’s not all. They see men standing at the end of the clearing, who they suddenly realise are CTs (communist terrorists). Grainger tells them to duck and Brigg flings himself into the wall of greenery, tripping over a log and slipping and falling a hundred feet down to a stream. From here he hears a lot of further shooting and hand grenades from back up in the clearing. Then a great bulky rumpus coming down through the undergrowth towards him.

It’s Morris Morris, he’s been badly shot, a bullet ripping through his stomach and groin leaving a big exit wound in his back. He comes to a rest in the stream, leeching blood. Brigg tries to reassure him, goes back up to the clearing and is horrified to see Grainger dead next to the dead pig. Terrified, he skeets over to the officer, retrieves his field dressing and returns to Morris and tries to apply it to the huge wound.

There follows an extended and meant-to-be moving scene where Morris slowly bleeds to death in the stream and confesses to Brigg that he’s not married with kids. He invented the wife and family, even fabricating letters from them. He is in fact gay or, in the lingo of the time, ‘a poor old Cardiff docks poof’ (p.332). Briggs is flabbergasted.

They hear voices and Briggs inches his way back up the slope to the rim of the clearing and sees armed men tie the dead pig to a bamboo shaft and then the corpse of Grainger, too, and then carry them away. He waits five minutes before moving, inching back down to the stream where Morris is dying.

As night has fallen and its gotten darker, they’ve realised there’s a light downstream and sounds. Morris won’t let Brigg leave him so Brigg has to get the man-mountain to lean on him as they blunder along the shallow stream, eventually arriving at a local village in the middle of a fiesta. By the time Brigg staggers into the clearing, Morris is dead.

The villagers let Brigg stay there overnight but insists he sleep in the same hut as the corpse. In the morning they send a messenger. Soon a truck arrives with a driver and two silent Gurkhas. The driver informs him that the others are alive: a) Clay got his posting back to an American unit and has left; b) Wellbeloved got a shoulder wound and bored everyone bragging about his bravery; c) Tasker is unwounded. With amazing speed he’s back at the depot for a tearful reunion with his mucker, Tasker.

Tasker describes Grainger’s mad heroism, the way he immediately charged the CTs, firing non-stop, must have got 3 or 4 of them before he himself was shot down, while Clay and Tasker dived into the undergrowth.

An Army lorry takes them back to good old, safe old Panglin. They buy an ice cream from the local vendor. They clump into the dormitory and look at Morris’s vacant bunk. Brigg wryly states that they still have two months, 25 days and 22 hours of the six months left to serve.

THE END. As with the first novel, the reader is left feeling dazed and bereft.

Nice turns of phrase

Almost very page is illuminated by imaginative and generally funny turns of phrase and thought. Here are the lads on parade:

Around them other squads were formed on the square; wooden figures like clothes pegs on long washing lines. The moon was hanging about the Naafi and the eternal noise of the crickets rattled the night. (p.57)

The prosaic reality of colonial prostitution:

Mucky Meg, the plump and motherly Eurasian who did midweek masturbations for impoverished soldiers at a dollar a time, missed the serious importance of the soldiers’ invasion altogether. ‘You like dollar wank, Johnny?’ she inquired politely of Brigg as he stood stiffly at a street corner. (p.59)

‘Dollar wank’ – a nice collocation of American and British culture. When the platoon are walking in single file, led by Corporal Field who jumps with fright at every flicker of light or strange sound:

The patrol behind him jumped in reactions to his jumps, giving the effect of an apprehensive caterpillar. (p.62)

The character of the man-mountain Morris Morris gives Thomas plenty of scope:

Most nights he looked like a great pie on his bed as it bowed spectacularly under his weight. (p.86)

Of the lanky, bony American, Clay, when he goes to salute:

Clay’s loose limbs came together as though someone had pulled a lever. (p.92)

In the waiting room to see the medical officer:

It was like a Trappist monastery after a wild night of illicit talking. (p.127)

Christmas morning:

The sun looked as though it had been up all night. (p.279)

This is what I mean by how easy and pleasurable and entertaining it is to read Thomas’s prose.

Movie version

Stand Up Virgin Soldiers was made into a cheap and pathetic movie (1977), strongly redolent of the skinflint production values of the period (Hammer, Carry On). Supposedly set in Malaya it very obviously looks like where it was shot, namely in and around rainy Maidenhead in Berkshire.

It was directed by Norman Cohen who also directed movie versions of the TV comedies, ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ (1969) and ‘Dad’s Army’ (1971) and some of the truly dreadful ‘Confessions of…’ sex comedy series: ‘Confessions of a Pop Performer’ (1975), ‘Confessions of a Driving Instructor’ (1976) and ‘Confessions from a Holiday Camp’ (1977). God help us. This was what was served up to us at our local cinemas in the 1970s.

It’s mildly interesting that Thomas wrote the screenplay himself.

Stand Up Virgin Soldiers on YouTube

Credit

Stand Up Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas was published in 1975 by Methuen Books. Page references are to the 2005 Arrow paperback. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

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Malaya reviews

History

The War of Running Dogs by Noel Barber (1971)

Fiction

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by Simon on June 7, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Novel, Sex

Tagged 1970s, Bernice Harrison, Bernie Harrison, Bongos, British Army, Chinese, Christmas, clay, comedy, Corporal Dobbie, Corporal Eggington, Corporal Field, Corporal Lunes, CTs, Dollar wank, farce, Gravy Browning, Harold Tasker, history, homophobia, Indians, It Ain't Half Hot Mum, John Brigg, Johore Baru, Juicy Lucy, Kenneth Williams, Kilburn, Korea, Korean War, Lance-Corporal Williams, Lantry, Lieutenant Colonel Bromley Pickering, Lieutenant Grainger, Lieutenant Perkins, Lieutenant Wilson, Longley, Maidenhead, Major Bilking, Malaya Emergency, Malays, Miss Phillimore, Morris Morris, National Service, Norman Cohen, novel, Panglin, Patsy Foster, Private Conway, Private Quentin Fundrum, prostitution, racism, Rajit, Reggie, Regimental Sergeant Major Woods, Sandy Jacobs, Sergeant Bass, Sergeant Wellbeloved, Sergeant-Major Ringbold, sex, sexism, Sidney Villiers, Singapore, Sparkles, Stand Up Virgin Soldiers, Sten gun, table tennis, the Calamine Kid, the Liberty Club, Valerie Porter, Virgin Soldiers

Posted by Simon on June 7, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/06/07/stand-up-virgin-soldiers-leslie-thomas/

The Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas (1966)

Brigg is a naive, virgin, 19-year-old private coming towards the end of his two-year National Service in Malaya during the communist insurgency (1948 to 1960). He’s a clerk in the Royal Army Pay Corps based at Panglin, a little way north of Singapore Island. In the evening he and his mates take the bus down to the island, to hang around in bars, many of them full of Chinese or Malay prostitutes. He knows he’s had a cushy number compared to the poor bastards who have been posted ‘up country’ i.e. further north and into the jungle. Those guys have seen real fighting, have been injured and seen their mates killed. By contrast the only violence Brigg and his buddies see is fights among the bored squaddies themselves or the occasional farcical incident such as when a drunk corporal having a crap in a latrine saw some fireflies dancing in the middle distance and so emptied his Sten gun magazine at them, sparking a barrack-wide panic until the other soldiers came running and saw what a plonker he’d been.

So it’s essentially a farce of army life, or features many farcical incidents – which means that, when the brutal reminders of war do come, they seem all the more brutal, inexplicable and horrible.

Cast of characters

As with many army novels, there’s a fairly big cast of characters because that’s the basic fact about the army, it’s very big, very populous – all the privacy and domestic quiet you enjoyed at home is torn from you and you’re thrown into the permanent company of all kinds of men you really don’t like, all day long, and then spend all night in big dormitories surrounded by men fidgeting, farting, crying and wanking.

And just often enough to give the whole experience a horrific edge, there’s the risk of actual fighting, of ambushes or sudden attacks by a homicidal enemy.

One way to cope with all this is to bring out the ludicrous and farcical aspects of army life. And one way to do that is to convert all the horrible men you’re forced to spend all your time with into gargoyles and caricatures. At moments The Virgin Soldiers reminded me a bit of Catch-22 in the way that both are populated with characters each of whom is allotted an obsession, an idée fixe or dominant characteristic which recurs robotically for comic effect.

Private Brigg, main character.

Private Sandy Jacobs, a hairy Scottish Jew.

Corporal Brook, ‘a thin man who was mad’, oddly ineffective, liable to freeze at vital moments, a figure of fun right up till the moment when he freezes in the face of a crowd of rioters in Singapore, so that one of them skewers him with a fence railing, in one of those moments of sudden violence which pierce the farcical mode.

Private Fenwick, who is trying to give himself an ear infection so as to be invalided home but only manages to give himself rheumatism and then falls in love with a nurse at the hospital where he’s treated so that, when he’s offered the opportunity of going home, he now desperately tries to have it rescinded so he can stay with his love.

Private Tasker, in on most conversations and trips to the bars and brothels, reliably randy, always first to pick up a girl and then take her off into the jungle to get his end away.

Private Sinclair, one of the most broadly comic characters, an obsessive trainspotter (p.60), continually thinking about train timetables, keen member of the Railway Society, despises the other men and their obsession with sex. In the book’s sudden violent finale, he turns out to be something of a hero before being killed by insurgent fire.

Patsy Foster and Sidney Villiers, gay couple, walk around hand in hand, always found in each other’s bunks; officers yell at them but they never get into any real trouble i.e. everyone seems to accept them.

Gravy Browning, international table tennis champion.

Sergeant Wellbeloved, officious bully and loudmouth, constantly bragging about his experiences in World War Two when he was captured by the Japs and interned in one of the notorious prison camps, singing his own praises as the only prisoner who stood up to them etc. Late in the book we are informed that this is all bullshit, that he was a coward and sold out his comrades to the Jap authorities. ‘He had a rancid face and a yellow bald head,’ (p.24). Brigg heartily loathes him.

Sergeant Driscoll, haunted by the memory of accidentally shooting some of his own men in Caen, during the Normandy Landings, when his Sten gun jammed. Moments later the house they were in was bombed so they’d have died anyway, but it doesn’t stop his ongoing PTSD. He is also haunted by the way his beloved wife divorced him when he refused to quit the army. Both scenes are described very powerfully.

Sergeant Fred Organ, 22 stone of blubber, ran the canteen tent, hung up a sign saying Fred’s Bar, 30 years service, barman, fatman, singer (p.67). Meets a grisly end when he treads on a landmine left over from the war on an apparently innocent carefree beach.

Phillipa Raskin, the daughter of Regimental Sergeant Major Raskin. Her father mercilessly bullies her, wants her to be a real woman, eventually provoking her into drunkenly losing her virginity on the night of a regimental party, she getting completely plastered at the family home and shouting at more or less the first soldier she sees passing the family home to come and fuck her. This soldier turns out to be Sergeant Driscoll and they proceed to have a very satisfying affair.

Colonel Wilfred Bromley Pickering, officer in charge of the regiment and the barracks. Lost his eye in Normandy, which terminated a promising career. To his eternal ignominy it wasn’t due to some heroic engagement with the enemy but when, under fire, he looked into a particularly beautiful flower thus disturbing a bee which was nestling in it, which came out and stung him on the eyeball. This disability explains why he has ended up in charge of this clerical unit down in peaceful Singapore, well away from the fighting against the communist insurgents further north.

Juicy Lucy. Crude nickname given to the slim, beautiful Chinese prostitute that Brigg goes with one night, more or less as a bet, who guides him through the mysteries of sex and who he thus loses his virginity to, thereupon falling heavily in love with.

