Published the year after Foden’s famous debut, ‘The Last King of Scotland’, ‘Ladysmith’ is even longer, weighing in at a chunky 362 pages. He must have been working on them at the same time and this prompts the thought of considering them as two prisms or perspectives, from different periods, on their subjects – Africa, white people in Africa, colonialism and war.

Talking of dates, I realised Foden probably wanted the book to be published in 1999 as this marked the centenary of its subject, the start of the siege of Ladysmith. I wonder if the actual publication date was aligned as well i.e. in October or November. In fact one of the characters wonders whether the siege will go on for decades and his diary of it will be dug up a century hence, in 1999 (George Steevens the journalist, p.175).

Anyway, Ladysmith is a dazzling feat of imagination and bravura writing, hugely gripping, informative and entertaining. Also, it is very hard, grim and violent.

The siege of Ladysmith

The (Second) Boer War lasted from 11 October 1899 to 31 May 1902. Less than a month into the conflict Boer forces surrounded the town of Ladysmith in the colony of Natal on 2 November 1899 – occupied by British civilians, Asians and Africans and a contingent of the British army – and besieged it for 118 days, until it was relieved by British forces on 28 February 1900.

• The siege of Ladysmith Wikipedia article

Prologue

The narrative opens not in Africa, but in late-Victorian Ireland (later on, we realise it’s about 1880). Four dramatic pages briskly describe the poverty and persecution suffered by the unnamed narrator, which drives him to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The underlying point is the implied connection between the Irish and the Boers, small subject peoples oppressed by the British Empire. He’s involved in a shootout with British police, escapes, is hidden by comrades in the Brotherhood, then smuggled to Liverpool, where he plans to start a new life in the colonies.

Part 1. Crossways

It quickly becomes clear that a distinguishing feature of the book is its very large cast of characters. Here’s a list of the characters who appear in the first hundred pages or so:

• Bella Kiernan, 20, eldest daughter of…
• Leo Kiernan, red-haired proprietor of the Royal Hotel, Ladysmith (p.19)
• Jane Kiernan, 18, Bella’s blonde younger sister (p.24), admired by gunner Foster of the Naval Brigade (p.62)
• Gunner Herbert Foster, likely young lad and beau to Jane Kiernan
• Antonio Torres, barber, from Lourenço Marques in Portuguese East Africa (now named Maputo and Mozambique, respectively) which he left when his beloved Isabella Teixera da Mattos (p.93) married another man (Luís)
• Mrs Frinton, thin, ascetic, grey-haired, God-fearing widow (p.47), most religious woman in town (p.125)
• Mr and Mrs Star, the Ladysmith bakers (p.15)
• Tom Barnes of the Green Horse regiment (p.20), writes long descriptive letters home to his mother and sister Lizzie, one of which includes burning down the house of an absent Boer including piano and music (pages 60 to 65)
• four journalists: George Steevens of the Mail; Henry Nevinson of the Daily Chronicle; Donald McDonald of the Melbourne Argus; William Maud the Graphic’s special artist (pages 21 and 120); MacDonald is coarse and racist (p.75); Steevens, small and bald and scholarly, is a legend for his calm under fire (p.76); Nevinson is more the neutral 40-ish narrator type (p.78) albeit a ‘dour figure’ (p.203)
• Atkins of the Manchester Guardian
• Perry Barnes, Tom’s younger brother who’s followed him into the army, a farrier by trade, aboard the same ship bringing the Biographer, Winston Churchill and thousands of troops to South Africa (p.26)
• Lieutenant Norris, Tom and Bob’s superior officer
• the Biographer who it took me a few pages to realise is not a photographer but a pioneer of moving pictures i.e. film photography – describes the loading and sea voyage of the Dunottar Castle setting off from Southampton to Cape Town – he grew up in Birmingham and considers himself an outsider at the captain’s table full of plummy posh officers (p.26); he is so-named because he works for the Mutoscope and Biograph Company (p.56)
• Winston Churchill, correspondent for the Morning Post (p.30)
• General Redvers Henry Buller (p.35)
• Muhle Maseku, wife Nandi (who Maseku married when he was 13) and young son Wellington, one of thousands in a refugee column fleeing (p.36), he is separated from his wife and boy into a group of 400 Blacks by Boers who force them to work on building fortifications; in the rush down a muddy slope after a day working in the rain he breaks his ankle
• Marwick, kindly Englishman from the Natal Native Affairs Department (p.38)
• General Piet Joubert, Commandant-General of the Transvaal (p.40)
• Major Mott, the military censor (p.43) started out ‘harsh’ and, as things become intense, becomes ‘merciless’ (p.97), proud possessor of a grand sealion moustache (p.195)
• Mohandas Gandhi, speaking at a Hindu political meeting and interviewed by the Biographer (pages 54 to 57)
• Bob Ashmead, soldier sharing a tent with Tom Barnes (p.58)
• Dr Sterkx, doctor in the Boer camp who looks after Muhle Maseku and his broken ankle (p.66); turns out it was his house and piano and music Tom Barnes and his troop burned down and took his wife Frannie prisoner into Ladysmith; he makes primitive crutches for Muhle who he gets to become an assistant; they watch battles from a nearby hill
• Mr Grimble of the Ladysmith town council, local farmer and leading light in Carbineers (p.86), producer of fruit jams (p.104)
• Archdeacon Barker (p.88)
• Lieutenant General Sir George White, overall commander of the Ladysmith forces (p.171)