She started from the beginning and went all the way. He felt like a balloon being slowly blown up. When she showed hi the big secret, she whispered: ‘How the virgin like?’ ‘Oh it’s lovely, Lucy,’ he shivered. ‘It’s lovely, it really is.’ (p.47)

Main events

The narrative consists of a series of incidents, some comic, some farcical, some grimly violent:

Wellbeloved supervises a squad digging a ditch who unearth a mass grave of Australians murdered by the Japanese during the war.

Wellbeloved and Driscoll nearly have a fight in the beer tent.

Fred Organ gets blown up on the beach when he has the bad luck to tread on one of the many landmines sprinkled on it back in 1942.

Brigg loses his virginity to prostitute ‘Juicy Lucy’ and then agonises that she will have given him an STD.

A soldier tells the boys that if you have a circumcision you get ten days leave. After some discussion in the bar, Brigg and his mates all agree to undergo the operation. But the soldier was misinformed and none of them get any leave. There’s some crude comedy when the nurse attending the row of just circumcised squaddies play with their exposed toes at the bottom of their beds, acting coy, just enough to arouse them and give them erections which, of course, hurt excruciatingly.

The boys build a catapult to hit the countless barking dogs which keep them awake at night but which instead, with its very first shot, hits Wellbeloved on the knee with half a brick, temporarily crippling him.

Phillipa chooses Sergeant Driscoll

The regimental dance. Sergeant Major Raskin’s beastly behaviour to his daughter Phillipa who he bullies and accuses of being a lesbian. To appease him she dances with the first soldier she sees, Brigg, then escapes the dance, goes home, makes herself very drunk, then leans out of the posh house she lives in with her bullying dad and gaga mother and shouts at a soldier crossing the wooden bridge below. This soldier turns out not to be Brigg, as she drunkenly thought, but Sergeant Driscoll, who takes advantage of her drunkenness to relieve her of her virginity, and they commence a friendly affair. Despite this Brigg insists on looking her up and taking her out and she allows him to, but never with the slightest possibility of sleeping with him. She is being very satisfactorily serviced by her sergeant.

The Singapore riots

Riots break out in Singapore. Sent to quell them, a patrol of our boys comes directly face to face with rioters. Wellbeloved orders ineffectual Corporal Brook to disarm the leading rioter but Brook freezes and is skewered and killed by a man with a spiked railing (who is immediately eviscerated by our guys’ gunfire).

Whoops there go my trousers

During this rioting period, Briggs finds himself in Lucy’s part of town and runs up the stairs to her flat. There she lures him in, scantily clad in a silk dressing gown, and persuades him to have sex. Then he wants to leave but she playfully throws his trousers out the window into the alleyway below. In a panic Briggs yells at his patrol partner Lantry to go and retrieve them. But when Lantry gets to the alleyway the trousers are gone. Terrified he’s going to get court martialled, Briggs makes Lucy give him some trousers, the only ones she owns being green silk woman’s trousers which, of course, look ludicrous, but Briggs wearing them rushes off with Lantry. Almost immediately they come upon a calm dignified Sikh holding the trousers who says that, finders keepers, they are now his. Furious Briggs attaches his bayonet to his rifle and points it at the Sikh who calmly hands them over. Farce.

The Driscoll and Wellbeloved fight

Sergeants Driscoll and Wellbeloved hate each other. In the empty sports arena where the regiment are staying while in Singapore, they have an epic fight. Driscoll has discovered that all Wellbeloved’s stories about fighting the Japs during the Second World War are lies, that he was not only not a hero, but sold out some of his comrades in the Japan camp to curry favour with their captors.

Brigg saves Phillipa

The platoon are driven back up to regimental headquarters at Panglin where there is an extended farcical incident. When a squad are detailed to go and protect officers’ houses from possible attack by the rioters Briggs smuggles himself along, effectively disobeying orders. He then peels off to the house of Phillipa and her dotty mother and, in an infection of panic, warns them that rioters are coming, hustles them out of the house and through the garden, as he sees a crowd of Chinese running towards them. He gets off a few shots before hustling them up a path behind the houses then he has a brainwave: there’s a huge overland pipeline running behind the houses so he forces the dazed stumbling mother and protesting Phillipa up onto it then they set off in terror through the night full of shots and cries. Their panic increases when they realise the Chinese mob have followed them and are also running along the pipeline. Brigg turns, kneels, gets off a few potshots then turns to hassle the women along, but the old mum is exhausted, and eventually slips and falls off the pipeline into the muddy swamp below.

Brigg drags Phillipa down there with her and all three hide in the scrubby jungle as they hear the mob come up abreast of them, on the pipeline overhead, pause, confer, then, mercifully, hurry on. They say in the muddy swamp till dawn, then wearily ascend the pipeline and stagger the last few hundred yards to a road where a jeep finds them and drives them back to the barracks.

Here Brigg is brought in front of Colonel Pickering who wearily points out that he disobeyed orders at least twice; there were no rioters near the houses so he, in effect, abducted Phillipa and her mother, nearly killing the old woman in the process; and that the Chinese he shot at were loyal Chinese from the camp laundry who were also fleeing in a panic. Lastly, one of his bullets shot off the fingers of the laundry’s chief mangler, a venerable old boy in his 70s who all the others look up to and the Chinese union are now demanding compensation or they’ll go on strike. Altogether a completely farcical misunderstanding. And the vulgar icing on the cake is that the venerable old mangler’s name is Fuk Yew.

The Colonel very decently says he won’t press charges against Briggs for desertion in the face of the enemy. nor will he name him as the shooter-off of Fuk’s fingers, but he will require him to hand over his next 6 weeks’ pay as compensation to the old Chinese. Thoroughly chastened, Brigg leaves the colonel’s office thinking of the possible newspaper headline: ‘How I shot FUK YEW the Chinese mangler’.

Lucy is dead

Brigg goes to see Lucy for the last time of dancing and sex but the bar manager tells him she’s dead. She was kicked to death by squaddies who thought she’d given them STIs. In a sweat of panic fear Briggs takes a taxi to her apartment and sure enough finds it has been emptied, only an old Chinese lady on the bed looking at some of the bric-a-brac before she gets up and walks out, leaving Briggs to collapse on the bed where he lost his virginity and cry his eyes out.

Frog races

As a result of handing over his weekly pay, Brigg is now penniless until he comes up with a plan of volunteering to do guard duty at the nearby ammunition depot for cash in hand. He discovers that the ammo boys hold epic frog races using the big wild frogs which throng the jungle. After a comical build-up Briggs’s frog wins the big race and the next day he puts in for some leave.

R&R up north

He catches a train north and a ferry across to the leave centre on Panang Island. His mellow mood is ruined by being billeted with a soldier, Waller, who’s been sent here because a squad of all his mates was recently massacred by CTs (communist terrorists). Waller flatly, calmly, asks Briggs how he can wangle himself a nice cushy number like Brigg has and Brigg is ashamed.

The rickshaw race

The boys attend a bordello named the Piccadilly Lights. To their surprise Sinclair the trainspotter ends up dancing with one of the prettiest hookers, nicknamed Little Nell. The other boys – Brigg, Lantry and Tasker – have a discussion about whether Little Nell should be left to Sinclair or one of them should take her for the night which escalates into the decision to have a rickshaw race for it. They go outside to the rack of rickshaws, each get into one then brief their drivers that it’s a race, which proceeds with predictably farcical results.

Phillipa relents

On the last day of his leave Brigg is mucking about in a canoe when is surprised to see Phillipa standing on the shore. She’s up her beginning the long training to become a nurse and his room-mate Waller mentioned he (Brigg) was here so she came looking. They spend a lovely day together till they get back to her room where Brigg makes a move, she says no, and he explodes with frustration, slapping her face and turning to go, crying tears of anger and frustration. But she calls to him, he turns and finds she has stepped out her dress, quite naked. They make love and it is wonderful. Fall asleep, shower, go out for an evening meal, come home, make love again. Early the next morning she’s left for her early shift and he has to hurtle back to the leave centre just in time to pack his stuff and jump onto the lorry to the ferry and the start of the journey back to Panglin. Just one niggle. In the middle of the night, he had reached out to hold her and she had sleepily said, ‘sergeant’. Sergeant? Which sergeant?

CT attack on the train

The book climaxes with a serious attack by armed insurgents on the troop train. An intense ten pages describe how the train is blown up and derailed, then wave after wave of rebels storm it. The soldiers fight back, not just our boys but a platoon of plucky Gurkhas. Waller, the infantryman traumatised by the deaths of his pals takes charge and is rock steady. Brigg finds a place under a carriage and fires at each new wave of attackers. Sinclair is taken down to the Gurkha end of the train and out in charge of an arc lamp to highlight the attackers, until it is shot out and he is shot twice in the chest, falling from the top of the carriage. Waller is shot dead and Brigg panics, he runs off shouting hysterically that he is going to fetch help. He stumbles through the jungle, falls into a ditch, becomes completely disorientated and blunders back out onto the track some distance away.

Brigg walks along the track till he sees the lights appear of an approaching train which he flags down. This one is packed with soldiers and he briefs the officer in charge about the ambush, so that the train starts up again and arrives as a relieving force. Brigg is thrilled to find his old muckers Lantry and Tasker still alive if seriously shell shocked, dirty and shaking. For the whole of the rest of his life Brigg spends long nights piecing together the chain of events, trying to make sense of it, trying to make sense of his behaviour, but never quite managing.

The end

Two short final codas.

1) Driscoll has been stationed in Butterworth, in the north of the country, and Phillipa moves to Penang to be with him. She hears about the raid on the train but isn’t worried. She knows her sergeant is indestructible.

2) Then in the last few pages, the National Service boys pack up their kit for the last time, climb aboard the truck which will take them to the port and their ship back to Britain. The last image is of Brigg spotting the old Chinese mangler at his work outside the laundry and he shouts a cheerful ‘Fuk Yew’ at the Chinaman who makes a cheerful V-sign in return.

Prose style

Given the book’s reputation for bawdiness it’s a surprise to see how hard Thomas worked at giving it style. Every page contains sentences which make an effort to impress.

It was not really dark because there was a moon looking daggers through the doors. (p.69)

Having a cold shower:

He let the stream of cold water hit him sharply like a dropping sword, jumping at its first strike, but then tackling it and mixing into it. (p.95)

After Sinclair has had his first sex, with a prostitute, he walks down to the beach:

He walked from her flat, down some concrete steps to the beach and then along the sand towards the place where big waves were coming white over the rocks like sporting ghosts. (p.175)

And:

On this beach the waves came up noisily, banging their fists on the shore and trying to grip the shingle with their fingers as the parent sea pulled them away again. (p.177)

The hot tropical sun, its movements and shadow, inspire repeatedly florid descriptions from Thomas:

They got a bus from the foot of the hill into Georgetown, arriving when the shadows were probing everywhere, and the sun was drifting away on its evening journey. (p.181)

As I read these many instances of imaginative and teasing descriptions, I couldn’t decide whether this is good style or terrible style, vivid and imaginative or arch and contrived. Either way I found them interesting and different and, when I learned to relax and enjoy them, all these little metaphors and turns of phrase add hugely to the book’s entertainment value.

Thoughts

When I was a boy this kind of book had the thrill of being ‘naughty’, about boobs and sex and stuff, an impression encouraged by saucy cover of the hardback edition showing images of war projected onto a busty Asian body.

But although there is a fair amount of sex in it – numerous soldiers fantasising about sex, talking about sex, and then actually having sex in a sweaty fumbling sort of way – there’s much more to the novel than that. It is an impressive depiction of life as a British soldier doing National Service in a hot, sweaty country on the other side of the world. It has the depth of lived experience and, although some of the passages are extended comic set-pieces, others are as disturbing and upsetting as life is.

Most of all, and despite Thomas’s often strange, sometimes contrived way with words, it is amazingly easy to read. During his lifetime it sold not just a million but millions of copies. Touched a nerve or a cluster of nerves. Impressive.

Credit

The Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas was first published by Constable and Co in 1966. References are to the 1974 Pan paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

Related (comic) reviews

Leslie Thomas reviews

Malaya reviews

History

The War of Running Dogs by Noel Barber (1971)

Fiction

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by Simon on June 3, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in British Empire, Comedy, Novel, War

Posted by Simon on June 3, 2024

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The War of Running Dogs by Noel Barber (1971)

‘I always had a great deal of time for Chin Peng. He was by far the most intelligent of all the Communists, calm, polite, very friendly – in fact almost like a British officer.’
(Senior District Officer and Chin’s escort to the 1955 peace talks, John Davis)

There are several basic facts about Malaya which you need to grasp in order to understand the so-called ‘Malayan Emergency’ (1948 to 1960).

British Malaya

Malaya was never a unified nation. ‘British Malaya’ (1896 to 1946) consisted of the Federated and Unfederated Malay States. The Federated states were four protected states in the Malay Peninsula – Selangor, Perak, Negeri Sembilan and Pahang – established by the British government in 1896, which were British protectorates run by their own local rulers. The Unfederated Malay States was the collective name given to five British protected states, namely Johor, Kedah, Kelantan, Perlis, and Terengganu. Unlike the federates states, the unfederated states lacked common institutions and didn’t form a single state in international law. They were standalone British protectorates. In addition, there were the Straits Settlements, established in 1896 and consisting of the settlements of Penang, Singapore, Malacca, and Dinding, to which were later added the Christmas Island and the Cocos Islands.

After the war, in 1946, the British colony of the Straits Settlements was dissolved. Penang and Malacca which had formed a part of the Straits Settlements were then grouped together with the Unfederated and Federated Malay States to form the new Malayan Union.

Map of Malaya 1952 to 1954 © Monash Asia Institute, from the Cambridge University Press book ‘Templer and the Road to Malayan Independence‘

Racial heterogeneity

Of the population of about 6 million, 40% were Malay, almost as many were Chinese, and the remainder Indians, Europeans or other.

The three non-European communities – Malay, Chinese and Indian – had different traditions, religions, languages, cultures and tended to cluster round different professions and occupations. For example, the sultans of each of the states was Malay, as was his court and advisers, whereas a high proportion of the country’s successful businessmen were Chinese.

There were some 12,000 British, consisting of the Malayan Civil Service, policemen, rubber planters, tin miners, doctors and businessmen.

Following the Second World War, in 1946 the British authorities announced a new administrative structure named the Malayan Union, which aimed to distribute power and influence among the three main ethnic groups, Malays, Chinese and Indians. This prompted an outcry and mass opposition, particularly from Malays who saw their influence diminish in what they considered their own country, as well as objections to other implications of the plan.

Protests led to the formation of the United Malays National Organisation which organised a campaign of civil disobedience, boycotting council meetings and so on. Bowing to pressure the British authorities scrapped the Malayan Union and in 1948 replaced it with the Federation of Malaya, consisting of states ruled by sultans as British protectorates i.e. with British advisers, with Penang and Malaca defined as colonies, and Singapore given separate and unique status.

Chinese communists

The 1948 reorganisation took power away from the Chinese community which made up about a third of the population and which responded with negative newspaper articles and political action. Distinct from the Chinese community as a whole (which included many rich and influential businessmen) was the relatively small Malay Communist Party, almost entirely staffed by Chinese. Many of these communists had fought alongside British irregular forces in guerrilla campaigns against the Japanese after the Japanese captured Malaya in 1942, in fact many of them had been armed and trained and served in Force 136.

The post-war authorities were able to monitor the activities of the Malay Communist Party for the simple reason that its leader, Lai Teck, was a British double agent. However, in 1947, his cover was blown and Lai absconded (taking the party’s disposable cash with him).

His replacement, Chin Peng, aged 26, son of a bicycle repairshop owner, was more ruthless and cunning. Barber’s book explains all this background and then describes the crucial Communist Party meeting held in a remote jungle location in Pahang, the largest state, in May 1948 (that pivotal year in the Cold War).

During the war many of the party’s members had fought a jungle insurgency as part of what was called the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, led by British army officers. Now, simply by changing one word, it became the Malayan People’s Anti-British Army. Many of the members, their arms, training and tactics remained exactly the same, but now they were dedicated to kicking out what they saw as just another colonial occupier and oppressor. In an irony which escaped no-one, many of the new communist terrorists (CTs) were fighting officers and men they had previously fought alongside against the Japanese.

Chin Peng divided his army up into two parts: the armed force of 5,000 fighters, organised up into nominal regiments, but in fact broken down into attack units of as little as half a dozen men, to be distributed around the country, based in the jungle near the network of arms caches they’d helped establish during the war. The second part was the Min Yuen, meaning ‘Masses Movement’, consisting of hundreds of thousands of normal everyday citizens who would operate on every level of Malay life, as waiters in British clubs, clerks in government offices, as schoolteachers, newspaper reporters and so on (p.37) who would supply the active army with food, money and information.

The primary aim was to sow terror, pure fear, among the British colonial community and its native assistants and workers (collaborators, in the communist view). As the campaign spread, Chin intended for the European community to become demoralised and increasingly enfeebled while the tentacles of the Min Yuen spread at all levels of Chinese society until it was so powerful and numerous that a communist revolution became inevitable.

Barber details Chin’s three-phase plan:

Phase one

Guerillas attack isolated planters, tin mines, police and government officials, creating a climate of fear, forcing these scattered Europeans to abandon the country and seek the cities for safety.

Phase two

Areas abandoned by the British would be named ‘Liberated Areas’ and become the settings for guerrilla bases. The army’s numbers would be increased by recruits from the Min Yuen.

Phase three

Moving out from their bases in the Liberated Areas, the expanded army would attack towns and infrastructure, roads and railway, electricity and water supplies, while the Min Yuen sabotaged urban services. The expanded guerrilla army, supported by China or Russia, would confront the weakened and demoralised imperial forces in a final revolutionary struggle.

What is notable about all this is that the communists were overwhelmingly Chinese, relied on the active support of part of the Chinese community, and expected the revolution to come with help from China, and yet… the Chinese made up a distinct minority of the Malay population. As you might expect, the largest element of Malaya’s population was Malay. And lots of the plantations and other businesses the communists targeted were staffed by Indians, especially Tamils.

The use of terror

Barber views the Malay Communist Party campaign through the teachings of Lenin and Mao. Lenin had written that, through the application of terror, a well-organised minority could take over a country (p.36). Mao had written extensively about the organisation and strategy necessary for a peasant army taking on a larger, better-funded, full-time army. Be mobile and flexible. If you meet resistance, withdraw.

To spread fear you practice murder with maximum cruelty. Barber doesn’t hold back on his descriptions. The emergency is commonly dated from the murder of three British planters, two at one plantation, the other at a nearby one, on the same day, 16 June 1948. He goes on to describe, in detail, the CTs’ tactics and types of attacks: they crept up on native Malay or Tamil tappers (the workers who tapped the rubber trees), captured them and slit their throats like farm animals. They seized workers and chopped off their arms with the large Malay knife. They regularly attacked isolated plantation owners’ houses or bungalows, using British Sten guns or grenades. They made road ambushes by falling trees across roads then subjecting stalled vehicles to barrages of fire. That is how they murdered High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney (p.156).

The casualties were never enormous – not on the scale of an actual war – but still significant, with around 500 European settlers or officials being killed each year, and several times more communists. In total, during the entire emergency, 1948 to 1960, 1,346 Malayan troops and police were killed, 519 British military personnel, about 6,710 communists, with civilian casualties of around 5,000.

The British response

The British responded with a number of co-ordinated strategies: most Malay settlements had so-called ‘squatter’ camps surrounding them, occupied by immigrants from China, some of whom helped the communists, but many of whom were victims of the communists if they didn’t help or were suspected of collaborating. Therefore the British created a network of ‘New Villages’ and relocated the 600,000 squatters to them. Surrounded by barbed wire, they certainly protected the inmates from attack, but also could be seen as concentration camps.

The British authorities enforced a photo identity scheme, and tried to starve the communist guerrillas by implementing a food denial campaign by enforcing food rationing on civilians, killing livestock and using chemical herbicides to destroy rural farmland. Policing was expanded and re-organised to provide protection for workers going to work on rubber plantations or tin mines.

It is ironic to learn that the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 led to boom market for rubber and boom period for Malayan economy (p.182). Nonetheless, when the Conservatives won their election victory in October 1951 victory, they discovered that Britain was on verge of bankruptcy. The country had lower food stocks than ten years earlier, in 1941. By 1951 huge numbers of men involved – 40,000 regular troops including 25,000 from Britain, 10,000 Gurkhas, 5 battalions of the Malay Regiment, plus 60,000 full-time police and 200,000 Home Guards. The war was costing £500,000 a day. (p.162) No wonder Correlli Barnett railed against the stupidity of spending all our Marshall Aid running the ridiculous empire.

The incoming Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, sent Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttleton on a fact-finding mission which reported back that the situation was dire and highlighted disagreements between army and police and divisions even within the police. Churchill appointed General Sir Gerald Templer to take over. Templer was a splendid example of the imperialist education system, having attended Wellington, Sandhurst, been an Olympic hurdling champion, and served in post-war Germany where he’d realised the Germans needed encouragement, carrots, promises of better times, to prevent communism.

It was Templer who realised the British had to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the population, not with military force, but simply by showing that democratic capitalism would give the native populations and their families a better future. So he combined expanding the police force, and especially its Special Branch wing, with social works, the building of hospitals, schools, an increase in teacher training, setting up of women’s groups and so on.

Barber’s approach

Noel Barber (1909 to 1988) was a journalist who worked as foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail in the 50s, 60s and 70s. He also managed to write some 22 non-fiction books about the many countries he reported from (Hungary, Tibet, India). Late in life, a car crash ended his career as a journalist and he switched to writing novels, producing half a dozen, none of which I’ve heard of.

The War of the Running Dogs: How Malaya Defeated the Communist Guerrillas 1948-60 was Barber’s 15th non-fiction book. I picked it up in a second-hand shop because I want to understand more about Britain’s decolonisation beyond the glut of books and documentaries about the two usual suspects, India and Israel.

I think it’s safe to say that Barber’s approach is old school. Writing at the end of the 1960s, he himself came from a solidly upper-middle-class family, good public school, well-connected family (his brother, Anthony, was a Conservative politician, who rose to be Chancellor of the Exchequer in Ted Heath’s government 1970 to 1974).

Thus we get the story predominantly from the British side and from a perspective which is now disappearing, told with a hearty patriotism which often reads like it’s from one of the Famous Five children’s book. The senior British figures are often described as ‘magnificent’, policies and outcomes are ‘splendid’. Men are men, especially the gruff, no-nonsense Lieutenant General Gerald Templer who was sent by Churchill to replace the assassinated High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney. Templer barks out orders, insists things are done the same day, issues red orders which must be carried out by underlings or else, insists on shaking hands with all the Malay staff at government house (in fact, King’s House) in Kuala Lumpur. Shakes colleagues by the hand and tells them, ‘You’re a man‘.

Other ‘men’ include Sir Harold Briggs, First Director of Operations, Sir Robert ‘Bob’ Thompson of the Malayan Civil Service, Colonel Arthur Young, Police Commissioner, Bill Carbonell Commissioner of Police, and Peter Lucy, the amazingly brave rubber planter. It is a winning aspect of the book that it opens with a one-page ‘cast of principal characters’ [which isn’t all-white, it includes Malayan politicians and all the key Communist leaders]. Somehow this crystallises the impression given by much of the text that the war was a spiffing affair with manly chaps like General Templer grasping Colonel Young with a firm handshake, looking straight into his eyes, and saying, ‘You’ve done a man’s job, sir.’