The start of the bombardment

The first shell from the surrounding Boers lands in Ladysmith on 2 November 1899. The town council debates evacuating the wounded and non-combatants. Jingos are outraged. Nevinson the journalist is developing into our eyes and ears and visits the station as the first long train of wounded and women and blacks and Indians pulls out. The telegraph line has been cut so he advertises for Blacks to be paid runners i.e. sneak through the Boer lines and get to the nearest British town in order to get his despatches sent back to London. Since they might be shot on sight the Blacks are charging £20 a journey. Nevinson hires a boy, Wellington, who’s the son of Muhle Maseku who we’ve seen being co-opted into the Boer camp then breaking his ankle. Nevinson includes not only his own despatches but letters friends want posted, including Tom’s to his mum.

Bella and Jane discuss their boyfriends, how long the siege will last, what will happen afterwards. Bella drops by the Star bakery. All food is rationed now and can only be bought with coupons. Bella pays triple the price for a loaf of bread which turns out to be adulterated and makes her sick.

General of the besieging Boers, Joubert, allows trains of wounded and non-combatants to be taken to Camp Intombi down the railway line. Jingos christen it ‘Fort Funk’ (p.106). (According to Wikipedia, the Intombi Military Hospital was some 5 kilometres (3.1 miles) outside Ladysmith and run by Major General (later Sir) David Bruce and his wife Mary. During the siege, the number of beds in the hospital camp grew from the initial 100 to a total of 1900. A total of 10,673 admissions were received and treated at Intombi.)

All classes of men are conscripted into digging defensive trenches and sangars. Torres the barber is bombed out.

Ladysmith measures not 3 miles in any direction. By 5 December 1899 some 3,500 cylinders of explosive iron have been thrown at it (p.123). Growing stress at the ceaseless barrage of incoming shells. Night-time burial parties. Food becomes scarcer. Water from the river polluted with faeces. More and more disease. British forces make a few night-time sallies and spike one Long Tom, cause of celebration. But there are others and numerous other field guns surrounding them. The constant barrage continues.

Dramatic tension

In all kinds of novels the reader experiences an element of suspense and tension as they wait to see what will happen to the characters, how the story will pan out. Well, in a war story like this, there’s a pretty obvious brutal tension involved, as you read about all of these characters, share their thoughts and feelings and perceptions and that is…which of them are going to be killed, or die of disease, or be horribly maimed?

(Lots) more narrative

Tom and Bob are practising cavalry manoeuvres when interrupted by shellfire (they’re not hurt). At the Boer camp Muhle Maseku wakens to see his son, Wellington, has been caught carrying his package of messages through Boer lines, by members of the Irish Brigade, who are kicking and beating him and about to drag him away to execute him. Muhle intervenes, hitting the leader of the Irish Brigade, John MacBride, with his crutch and is shot in the thigh for his troubles, passing out.

(Mention of John MacBride is significant, because he appeared in the prologue to the entire book set, we later learn, around 1879, a member of the small group of Irish Nationalists which includes the unnamed narrator of the prologue. The significance of all of this is explained towards the very end of the book.)

The Biographer has made it by train as far as Frere where the line has been blown up by the Boers. Churchill has gone and got himself captured when the Boer derailed an armoured train he was riding in. The other correspondents are making a fuss to get him freed.

The Biographer is an eye witness to the Battle of Colenso, 15 December 1899. He gets involved in carrying stretchers of the wounded which is where he bumps into Mohandir Gandhi who, somewhat improbably, takes the opportunity to explain that all this bloodshed has helped him crystallise his worldview of satyagraha or non-violence (p.151).

Colenso was one of the three catastrophic defeats which were dubbed Black Week (Sunday 10 December to Sunday 17 December 1899) in which some 2,800 British troops were killed, wounded or captured (p.153). Buller sends, via the new helioscope system which has been set up to replace the broken telegraph, a depressed defeatist message to Ladysmith to surrender which the town’s commander in chief, Lieutenant General Sir George White, to his credit, ignores.

We are given the text of a letter Perry Barnes writes home to his sister from the camp at Frere i.e. Buller’s camp trying to get past Colenso to relieve Ladysmith. The point is that at the end of the narrative, Foden explains that one of the sources of the novel was an actual cache of letters written by one of his forebears who was in the siege.