Stories and comedy

Barber tells a number of funny or wry anecdotes. For example, the occasion when Templer addressed the population of one of the New Villages which had passively let CTs walk in, take all their weapons, and then walk out, the British general tried to convey his anger, but the Malay translator produces a comically rude mistranslation.

Or the amazing tale of 14-year-old Terence Edmitt who drove the family armoured car (!) through a CT roadblock and ambush, carefully ramming the car blocking the road into the ditch, while the car echoed to fusillades of bullets from CT sten guns and his mum and dad fired back through slits in the side (p.227).

Or the astonishing story of Peter Lucy and his tough, no-nonsense wife Tommy, who refused to abandon their remote plantation bungalow, so they fortified it, ringed it with barbed wire, and regularly fought off CT attacks with Sten guns and hand grenades even when Tommy was nine months pregnant!

Barber finds the astonishing or the amusing, the gossipy and heroic, in everything. This is one of the aspects which makes it more of a popular magazine article than a work of serious history.

There are other reasons why I doubt a book like this could be published nowadays:

1. Race and ethnicity

As Britain ceases to be a white country (estimates vary, but by about 2070 it’s thought whites will be in a minority in the UK) and its academic and publishing industries become ever-more hypersensitive to issues of race and ethnicity, the book’s unstinting support of ‘our boys’ and of colonial administration generally, has, I think, nowadays, become untenable. Barber would be picked up on countless places where he makes no-longer-acceptable generalisations about the Malays, the Chinese or the Indian population of Malaya.

In fact, Barber goes out of his way to praise the three different racial groups in Malaya, and also brings out Templer’s and the British authorities’ deliberate policies of racial integration. He tells the story of Templer being outraged to learn that some ex-pat club refuses membership to Malays and Chinese, gets the entire board sacks, and forces them to take non-European members. So Barber and his heroes are very pro race equality and racial integration. Templer and many other Brits realised it was vital not only to winning the war but to ensuring a smooth transition to independence. That wouldn’t save them from being damned by modern academics and critics.

And Barber goes out of his way to detail the intelligence work of the CT defector Lam Swee and, especially, of C.C. Too, a Chinese brought in to head British psychological operations, who became responsible for the propaganda war, including dropping millions of leaflets in the jungle telling the terrorists they would be treated well if they gave themselves up, describing the joys of civilian life (which amount to ‘women and cigarettes), as well as planes which were commissioned to fly low over huge expanses of jungle broadcasting the same message from big loudspeakers (p.139).

So I wasn’t aware of any racial bias or bigotry at all, rather the reverse. Bet that wouldn’t save him, though. And although he goes out of his way to give a positive impression of the remote communities of ‘aboriginal’ peoples, the peoples who inhabited Malaya before either the Malays or Chinese arrived, I suspect he would be hammered for calling them ‘abos’ and not the currently acceptable term, which appears to be ‘Orang Asli aboriginals’.

2. Women

Since the complete triumph of feminism in academia and the media, the slightest disparaging remark about women in any capacity is enough to end careers.

Again, Barber is surprisingly liberated for his day (he must have written this book in the late 60s and 1970 for it to be published in 1971) and goes out of his way to praise women at every level. For example:

a) He describes the tremendous good works done by Templer’s wife, who threw herself into organising hospitals, schools, women’s groups and generally improving the status of women in Malay society.

b) He gives specific examples of amazing courage and bravery among women in the war, for example, Lucie Card who one minute is living a middle-class life in Surrey, volunteers for the St John’s Ambulance, and a month later is driving an ambulance through bandit-infested jungle in Malaya (p.237 ff.)

Barber devotes a long passage to the surprising fact that Chin Peng selected as head of the communist army’s courier network, a determined young woman, Lee Meng. Not only do we hear about her legendary efficiency and ruthlessness, but there is a long passage devoted to the hard work the Malay Special Branch put in to a) identifying her b) arresting and interrogating her.

It is just as surprising to learn that a key player in tracking her down was British operative Eileen Lee. The complexities of the operation to identify Lee Meng sound as if they’re from a James Bond story (as does the very unlikely-sounding story of CT double agent ‘the Raven’ attending a dinner party of local Brits disguised as a servant in order to leave a secret message on the District Officer’s pillow! p.286)

Elsewhere Barber remarks more than once that female comrades in the Liberation Army were generally thought to be tougher and more ruthless than most of the men.

So Barber goes well out of his way to sing the praises of women in general, and to single out some remarkable examples of female braveness, toughness and ingenuity in particular – but I don’t think that would be enough to save him. He routinely refers to these heroic women as ‘girls’, sometimes as ‘young and pretty girls’ (p.203), ‘she was young, extremely beautiful and very pregnant’ (p.284). Tsk tsk. His entire attitude would, nowadays, be dismissed as the patronising stereotypes of a patriarchal, pro-imperialist, white supremacist male. I’m surprised his book is still in print.

It’s very obvious that anyone interested should read a more up-to-date account of the war, but all the aspects I’ve just mentioned mean that Barber’s account is interesting not only for its subject matter, but for the strong flavour of the 1970s prism through which he views them.

3. Unquestioning patriotism

For Barber, the high commissioners, heads of police or special branch, are ‘magnificent’, so a ‘splendid’ job, are real ‘men’. He mentions at some length the two trials of Lee Meng and how, when the authorities couldn’t get a guilty verdict from the first trial, they simply held another one with a more European panel of ‘advisers’ (instead of a jury). This caused controversy at the time. Similarly, he mentions the ‘Batang Kali massacre’ when 24 unarmed Chinese prisoners appear to have been murdered by British troops. He mentions these things, presents the evidence and says they left question marks over ‘British justice’. He makes brief mention of regulation 17D which gave the government the power of detention without trial and that some 30,000 civilians were interned under it, but not much more. He mentions these things but I bet a modern historian would use them to flay the racist imperialist British.

Key developments

By October 1951

It had become clear to Chen Ping that his initial three-phase plan wasn’t working. He duly called another big meeting of senior Malay Communist members and issued a new Directive. This refocused the communist campaign – stop killing innocent bystanders and Chinese, focus more on police, soldiers, direct officers of imperialism – but at same time boosted political efforts to infiltrate trade unions and create communist sympathisers through legal means.

January 1952

The appointment of Templer as High Commissioner, who comes in with sweeping new policies. One is to place enormous bounties on the heads of the CT senior command, double if caught alive, half if caught dead. He wanted them alive so he could convert them and use them as propaganda. Also to interrogate them and get intelligence about camps and strategies.

September 1952

One of the stupidities of the entire thing was that the British fully intended to quit Malaya, and had made this known to all the sultans and the general population. Throughout the period Britain made attempts to get more local figures into politics, to make more places open to locally elected officials. Then on 14 September 1952 a new citizenship law gave 60% of the Chinese population and 180,000 Indians full and immediate citizenship, with procedures established for all other inhabitants to apply for citizenship (including any Europeans who had one parent who’d been born in the country).

Spring 1953

Chin Peng makes a momentous decision to relocate his forces across the border into Thailand. Barber describes eye-witness accounts of the jungle meeting where this was announced to the communist cadres and the mood of disillusion and demoralisation which it led to.

Winding down

By mid-1953, five years into the war, a number of key communist leaders had been captured, killed or had defected. The British had sealed the squatter Chinese population off in the New Villages, enforced citizen id cards on everyone else, granted citizenship to large numbers of the population with processes for everyone else to gain full, legal citizenship, and had laid out a timetable towards full and free democratic elections to be held in 1955. Independence, in other words, was only a few years away. In the meantime Templer had overseen the inauguration of a sort of welfare state into which legal citizens paid, and which would contribute towards medical care or pensions. Tours were organised of government offices which included each citizen being taken to a bank and show how much money they had accrued, and led up to a speech by Templer himself. More and more CTs began to defect, giving themselves up and were astonished when they were not shot out of hand, but carefully treated, questioned, then freed and given clothes, money and jobs, and encouraged to spread the word to their comrades still in the jungle.

It became harder and harder for the communists to persuade peasants or urban dwellers that theirs was the correct route to freedom when the British route was so obviously better, for everyone.

This is what Templer meant when he had announced his ‘hearts and minds’ strategy. Barber really emphasises that right at the start of the emergency the government took the right decision which was to keep the emergency in the hands of the civil authorities – to make it a law and order issue. To make the police and Special Branch the key arms of law enforcement, with the army solely as backup and for specific defined operations (p.245 and throughout).

It was vital that the majority of the population see that law and order and government continue in its same form. The classic mistake to make in such situations, is to appoint a military overseer who invariably puts military units in charge, maybe imposes martial law, sets up special army-run detention centres and so on, with the inevitable result that sooner or later some atrocity is committed or photos leak out of inmates being mistreated in military gaols, and the general effect is to alienate the majority of the non-combatant population and encourage them to give passive or active support to the insurgents. As the Americans did in Vietnam and then again, astonishingly, in Iraq.

The Brits may have bent the law in some trials, been responsible for one well-publicised massacre (Batang Kal: 24 terrorists shot; My Lai: over 500 unarmed men, women and children killed), and the New Villages policy doesn’t sound as benign to me as Barber makes it sound. But overall, eventually, the non-military nature of the British response worked.

Communist desertions

The British placed huge bounties on the heads of the CT leaders. They offered huge sums for information. And they paid CTs who handed themselves in. Millions of leaflets offering safe passage were dropped over the jungle (93 million in 1953 alone, p.246, 525 million in total, p.321).

So many took up this offer that in the summer of 1953 Templer set up the Special Operational Volunteer Force, 180 ex-communist terrorists grouped into twelve platoons of 15 men each (p.233).

Barber describes in detail the defection of a number of the highest CT leaders, including the elusive Osman China ‘one of the most brilliant propagandists in South-East Asia’ and Hor Leung, a high ranking communist official (pages 250 to 265).

Elections

In July there was the first full general election in Malayan history. Barber had already introduced us to Tunku Abdul Rahman who had emerged as a canny political operator in the regional elections of 1952. Now he built a coalition between the ethnic parties to take overall power. 85% of the electorate voted and the Tunku’s Alliance won 51 of the 52 seats. He immediately began criticising the British veto on all laws passed by the assembly and pushing for the British to leave and relinquish full political power as soon as possible. The Tunku immediately issued a complete amnesty to all remaining CT fighters and had it distributed by leaflet, loudspeaker, the press and so on. Chin Peng replied calling for an immediate ceasefire.

The Tunku and his party were keen to hold talks but the British stalled. They were still responsible for the country’s security and felt admitting Chin Peng to a conference table would subvert the democratic process they had put in place, would give the communists influence not merited by their dwindling band of malnourished jungle fighters, and would hand a propaganda coup to the communist cause across wider South-East Asia (not least in Vietnam). But the Alliance party and many others saw this as simply excuses for the British to hang onto ultimate power. As long as the emergency remained, the British remained, and so the imperial power had a vested interest in dragging it out.

We now enter the complex world of multi-party politics, in which there are factions within the ruling Alliance party, these disagree with the old sultans, many of whom trust their British advisers more than these upstart democratic politicians, and the British administration itself which was divided about policy, and a British political community which was, of course, also divided between Conservative ruling party and the opposition internationalist Labour Party. The story gets more complex and, frankly, more boring, more bureaucratic.

The solution to this particular conundrum was simple: the British announced that they would leave whether the emergency was over or not. The existence of the emergency would not prevent full independence. And so Chin Peng was offered and amnesty and the opportunity to emerge from the (Thai) jungle and hold talks with First Minister Tunku.

In the event Malaya finally became fully independent (achieving Merdeka or independence) in August 1957, ending 83 years of British rule. Although under a British-Malayan Defence Pact, the Malay Army was run by Director of Operations Sir James Cassels (p.305), British soldiers continued to provide ‘defence’ for the Malayan state, and continued to be ambushed and killed by the 1,000 or so remaining CTs left in the jungle.

Despite independence the Communist insurgency continued until 1960. The final 30 or so pages don’t cover any of the political, social or economic ramifications of independence, but instead continue to give us exciting stories of derring-do, describing the cat and mouse campaigns to kill or capture the last remaining CT leaders, who are regularly portrayed as fiendish, cunning, clever, zealous and indoctrinated opponents of tall, tough, multi-lingual British Special Branch or SAS officers with mops of unruly hair and piercing blue eyes.

These last couple of extended adventures made me suddenly realise who Noel Barber reminds me of – Frederick Forsyth. A lot of the passages of action – the ambushes and attacks, the forays into the jungle, the top secret intelligence work – and the stereotyped characters – bluff British army officers, slight twinkly-eyed Chinese fanatics, beautiful girls, fast cars, Sten guns and armoured cars – read like an airport thriller, an airport thriller, a lot of which just happens to be true.

On 31 July 1960 the ’emergency’ was declared over and there was a huge victory parade through Kuala Lumpa which Barber describes in joyous detail, and then wraps his account up with a purple prose description of free, independent Malaya, unchanged and yet completely changed, enduring forever…

Thoughts

1. I must read a more modern account of the emergency, one which will probably contain a far more damning version of British behaviour.

2. Ideally, this modern version would go on to cover the longer period after independence up to the 1990s, say, so that the long-term effect of not only the emergency but of colonial rule can be assessed in the longer perspective.

3. Barber’s book is a very accessible, rip-roaring boys adventure version of events. The thing is, this may not be so misleading because quite obviously a lot of the British participants took part in that spirit, had that gung-ho, patriotic ‘come on chaps’ attitude. Certainly in his interviews with Peter Lucy and his wife, with Lucie Card and the dashing Scottish officer she met and married in Malaya, David Storrier (p.239), they all talk like that, they describe acts of everyday heroism and bravery with a dashing disregard for the danger.

4. And this is connected to the many scenes and descriptions of events where Barber deploys the techniques of a popular novelist, setting scenes whether in ex-pat clubs or jungle guerrilla camps, giving vivid descriptions of emaciated CTs, terrified Tamil workers, jolly fun-loving sultans and dashing Brits which come from movies, novels or comics of the 1950s:

Gallery of characters

Colonel Robert ‘Bob’ Thompson, son of an English clergyman, fluent Chinese scholar, fought with the famous Wingate Chindits, had a ‘brilliant’ war record, looked like a film star, was ‘a dashing, handsome, highly intelligent bachelor with a ready chuckle’ (p.24)

Sir Edward Gent, the High Commissioner… at Oxford gained a double first and was a rugger Blue… (p.44)

Malcolm MacDonald, Commissioner-General for South-East Asia… was something of a ‘character’ and over the years had developed a public image of a shirt-sleeved, approachable democrat… (p.47)

Police-Superintendent ‘Two-Gun’ Bill Stafford, a stocky, broad-shouldered barrel-chested aggressive man with grey-green eyes, who had been a ‘crime-buster’ before the Emergency and was already something of a legend in Malaya. (p.66)

[David Storrier] had sharp features, straight fair hair and the bluest eyes she [Lucie Card] had ever seen.

[Sir Henry Gurney’s] panache had become a legend in Palestine during the last frightful months… known to close friends as Jimmy, he had gained a blue for golf at Oxford and was a keen tennis player. (p.73)

Colonel Nicol Gray was a strong man in every sense of the word. (p.81)

John Davis, Senior District officer was ‘a broad-shouldered man of forty-nine with twinkling blue eyes and a shock of unmanageable hair’ (p.276)

The commanding officer chosen for the task was a spectacular character – literally: Major Harry Thompson, seconded from the Royal Highland Fusiliers, stood six feet four inches, had a thatch of fierce red hair and a boxer’s nose (p.311)

Evan Davies was a master of the technique of using double agents… He had impeccable manners… he was ‘feared yet respected in every CT camp in Malaya’… he drove a cream, two-seater sports car ‘with his usual dash and verve’…He had ‘a remarkable ability to think like a Chinese…’ ‘He had been a policeman on the beat in London before being promoted to Special Branch, followed by a spell as a Commando during World War Two..’ (pages 281 to 24)

Commando: Marching to Glory: Six of the Best Commando Army Books Ever! (Commando for Action and Adventure): Amazon.co.uk: Low, George: 9781853758966: Books

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by Simon on October 13, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in History, imperialism, War

Tagged 1951 general election, Anthony Barber, Batang Kali massacre, Bill Carbonell, British Empire, British government, British Malaya, British protectorates, British-Malayan Defence Pact, Chin Peng, Chinese, Chinese communists, Christmas Island, civil disobedience, Cold War, Colonel Arthur Young, Colonel Nicol Gray, Colonel Robert 'Bob' Thompson, Commando, Communism, communist party, communist terrorists, Correlli Barnett, CTs, Daily Mail, David Storrier, democratic capitalism, Dinding, double agent, Eileen Lee, Europeans, Evan Davies, Federated Malay States, Federation of Malaya, Force 136, Frederick Forsyth, General Sir Gerald Templer, hearts and minds, High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney, history, Hor Leung, imperial history, Indians, James Bond, John Davis, Johor, jungle guerrilla camps, jungle insurgency, Kedah, Kelantan, King's House, Korean War, Kuala Lumpa, Kuala Lumpur, Labour Party, Lai Teck, Lam Swee, Lee Meng, Lenin, Liberation Army, Lucie Card, Major Harry Thompson, Malacca, Malay, Malay Communist Party, Malay Peninsula, Malaya, Malayan Civil Service, Malayan Emergency, Malayan People's Anti-British Army, Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army, Malayan Union, Malcolm MacDonald, Mao, Marshall Aid, Masses Movement, Merdeka, Min Yuen, modern history, Negeri Sembilan, New Villages, Noel Barber, Oliver Lyttleton, Operational Volunteer Force, Orang Asli aboriginals, Osman China, Pahang, Penang, Perak, Perlis, Peter Lucy, Police Superintendent 'Two-Gun' Bill Stafford, regulation 17D, Royal Highland Fusiliers, Sandhurst, SAS, Second World War, Selangor, Singapore, Sir Edward Gent, Sir Harold Briggs, Sir Henry Gurney, Sir James Cassels, Sir Robert 'Bob' Thompson, South-East Asia, Special Branch, St John's Ambulance, Sten guns, Straits Settlements. Penang, Tamils, Ted Heath, Terence Edmitt, Terengganu, Thailand, the Cocos Islands, the Straits Settlements, The War of the Running Dogs: How Malaya Defeated the Communist Guerrillas 1948-60, Tommy Lucy, Tunku Abdul Rahman, twentieth century history, Unfederated Malay states, United Malays National Organisation, Vietnam, Wingate Chindits, Winston Churchill, World War Two

Posted by Simon on October 13, 2023

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Alex’s Adventures In Numberland by Alex Bellos (2010)

Alexander Bellos (born in 1969) is a British writer and broadcaster. He is the author of books about Brazil and mathematics, as well as having a column in The Guardian newspaper. After adventures in Brazil (see his Wikipedia page) he returned to England in 2007 and wrote this, his first book. It spent four months in the Sunday Times bestseller list and led on to five more popular maths books.

It’s a hugely enjoyable read for three reasons:

Bellos immediately establishes a candid, open, good bloke persona, sharing stories from his early job as a reporter on the Brighton Argus, telling some colourful anecdotes about his time in Brazil and then being surprisingly open about the way that, when he moved back to Britain, he had no idea what to do. The tone of the book is immediately modern, accessible and friendly.
However this doesn’t mean he is verbose. The opposite. The book is packed with fascinating information. Every single paragraph, almost every sentence contains a fact or insight which makes you sit up and marvel. It is stufffed with good things.
Lastly, although its central theme is mathematics, it approaches this through a wealth of information from the humanities. There is as much history and psychology and anthropology and cultural studies and philosophy as there is actual maths, and these are all subjects which the average humanities graduate can immediately relate to and assimilate.

Chapter Zero – A Head for Numbers

Alex meets Pierre Pica, a linguist who’s studied the Munduruku people of the Amazon and discovered they have little or no sense of numbers. They only have names for numbers up to five. Also, they cluster numbers together logarithmically i.e. the higher the number, the closer together they clustered them. Same thing is done by kindergarten children who only slowly learn that numbers are evenly spaced, in a linear way.

This may be because small children and the Munduruku don’t count so much as estimate using the ratios between numbers.

It may also be because above a certain number (five) Stone Age man needed to make quick estimates along the lines of, Are there more wild animals / members of the other gang, than us?

Another possibility is that distance appears to us to be logarithmic due to perspective: the first fifty yards we see in close detail, the next fifty yards not so detailed, beyond 100 yards looking smaller, and so on.

It appears that we have to be actively taught when young to overcome our logarithmic instincts, and to apply the rule that each successive whole number is an equal distance from its predecessor and successor i.e. the rational numbers lies along a straight line at regular intervals.

More proof that the logarithmic approach is the deep, hard-wired one is the way most of us revert to its perspective when considering big numbers. As John Allen Paulos laments, people make no end of fuss about discrepancies between 2 or 3 or 4 – but are often merrily oblivious to the difference between a million or a billion, let alone a trillion. For most of us these numbers are just ‘big’.

He goes on to describe experiments done on chimpanzees, monkeys and lions which appear to show that animals have the ability to estimate numbers. And then onto experiments with small babies which appear to show that as soon as they can focus on the outside world, babies can detect changes in number of objects.

And it appears that we also have a further number skill, that guesstimating things – the journey takes 30 or 40 minutes, there were twenty or thirty people at the party, you get a hundred, maybe hundred and fifty peas in a sack. When it comes to these figures almost all of us give rough estimates.

To summarise:

we are sensitive to small numbers, acutely so of 1, 2, 3, 4, less so of 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
left to our own devices we think logarithmically about larger numbers i.e lose the sense of distinction between them, clump them together
we have a good ability to guesstimate medium size numbers – 30, 40, 100

But it was only with the invention of notation, a way of writing numbers down, that we were able to create the linear system of counting (where every number is 1 larger than its predecessor, laid out in a straight line, at regular intervals).

And that this cultural invention enabled human beings to transcend our vague guesstimating abilities, and laid the basis for the systematic manipulation of the world which followed

Chapter One – The Counter Culture

The probable origins of counting lie in stock taking in the early agricultural revolution some 8,000 years ago.

We nowadays count using a number base 10 i.e. the decimal system. But other bases have their virtues, especially base 12. It has more factors i.e. is easier to divide: 12 can be divided neatly by 2, 3, 4 and 6. A quarter of 10 is 2.5 but of 12 is 3. A third of 10 is 3.333 but of 12 is 4. Striking that a version of the duodecimal system (pounds, shillings and pence) hung on in Britain till we finally went metric in the 1970s. There is even a Duodecimal Society of America which still actively campaigns for the superiority of a base 12 counting scheme.

Duodecimal Society of America

Bellos describes a bewildering variety of other counting systems and bases. In 1716 King Charles XII of Sweden asked Emmanuel Swedenborg to devise a new counting system with a base of 64. The Arara in the Amazon count in pairs, the Renaissance author Luca Paccioli was just one of hundreds who have devised finger-based systems of counting – indeed, the widespread use of base 10 probably stems from the fact that we have ten fingers and toes.

He describes a complicated Chinese system where every part of the hand and fingers has a value which allows you to count up to nearly a billion – on one hand!

The Yupno system which attributes a different value for parts of the body up to its highest number, 33, represented by the penis.

Diagram showing numbers attributed to parts of the body by the Yupno tribe

There’s another point to make about his whole approach which comes out if we compare him with the popular maths books by John Allen Paulos which I’ve just read.