A shell lands on the steps of the Royal Hotel blowing off the leg of a doctor who later dies. Bella ponders the mother she never knew, Catherine, from back in Ireland.

(At which point I realised this is probably the ‘Catherine’ we see getting shot dead by British police in Ireland in the dramatic opening Prologue. And realise at the same moment that the unnamed narrator of the Prologue must have been the man now known as Leo Kiernan, Bella’s father and owner of the Royal Hotel.)

Bella and Tom have slowly become an item though Bella is wary. Novels and love, do all ‘serious’ novels have to feature a love story?

Nevinson is astonished to spot the young Zulu he had sent with his despatches bathing in the river with his mother. Wellington explains how he was caught, beaten up, the documents taken from him, read and defaced, but he was saved from execution by General Joubert who instead tasked him with returning them to Ladysmith, which Wellington did by creeping up on a sentry post and chucking the bag in then running off.

Bella finally agrees to ‘walk out’ with Tom, they walk out to the empty orchard outside town and have first sex, breathily described: ‘She rubbed against the straining tip of him’ etc (p.187). Although they get as far as him licking her through her panties, she bridles, pulls back, unzips his trousers and masturbates him till he climaxes, giggling quietly because his name is Tom, and the big guns firing on the town are nicknamed Long Toms and she is holding his Long Tom in her hand.

George Steevens has had enteric fever for weeks and Nevinson is justifiably concerned for him and his sometimes hallucinatory feverish conversation. The bored journalists have amused themselves by setting up a home-printed broadsheet called the Ladysmith Lyre whose purpose is exaggeration, rumour and amusement.

Very long description of a cricket match put together by the General, between two teams called the Colonials and the Mother Country. Both Tom and Gunner Foster do good batting, to the admiration of Bella and Jane. Tribal courtship rituals. To his irritation Leo Kiernan is compelled to be captain of the Colonials. It all builds to a climax as Bella’s dad turns out to be an improbably fine cricketer (improbable because he’s never played the game before) and the Colonials are just one run away from victory when just the one shell is lobbed at the game by the Boers on the surrounding hills. It explodes sending red hot splinters everywhere but apparently harming no-one, the final ball is played, Bella’s dad misses it but it hits young Herbert Foster who had remained in his wicket keeper’s crouch and when Tom goes up to see him, realises he is dead, killed instantly by a liver of shrapnel from the Boer shell.

Part 2. The Tower

Two days later Jane is in deep shock, shell-shocked, PTSD, shakes, catatonic, throws up, can’t answer questions. Bella cleans up the vomit, remakes the bed, puts her in, goes downstairs to the hotel bar which promptly receives two direct hits.

When she wakes up in the makeshift hospital in the town hall, she discovers both her dad and she have gashes but otherwise unhurt. Leo has sent Jane with a nurse in that day’s train to Intombi. Leo takes Bella to see the hotel which is utterly ruined. She reclaims some dirty clothes and sheets from the wreckage then her dad takes her to the network of caves along the river Klip, where bombed-out women and children are living.

Gaza

It’s unnerving to read the account of a population traumatised (and killed and mutilated) by relentless, merciless bombardment on days when, making coffee or lunch, I turn on the radio and hear more grim details of the relentless Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Even more eerie to read about the huge network of tunnels the homeless men and women of Ladysmith constructed in the soft soil alongside the river Klip, reminding me of the vast labyrinth of tunnels Hamas has are said to have created in Gaza. Rightly or wrongly I couldn’t get the contemporary resonance out of my head as I read descriptions of crying women and children surrounded by unrelenting, random death.

‘When will it end?’
‘I never thought I would see myself like this.’
‘Mummy!’
‘My God, I have no hope left in me.’ (p.231)

It was as if they’d gone back in time to a prehistoric era; it was as if they were real cave-dwellers now. (p.234)

1899. 2023. Some people think the human race changes, that ‘humanity’ is moving forwards and upwards, that we are ‘progressing’. I don’t.

More part 2

Bella is settled into a dugout cave, has sort of bed made up for her by kindly Mrs Frinton. Standing outside she notices the Portuguese barber, Torres, digging. Turns out he’s digging up unexploded munitions. When a shell comes over Torres grabs her hand and yanks her over and into the men’s tunnels. Here a rough uitlander makes an off-colour remark prompting Torres to fight him for the lady’s honour. Arguably, this section should have been called ‘The Tunnels’ as the narrative dwells on Bella’s completely changed circumstances and how poor and alone and ill and hungry she feels. It’s called The Tower because in her distracted mind she creates a shimmering tower rising above the ruined town, an image of transcendence and escape.