Paulos clearly sees the need to leaven his explanations of comparative probability and Arrow’s Theorem and so on with lighter material and so his strategy is to chuck into his text things which interest him: corny jokes, anecdotes about baseball, casual random digressions which occur to him in mid-flow. But al his examples clearly 1. emanate from Paulos’s own interests and hobby horses (especially baseball) and 2. they are tacked onto the subjects being discussed.

Bellos, also, has grasped that the general reader needs to be spoonfed maths via generous helpings of other, more easily digestible material. But Bellos’s choice of material arises naturally from the topic under discussion. The humour emerges naturally and easily from the subject matter instead of being tacked on in the form of bad jokes.

You feel yourself in the hands of a master storyteller who has all sorts of wonderful things to explain to you.

In fourth millennium BC, an early counting system was created by pressing a reed into soft clay. By 2700 BC the Sumerians were using cuneiform. And they had number symbols for 1, 10, 60 and 3,600 – a mix of decimal and sexagesimal systems.

Why the Sumerians grouped their numbers in 60s has been described as one of the greatest unresolved mysteries in the history of arithmetic. (p.58)

Measuring in 60s was inherited by the Babylonians, the Egyptians and the Greeks and is why we still measure hours in 60 minutes and the divisions of a circle by 360 degrees.

I didn’t know that after the French Revolution, when the National Convention introduced the decimal system of weights and measures, it also tried to decimalise time, introducing a new system whereby every day would be divided into ten hours, each of a hundred minutes, each divided into 100 seconds. Thus there were a very neat 10 x 100 x 100 = 100,000 seconds in a day. But it failed. An hour of 60 minutes turns out to be a deeply useful division of time, intuitively measurable, and a reasonable amount of time to spend on tasks. The reform was quietly dropped after six months, although revolutionary decimal clocks still exist.

Studies consistently show that Chinese children find it easier to count than European children. This may be because of our system of notation, or the structure of number names. Instead of eleven or twelve, Chinese, Japanese and Koreans say the equivalent of ten one, ten two. 21 and 22 become two ten one and two ten two. It has been shown that this makes it a lot simpler and more intuitive to do basic addition and subtraction.

Bellos goes on to describe the various systems of abacuses which have developed in different cultures, before explaining the phenomenal popularity of abacus counting, abacus clubs, and abacus championships in Japan which helps kids develop the ability to perform anzan, using the mental image of an abacus to help its practitioners to sums at phenomenal speed.

Chapter Two – Behold!

The mystical sense of the deep meaning of numbers, from Pythagoras with his vegetarian religious cult of numbers in 4th century BC Athens to Jerome Carter who advises leading rap stars about the numerological significance of their names.

Euclid and the elegant and pure way he deduced mathematical theorems from a handful of basic axioms.

A description of the basic Platonic shapes leads into the nature of tessalating tiles, and the Arab pioneering of abstract design. The complex designs of the Sierpinski carpet and the Menger sponge. And then the complex and sophisticated world of origami, which has its traditionalists, its pioneers and surprising applications to various fields of advanced science, introducing us to the American guru of modern origami, Robert Lang, and the Japanese rebel, Kazuo Haga, father of Haga’s Theorem.

Haga’s Theorem

Chapter Three – Something About Nothing

A bombardment of information about the counting systems of ancient Hindus, Buddhists, about number symbols in Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek and Latin. How the concept of zero was slowly evolved in India and moved to the Muslim world with the result that the symbols we use nowadays are known as the Arabic numerals.

A digression into ‘a set of arithmetical tricks known as Vedic Mathematics ‘ devised by a young Indian swami at the start of the twentieth century, Bharati Krishna Tirthaji, based on a series of 16 aphorisms which he found in the ancient holy texts known as the Vedas.

Shankaracharya is a commonly used title of heads of monasteries called mathas in the Advaita Vedanta tradition. Tirthaji was the Shankaracharya of the monastery at Puri. Bellos goes to visit the current Shankaracharya who explains the closeness, in fact the identity, of mathematics and Hindu spirituality.

Chapter Four – Life of Pi

An entire chapter about pi which turns out not only to be a fundamental aspect of calculating radiuses and diameters and volumes of circles and cubes, but also to have a long history of mathematicians vying with each other to work out its value to as many decimal places as possible (we currently know the value of pi to 2.7 trillion decimal places) and the surprising history of people who have set records reciting the value if pi.

Thus, in 2006, retired Japanese engineer Akira Haraguchi set a world record for reciting the value of pi to the first 100,000 decimal places from memory! It took 16 hours with five minute beaks every two hours to eat rice balls and drink some water.

There are several types or classes of numbers:

natural numbers – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7…
integers – all the natural numbers, but including the negative ones as well – …-3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3…
fractions
which are also called rational numbers
numbers which cannot be written as fractions are called irrational numbers
transcendent numbers – ‘a transcendental number is an irrational number that cannot be described by an equation with a finite number of terms’

The qualities of the heptagonal 50p coin and the related qualities of the Reuleux triangle.

Chapter Five – The x-factor

The origin of algebra (in Arab mathematicians).

Bellos makes the big historical point that for the Greeks (Pythagoras, Plato, Euclid) maths was geometric. They thought of maths as being about shapes – circles, triangles, squares and so on. These shapes had hidden properties which maths revealed, thus giving – the Pythagoreans thought – insight into the secret deeper values of the world.

It is only with the introduction of algebra in the 17th century (Bellos attributes its widespread adoption to Descartes’s Method in the 1640s) that it is possible to fly free of shapes into whole new worlds of abstract numbers and formulae.

Logarithms turn the difficult operation of multiplication into the simpler operation of addition. If X x Y = Z, then log X + log Y = log Z. They were invented by a Scottish laird John Napier, and publicised in a huge book of logarithmic tables published in 1614. Englishman Henry Briggs established logarithms to base 10 in 1628. In 1620 Englishman Edmund Gunter marked logarithms on a ruler. Later in the 1620s Englishman William Oughtred placed two logarithmic rulers next to each other to create the slide rule.

Three hundred years of dominance by the slide rule was brought to a screeching halt by the launch of the first pocket calculator in 1972.

Quadratic equations are equations with an x and an x², e.g. 3x² + 2x – 4 = 0. ‘Quadratics have become so crucial to the understanding of the world, that it is no exaggeration to say that they underpin modern science’ (p.200).

Chapter Six – Playtime

Number games. The origin of Sudoku, which is Japanese for ‘the number must appear only once’. There are some 5 billion ways for numbers to be arranged in a table of nine cells so that the sum of any row or column is the same.

There have, apparently, only been four international puzzle crazes with a mathematical slant – the tangram, the Fifteen puzzle, Rubik’s cube and Sudoku – and Bellos describes the origin and nature and solutions to all four. More than 300 million cubes have seen sold since Ernö Rubik came up with the idea in 1974. Bellos gives us the latest records set in the hyper-competitive sport of speedcubing: the current record of restoring a copletely scrambled cube to order (i.e. all the faces of one colour) is 7.08 seconds, a record held by Erik Akkersdijk, a 19-year-old Dutch student.

A visit to the annual Gathering for Gardner, honouring Martin Gardner, one of the greatest popularisers of mathematical games and puzzles who Bellos visits. The origin of the ambigram, and the computer game Tetris.

Chapter Seven – Secrets of Succession

The joy of sequences. Prime numbers.

The fundamental theorem of arithmetic – In number theory, the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, also called the unique factorization theorem or the unique-prime-factorization theorem, states that every integer greater than 1 either is a prime number itself or can be represented as the product of prime numbers.

The Goldbach conjecture – one of the oldest and best-known unsolved problems in number theory and all of mathematics. It states that, Every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes. The conjecture has been shown to hold for all integers less than 4 × 1018, but remains unproven despite considerable effort.

Neil Sloane’s idea of persistence – The number of steps it takes to get to a single digit by multiplying all the digits of the preceding number to obtain a second number, then multiplying all the digits of that number to get a third number, and so on until you get down to a single digit. 88 has a persistence of three.

88 → 8 x 8 = 64 → 6 x 4 = 24 → 2 x 4 = 8

John Horton Conway’s idea of the powertrain – For any number abcd its powertrain goes to a^bc^d, in the case of numbers with an odd number of digits the final one has no power, abcde’s powertrain is a^bc^de.

The Recamán sequence Subtract if you can, unless a) it would result in a negative number or b) the number is already in the sequence. The result is:

0, 1, 3, 6, 2, 7, 13, 20, 12, 21, 11….

Gijswijt’s sequence a self-describing sequence where each term counts the maximum number of repeated blocks of numbers in the sequence immediately preceding that term.

1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 1, …

Perfect number A perfect number is any number that is equal to the sum of its factors. Thus 6 – its factors (the numbers which divided into it) are 1, 2 and 3. Which also add up to (are the sum of) 6. The next perfect number is 28 because its factors – 1, 2, 4, 7, 14 – add up to 28. And so on.

Amicable numbers A number is amicable if the sum of the factors of the first number equals the second number, and if the sum of the factors of the second number equals the first. The factors of 220 are 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55 and 110. Added together these make 284. The factors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71 and 142. Added together they make 220!

Sociable numbers In 1918 Paul Poulet invented the term sociable numbers. ‘The members of aliquot cycles of length greater than 2 are often called sociable numbers. The smallest two such cycles have length 5 and 28’

Perfect, amicable and sociable numbers

Mersenne’s prime A prime number which can be written in the form 2n – 1 a prime number that is one less than a power of two. That is, it is a prime number of the form Mn = 2n − 1 for some integer n. The exponents n which give Mersenne primes are 2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 17, 19, 31, … and the resulting Mersenne primes are 3, 7, 31, 127, 8191, 131071, 524287, 2147483647, …

These and every other sequence ever created by humankind are documented on The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS), also cited simply as Sloane’s. This is an online database of integer sequences, created and maintained by Neil Sloane while a researcher at AT&T Labs.

On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences

Chapter Eight – Gold Finger

The golden section a number found by dividing a line into two parts so that the longer part divided by the smaller part is also equal to the whole length divided by the longer part.

Phi The number is often symbolized using phi, after the 21st letter of the Greek alphabet. In an equation form:

a/b = (a+b)/a = 1.6180339887498948420 …

As with pi (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter), the digits go on and on, theoretically into infinity. Phi is usually rounded off to 1.618.

The Golden Ratio

The Fibonnaci sequence Each number in the sequence is the sum of the two numbers that precede it. So the sequence goes: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on. The mathematical equation describing it is X_n+2= X_n+1 + X_n_.

as the basis of seeds in flowerheads, arrangement of leaves round a stem, design of nautilus shell and much more.

The Fibonnaci sequence

Chapter Nine – Chance Is A Fine Thing

A chapter about probability and gambling.

Impossibility has a value 0, certainty a value 1, everything else is in between. Probabilities can be expressed as fractions e.g. 1/6 chance of rolling a 6 on a die, or as percentages, 16.6%, or as decimals, 0.16…

The probability is something not happening is 1 minus the probability of that thing happening.

Probability was defined and given mathematical form in 17th century. One contribution was the questions the Chevalier de Méré asked the mathematical prodigy Blaise Pascal. Pascal corresponded with his friend, Pierre de Fermat, and they worked out the bases of probability theory.

Expected value is what you can expect to get out of a bet. Bellos takes us on a tour of the usual suspects – rolling dice, tossing coins, and roulette (invented in France).

Payback percentage if you bet £10 at craps, you can expect – over time – to receive an average of about £9.86 back. In other words craps has a payback percentage of 98.6 percent. European roulette has a payback percentage of 97.3 percent. American roulette, 94.7 percent. On other words, gambling is a fancy way of giving your money away. A miserly slot machine has a payback percentage of 85%. The National Lottery has a payback percentage of 50%.

The law of large numbers The more you play a game of chance, the more likely the results will approach the statistical probability. Toss a coin three times, you might get three heads. Toss a coin a thousand times, the chances are you will get very close the statistical probability of 50% heads.

The law of very large numbers With a large enough sample, outrageous coincidences become likely.

The gambler’s fallacy The mistaken belief that, if something happens more frequently than normal during a given period, it will happen less frequently in the future (or vice versa). In other words, that a random process becomes less random, and more predictable, the more it is repeated.

The birthday paradox The probability that, in a set of n randomly chosen people, some pair of them will have the same birthday. By the pigeonhole principle, the probability reaches 100% when the number of people reaches 367 (since there are only 366 possible birthdays, including February 29). However, 99.9% probability is reached with just 70 people, and 50% probability with 23 people. (These conclusions are based on the assumption that each day of the year (excluding February 29) is equally probable for a birthday.) In other words you only need a group of 23 people to have an evens chance that two of them share a birthday.

The drunkard’s walk

The difficulty of attaining true randomness and the human addiction to finding meaning in anything.

The distinction between playing strategy (best strategy to win a game) and betting strategy (best strategy to maximise your winnings), not always the same.

Chapter Ten – Situation Normal

Carl Friedrich Gauss, the bell curve, normal distribution aka Gaussian distribution. Normal or Gaurrian distribution results in a bell curve. Bellos describes the invention and refinement of the bell curve (he explains that ‘the long tail’ results from a mathematician who envisioned a thin bell curve as looking like two kangaroos facing each other with their long tails heading off in opposite directions). And why

Regression to the mean – if the outcome of an event is determined at least in part by random factors, then an extreme event will probably be followed by one that is less extreme. And recent devastating analyses which show how startlingly random sports achievements are, from leading baseball hitters to Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski’s analysis of the form of the England soccer team.

Chapter Eleven – The End of the Line

Two breakthroughs which paved the way for modern i.e. 20th century, maths: the invention of non-Euclidean geometry, specifically the concept of hyperbolic geometry. To picture this draw a triangle on a Pringle. it is recognisably a triangle but all its angles do not add up to 180°, therefore it defies, escapes, eludes all the rule of Euclidean geometry, which were designed for flat 2D surfaces.

Bellos introduces us to Daina Taimina, a maths prof at Cornell University, who invented a way of crocheting hyperbolic surfaces. The result looks curly, like curly kale or the surface of coral.

Anyway, the breakaway from flat 2-D Euclidean space led to theories about curved geometry, either convex like a sphere, or hyperbolic like the pringle. It was this notion of curved space, which paved the way for Einstein’s breakthrough ideas in the early 20th century.

The second big breakthrough was Georg Cantor’s discovery that you can have many different types of infinity. Until Cantor the mathematical tradition from the ancient Greeks to Galileo and Newton had fought shy of infinity which threatened to disrupt so many formulae.

Cantor’s breakthrough was to stop thinking about numbers, and instead think of sets. This is demonstrated through the paradoxes of Hilbert’s Hotel. You need to buckle your safety belt to understand it.

Hilbert’s Paradox of the Grand Hotel

Thoughts

This is easily the best book about maths I’ve ever read. It gives you a panoramic history of the subject which starts with innumerate cavemen and takes us to the edge of Einstein’s great discoveries. But Bellos adds to it all kinds of levels and abilities.

He is engaging and candid and funny. He is fantastically authoritative, taking us gently into forests of daunting mathematical theory without placing a foot wrong. He’s a great explainer. He knows a good story when he sees one, and how to tell it engagingly. And in every chapter there is a ‘human angle’ as he describes his own personal meetings and interviews with many of the (living) key players in the world of contemporary maths, games and puzzles.

Like the Ian Stewart book but on a vastly bigger scale, Bellos makes you feel what it is like to be a mathematician, not just interested in nature’s patterns (the basis of Stewart’s book, Nature’s Numbers) but in the beauty of mathematical theories and discoveries for their own sakes. (This comes over very strongly in chapter seven with its description of some of the weirdest and wackiest number sequences dreamed up by the human mind.) I’ve often read scientists describing the beauty of mathematical theories, but Bellos’s book really helps you develop a feel for this kind of beauty.

For me, I think three broad conclusions emerged:

1. Most mathematicians are in it for the fun. Setting yourself, and solving, mathematical puzzles is obviously extremely rewarding. Maths includes the vast territory of puzzles and games, such as the Sudoku and so on he describes in chapter six. Obviously it has all sorts of real-world application in physics, engineering and so on, but Bellos’s book really brings over that a true understanding of maths begins in puzzles, games and patterns, and often remains there for a lifetime. Like everything else maths is no highly professionalised the property of tenured professors in universities; and yet even to this day – as throughout its history – contributions can be made by enthusiastic amateurs.

2. As he points out repeatedly, many insights which started out as the hobby horses of obsessives, or arcane breakthroughs on the borders of our understanding, and which have been airily dismissed by the professionals, often end up being useful, having applications no-one dreamed of. Either they help unravel aspects of the physical universe undreamed of when they were discovered, or have been useful to human artificers. Thus the development of random number sequences seemed utterly pointless in the 19th century, but now underlies much internet security.

On a profounder note, Bellos expresses the eerie, mystical sense many mathematicians have that it seems so strange, so pregnant with meaning, that so many of these arcane numbers end up explaining aspects of the world their inventors knew nothing of. Ian Stewart has an admirably pragmatic explanation for this: he speculates that nature uses everything it can find in order to build efficient life forms. Or, to be less teleological, over the past 3 and a half billion years, every combination of useful patterns has been tried out. Given this length of time, and the incalculable variety of life forms which have evolved on this planet, it would be strange if every number system conceivable by one of those life forms – humankind – had not been tried out at one time or another.

3. My third conclusion is that, despite John Allen Paulos’s and Bellos’s insistence, I do not live in a world ever-more bombarded by maths. I don’t gamble on anything, and I don’t follow sports – the two biggest popular areas where maths is important – and the third is the twin areas of surveys and opinion polls (55% of Americans believe in alien abductions etc etc) and the daily blizzard of reports (for example, I see in today’s paper that the ‘Number of primary school children at referral units soars’).

I register their existence but they don’t impact on me for the simple reason that I don’t believe any of them. In 1992 every opinion poll said John Major would lose the general election, but he won with a thumping majority. Since then I haven’t believed any poll about anything. For example almost all the opinion polls predicted a win for Remain in the Brexit vote. Why does any sane person believe opinion polls?

And ‘new and shocking’ reports come out at the rate of a dozen a day and, on closer examination, lots of them turn out to be recycled information, or much much more mundane releases of data sets from which journalists are paid to draw the most shocking and extreme conclusions. Some may be of fleeting interest but once you really grasp that the people reporting them to you are paid to exaggerate and horrify, you soon learn to ignore them.

If you reject or ignore these areas – sport, gambling and the news (made up of rehashed opinion polls, surveys and reports) – then unless you’re in a profession which actively requires the sophisticated manipulation of figures, I’d speculate that most of the rest of us barely come into contact with numbers from one day to the next.

I think that’s the answer to Paulos and Bellos when they are in their ‘why aren’t more people mathematically numerate?’ mode. It’s because maths is difficult, and counter-intuitive, and hard to understand and follow, it is a lot of work, it does make your head ache. Even trying to solve a simple binomial equation hurt my brain.

But I think the biggest reason that ‘we’ are so innumerate is simply that – beautiful, elegant, satisfying and thought-provoking though maths may be to the professionals – maths is more or less irrelevant to most of our day to day lives, most of the time.

Reviews of other science books

Chemistry

The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into the Land of the Chemical Elements by Peter Atkins (1995)

Cosmology

The Environment

Genetics and life

Human evolution

Maths

Particle physics

Atomic by Jim Baggott (2009)

Psychology

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by Simon on April 1, 2019 • Permalink

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Tagged 2010, abacus, Akira Haraguchi, Alex Bellos, Alex's Adventures In Numberland, algebra, Amazon, ambigram, amicable numbers, anzan, Arabic numerals, Arrow's Theorem, Babylonians, base 10, betting strategy, Bharati Krishna Tirthaji, Blaise Pascal, book, Brazil, Buddhists, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Chinese, curved space, Daina Taimina, Descartes, Duodecimal Society of America, Edmund Gunter, Egyptians, Einstein, Emmanuel Swedenborg, Erik Akkersdijk, Ernö Rubik, Euclid, expected value, fractions, France, French Revolution, gambling, Gaussian distribution, Georg Cantor, Gijswijt's sequence, Greek, Greeks, Guardian, Haga's Theorem, Hebrew, Henry Briggs, Hilbert's Hotel, Hindus, hyperbolic geometry, India, integers, irrational numbers, Japanese, Jerome Carter, John Allen Paulos, John Horton Conway, John Napier, Kazuo Haga, King Charles XII, Koreans, Latin, linear maths, logarithmic, Luca Paccioli, Martin Gardner, Mathematics, Mersenne's prime, Munduruku people, National Convention, natural numbers, Neil Sloane, non-Euclidean geometry, normal distribution, On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, Paul Poulet, payback percentage, perfect number, persistence, phi, pi, Pierre Pica, Plato, playing strategy, prime numbers, probability, probability theory, Pythagoras, quadratic equations, rational numbers, regression to the mean, Robert Lang, rolling dice, roulette, Rubik's cube, Sanskrit, sexagesimal, Shankaracharya, Simon Kuper, sociable numbers, speedcubing, Stefan Szymanski, Sudoku, Sumerians, tangram, Tetris, the birthday paradox, the Chevalier de Méré, the drunkard's walk, the Fibonnaci sequence, the Fifteen puzzle, the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, the gambler's fallacy, the Goldbach conjecture, the golden section, the law of large numbers, the law of very large numbers, the long tail, the Menger sponge, the powertrain, the Recamán sequence, the Reuleux triangle, the Sierpinski carpet, tossing coins, transcendent numbers, Vedas, Vedic Mathematics, William Oughtred, Yupno, Zero

Posted by Simon on April 1, 2019

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Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut Jnr (1976)

This is a really weird story, a madly disorientating story about twin freaks, a future dystopia, shrinking Chinese and communication with the afterlife.

The main story (pp.15-170) is narrated by the two-metre tall man, christened Wilbur Rockefeller Swain but now known as Dr Wilbur Daffodil-II Swain.

It is a morbid and depressing story. Swain is just coming up to his 101st birthday. He lives amid the ruins of New York. The rest of America has been depopulated by Albanian Flu (p.33), but New York had a special plague of its own, known as the Green Plague. Now it is almost empty, with only Swain and a handful or relatives and friends living in the overgrown ruins. To survivors on the mainland it is known only as ‘the Island of Death’.

So Slapstick is a post-apocalypse story.

As so often in fictional memoirs, two timelines run in parallel 1. The ‘present’ in which the narrator wakes up and potters round and we are introduced to the main characteristics of the post-apocalyptic world. Thus Swain starts each chapter with a bit of gossip about his current companions, his emaciated though pregnant grand-daughter Melody, and her husband Isidore, or about their best friend Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa who keeps a farm worked by ‘slaves’.

Before 2. returning to a conventional chronological account which begins with the birth of him and his twin sister, follows them through their early life, and on to the series of events which led up to the disaster.

Vonnegut uses Vonnegutian tricks such as:

The entire text is broken up into very short sections, sometimes a few paragraphs, but sometimes just a few words, all divided by three asterisks in the centre of the page, creating the sense that the whole book is made of fragments glued together, a suitable feel, maybe, for post-apocalyptic fragments.
And just as the catchphrase ‘So it goes’ appeared on every page of Slaughterhouse-Five and ‘And so on’ capped every anecdote in Breakfast of Champions, so almost every bit of prose which tells a significant story or anecdote in this book is capped with ‘Hi ho’. At one point the narrator says he must go back through the book and delete all the ‘Hi ho’s’. Which he follows with another Hi ho. Hi ho. I think it is safe to say this use of ironically off-hand taglines has become a mannerism.

From his birth up to the age of 15, Wilbur and his twin sister, Eliza Mellon Swain, pretend to be drooling idiots. In fact they are geniuses, especially if they physically touch their heads together. When they do this they share a joint super-intelligence. But for 15 years all they do is pretend to be retards, and are locked by their parents in their posh Boston home. (They are from a super-rich family.)

This is every bit as weird as it sounds. On their fifteenth birthdays, they overhear their parents discussing sending them to separate homes and so make the startling announcement that they are not brain damaged but the reverse – hyper-intelligent and articulate young people.

This shocks their parents even more, who promptly call in a high-powered women psychiatrist who, vindictively knowing the damage it will cause them, recommends they be separated, declaring Wilbur is the clever one and Eliza is the defect.

So Wilbur is packed off to medical school and becomes a successful pediatrician, while Eliza goes to rot in a home for the mentally defective.

Cut to about ten years later when Wilbur is confronted by Eliza, who has been sprung from the home by a money-grabbing lawyer on the news that their parents have died. She is a wreck, distraught and determined on revenge as she confronts him at his grand mansion. But the moment they actually make physical contact, the old telepathic communication is revived and they have a five-day long orgy during which they tie up all the servants.

Maybe this whole plotline is intended as satirical but it comes over as a kind of poor man’s Philip K. Dick, with its dwelling on identity and reality, and sick obsession with a dead sibling (both Dick and Vonnegut had dead sisters).

Meanwhile, in the background of the story, we learn that oil has been running low, and that American science and technology has stagnated. The sky has turned yellow because of gases released by underarm deodorants. The Chinese are making all kinds of new discoveries. The West is collapsing. Americans are becoming more lonely.

Eliza takes her cut of Swain’s estate and goes to Macchu Picchu. Why? Because it

was then becoming a haven for rich people and their parasites, people fleeing social reforms and economic declines, not just in America, but in all parts of the world. (p.93)

An absurdist theme which runs through the book is that the Chinese, as part of their transformation into top economic power in the world, undertake a programme of miniaturising human beings. There are so many of them, they can only survive if they get smaller.

Thus it is that a lot later in the book, Swain is visited by the Chinese ambassador who is only a few inches tall (the size of Wilbur’s thumb, p.101). Piling absurdity on absurdity, he is named Fu Manchu. He asks Swain to take him to the family mausoleum in which are hidden the various writings Swain and Eliza did when their heads were together and they were a super-genius. Swain doesn’t understand why, but some of these writings are of immense importance to the Chinese – now the leading scientific and technological country in the world.

A second major idea has to do with gravity. When Swain describes life in post-apocalyptic America, he has dropped hints about there being a problem with gravity, that it varies from day to day like the weather, with some days of heavy gravity, some of light. This is, apparently, caused by scientific experiments by the Chinese, though by this stage nobody in America understands what or how or has the power to stop it.

The first time gravity changes is on the day Swain picks up a telegram at his local post office which tells him that Eliza is dead, crushed under an avalanche on Mars (p.106). Mars? Yes she had tipped off the Chinese about the secret documents hidden in the mausoleum and, as a reward, was transported to the new Chinese colony on Mars. Ill-fatedly, as it turns out.

As he walks out onto the steps outside his local post office, gravity changes – for just a minute or so it is doubled, quintupled, and Wilbur falls through the wooden steps he’s standing on, people fall through ladders, chairs, and flimsy flooring. Bridges and tall buildings collapse, elevators plummet to the ground and so on.

The Gravity Shift only lasts a minute or so but undermines the confidence of Americans even more than the failing oil supply and yellow sky.

It is against this backdrop of America’s economic, scientific and political decline, that Swain runs for president on a platform of radically reorganising society. He decides the problem with Americans is they are lonely and isolated. He comes up with a scheme whereby all Americans will be given new middle names by computer. The number of names will be calculated so that each new ‘family’ has about 10,000 members. I.e. if something happens to you there will be 9,999 other ‘family members’ you can call on.

He runs for senator, then president, on the slogan of ‘Lonesome no more’ – which is the sub-title of this book (p.112).

It is hard not to think that this plotline – the satire on American loneliness – is a separate short story or plot idea which Vonnegut has bolted onto the weird story of two twin giants who are cruelly separated. Chucking in Chinese miniaturisation, and the notion that the Earth’s gravity can be played with, as additional sweeties.

By this stage we learn that, because of the end of oil and technology, America has collapsed as a political entity. There are no more printing presses, no more radio or TV – because there is no more fuel (p.117). it has been replaced by warlords which control territories like Michigan or Dakota – hence the King of Michigan, the Great Lake pirates, and other satirical names the narrator casually mentions in passing.

(In a satirical touch, the only way to power the computer which doles out new middle names to the population of America, is by systematically burning all the paper archives in the White House and Congress.)

(In another satirical touch he throws in the fact that the new religion which the general crisis gives rise to is the Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped.)

Also, by this stage, Wilbur tells us he has become addicted to some kind of tranquiliser named tri-benzo-Deportamil, which helps him to cope with all the ups and downs of his life with equanimity.

Vonnegut devotes an extensive passage to describing his happiness at visiting a lodge of his own ‘family’, the Daffodils, in Indiana, how kind and welcoming they are. And to explaining how his successful family plan meshes or overlaps with the numerous small wars which the King of Michigan and so on are fighting against each other.

In fact there is a satirical scene where Swain is summoned by the grandiose young King of Michigan who wishes him to solemnly sign a document reversing the famous Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and handing over rule of what was then the vast territory in the centre of the USA over the king. Fine, thinks Swain, and signs.

Epilogue

At this point the memoir written by Wilbur Swain comes to an abrupt end. It is succeeded by an epilogue tying up loose ends.

This takes the story from the meeting with the King of Michigan to his death.

Swain had been contacted by a woman who had discovered a way of contacting the dead. An old farmer arranged a bucket and antique pipe in just such a way atop a defunct particle accelerator (no more electricity; hadn’t worked for years) and, to his surprise, began hearing voices out of the pipe.

Swain, still nominally president although now with few if any powers over a disintegrated country, is told about this and invited to try it. He manages to get through to his sister Eliza, who tells him the afterlife is dreadful. Swain can hear a babble of people coughing, shouting and farting in the background. Eliza says the afterlife is like a badly managed Turkey Farm. She begs him to die and join her. The device for communicating with the dead is known as ‘the Hooligan’ after the name of the farmer who accidentally created it. (p.160-164)

Convinced that she needs his help, and in a hurry to die, Swain persuades the pilot of the helicopter (Captain Bernard O’Hare – sharp-eyed Vonnegut readers might remember that Bernard O’Hare plays an important role in his 1962 novel Mother Night) which flew him to the Daffodil reunion in Indiana (and is himself a member of the Daffodil family) to fly him to Manhattan, long since known as ‘the Island of Death’ because of the mysterious epidemic which wiped out almost its entire population.

Hovering over the empty, overgrown avenues, Swain climbs down a rope ladder and onto the balcony of the Empire State Building, whose staircase he proceeds to walk down. But instead of quickly dying, in the ruined lobby of the building Swain is kidnapped by some ‘Raspberries’ a really primitive clan of humans who live by eating nuts, and berries and whatever they can forage.

As it happens these people have unwittingly stumbled on an antidote to the Green Death, namely fish from the rivers either side of Manhattan which are so polluted that some of the rare chemicals in them act as antidotes.

Now the narrator now tells us that the flu which killed everyone was caused by an invasion of microscopic Martians, whose invasion was repelled by antibodies in the systems of the survivors (p.163). While the Green Death was caused by microscopic Chinese floating through the air who were peace-loving but were invariably fatal to normal-sized human who inhaled or ingested them (p.164).

Swain proceeds to live on derelict Manhattan for a very, very long time. Back around the time when he used the Hooligan and sold Louisiana to the King of Michigan, his last few pills of tri-benzo-Deportamil ran out and he went mental. He had to be tied down for five days in the farmhouse, but managed – in the impossible way characteristic of this narrative – to have sex and impregnate the wife of the old farmer.

She had a son.

He had a daughter, who was packed off to join the seraglio of the King of Michigan who was, by this time, a disgusting old man. She managed to escape and set off East towards New York to try and track down the mythical grandfather her dad had told her about. Her name is Melody Oriole-2. She was helped along the odyssey by strangers who gave her a baby pram, a candlestick, a compass and an umbrella. And one who rowed her across to the Island of Death.

And that’s how Swain was reunited with his grand-daughter and came to be chatting about her at the start of the book’s 49 chapters. He has his drunken 102nd birthday, organised for him by his old friend Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa, and drops dead.

Thoughts

It’s a short book (170 pages) but with enough ideas in it to blow anyone’s mind.

Whether any of them – plausible, fantastical, surreal, satirical – are any good, was hard to tell. I was so dazed by the relentless nonsensicality of much of the narrative that it was difficult to take a view. Is it a farrago of rubbish, which a summary of the plot might lead you to think? Or, as a friend of mine who’s a Vonnegut fan thinks, one of his best books?

I couldn’t work out whether the four or five hours it took me to read it were time well spent or not.

I think it feels to me like a last hurrah of the absurdist approach, and typographical experimentation, which Vonnegut launched in Slaughterhouse-Five and brought to a climax in Breakfast of Champions. But then Cat’s Cradle which preceded both also has an end-of-the-world, post-apocalyptic setting. In fact, both books consist of the memoir of one of the few people who survived the end of the world.

But when I saw how his next novel, Jailbird, reverts to a much more conventional layout and prose style, and to realistic subject matter, this adds to the sense that Slapstick is like the fagged-out hangover of the absurdist approach which characterised its three predecessors.

Kurt Vonnegut reviews

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped andys
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after a catastrophe on the moon

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?

1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the enormous monolith on Japetus
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke* – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, a moon of the former Jupiter, but the thriller aspects are only pretexts for Clarke’s wonderful descriptions of landing on Halley’s Comet and the evolution of wild and unexpected new forms of life on Europa

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by Simon on January 22, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in America, American literature, Books, Novel

Posted by Simon on January 22, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/01/22/slapstick-kurt-vonnegut/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged Chinese

A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang @ the British Library

Background history

The heyday

Silk roads, plural

The significance of Dunhuang

Buried treasure

The Mogao caves

The guardian Wang

Wang discovers the Library Cave

Western archaeologists pounce

Collectors’ guilt

Founding of the International Dunhuang Programme

The exhibition

Topics and stories

The Merchant (unnamed)

Dunhuang Limes

The booklets

The Diplomat: Ca Kima-sana

The Fortune-Teller: Shenzhi, the Yin and Yang Master

The Printer: Lei Yanmei, the woodblock carver

The Scribe: Ke’u Monley

The artist: Dong Baode

The Lay Buddhist: the 80-year-old who wrote in blood

The Buddhist Nun: Deng Ziyi

The caves

Music

Related links

Related reviews

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Stand Up Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas (1975)

Cast

The book’s cons

Tired

Reviving finished relationships

Resurrecting Lucy

Forgetting what we’ve learned

Sexism

Racism

Homophobia

The pros

The main events

A digression about sex

Back to the plot

Nice turns of phrase

Movie version

Credit

Related (comic) reviews

Malaya reviews

History

Fiction

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The Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas (1966)

Cast of characters

Main events

Phillipa chooses Sergeant Driscoll

The Singapore riots

Whoops there go my trousers

The Driscoll and Wellbeloved fight

Brigg saves Phillipa

Lucy is dead

Frog races

R&R up north

The rickshaw race

Phillipa relents

CT attack on the train

The end

Prose style

Thoughts

Credit

Related (comic) reviews

Malaya reviews

History

Fiction

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The War of Running Dogs by Noel Barber (1971)

British Malaya

Racial heterogeneity

Chinese communists