On Christmas Day 1899 a shell lands nearby spattering Bella with mud as she was dressing in her best blouse, she spends hours rocking on the floor in despair. Her dad arrives with a letter from Jane at the military hospital who, mercifully, has recovered.

After two weeks Bella is sent by the river cave women to get provisions from the Commissariat in town. She visits the Royal and is distraught to see it looking like it’s been abandoned for years. In the ruins she discovers the Zulu mother Nandi and Wellington the messenger boy are squatting. Nandi tugs her skirts and begs and Bella gives her some of her precious supplies.

(The degrading immiseration of once cheerful well-fed westerners also reminds me of the imprisonment of the Europeans in the Japanese internment camp in J.G. Ballard’s ‘Empire of the Sun’.)

She goes to the Town Hall to see her father, is disconcerted to see that he is sitting on the military tribunal alongside Mayor Farquhar and Major Mott, and then horrified when they drag Torres the barber before them and arraign him for spying and treason, for which the penalty in time of war is death. Tom had reported seeing someone flashing messages using a mirror from some shrubbery on the edge of town, had fired into the bushes, missed the man who disappeared, leaving fragments of a mirror of the type which Torres used to sell from his barber’s shop, and the footprint of a boot with a big V on it.

The case is not proven but he is still roughly tied up and dragged off to the Dopper Church which has been surrounded by barbed wire and turned into an ad hoc prison for suspects.

Part 2 is much much more focused on one character (Bella) than part one had been with its cast of over 40. Now it’s all about Bella’s feelings at being bombed out, realising she doesn’t like Tom who obeys orders rather than listen to her, and hates her father after he defended the xenophobic unfairness of trying Torres.

Next day she goes back into town and to the Dopper Church, where she asks the guard to fetch Torres to the barbed wire where she apologises for everything and promises to do whatever she can. Then she goes to the ruins of the Royal Hotel, climbing gingerly up the ruined staircase to the Star Room where she finds her father, white with intense strain. His revolver is on the desk. He makes her swear not to try to find him till the siege is over but stay in the caves. In a flash it came to me that Leo is the spy, the traitor, the anti-British Irish Republican Brother who is signalling information to the Boers. I bet at some crucial moment we discover Leo’s boots have a big V pattern on them.

Part 3. Amours de Voyage

Rather mercifully, the narrative leaves Bella and her agonisings about Tom, the meaning of love, her father and Torres and we’re back with Nevinson, the dour journalist. ‘Amours de voyages’ is the ironic description Nevinson gives to the final delusions of his friend Steevens as he approaches the final stages of enteric fever. Nevinson visits the sheds at the (now disused) railway station to see for himself the vast abattoir and horse-stewing factory it’s been turned into, producing revolting foods such as ‘chevril’, made from boiling horses’ bones and guts.

There’s an interlude where Foden inserts newspaper reports, and Churchill’s telegram to Britain, giving details of his daring escape from Boer captivity and wild escape by train and walking the 300 miles north to Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique).

That night the Boers mount their biggest attack, seizing part of the vital Caesar’s Camp area. Nevinson finds command headquarters in total chaos and rides out to see for himself, ending up taking refuge in a sangar of the Irish Fusiliers, during the fierce battle and on into a sudden rainstorm. The British counter-attack and take all the key positions. 500 British soldiers killed to about 800 Boers. A significant battle. By the time he gets back to the cottage he’s been sharing with the other correspondents, Nevinson feels chill and ill.

Cut to Churchill taking a boat to Durban then hastening back to Buller’s relieving force, where he is greeted and filmed by the Biographer (quite a while since we’ve heard about him). They can see the terrible guns firing down onto the town but every attempt to cross the river Tugela is repulsed by the Boers who are firmly entrenched on the other side.

A slightly delirious, impressionistic description of the disastrous attack on Spion Kop, 23 to 24 January 1900, premonition of the Somme and First World War butchery. Ends with a letter from Perry Barnes back to Lizzy describing the slaughter and blaming the useless British generals (pages 303 to 304).

Dr Sterkx comes to the Zulu Muhle Maseku whose gunshot wound to the thigh is healing, says he will help him escape from the Boer camp into Ladysmith, if he will take a message to his wife, Frannie.

Bella now spends all her time by the filthy, faeces-full river, brooding, hungry and depressed. She is slightly deliriously metaphysical, staring at the same scene till it shimmers and wobbles, until she feels like one more shape in the lifeless scene (p.307).

Torres becomes desperate stuck inside the barbed-wired church. He becomes fascinated by the Boer woman who still has her goose with her. The reader realises it’s Frannie, distraught wife of Dr Sterkx.

Thrilling description of Muhle Maseku’s escape from the Boer camp during British shelling, under cover of drifting smoke, but still they spot and trail him, taking pot shots till he abandons the obvious route down a gulley and goes up the side and over land, hiding and resting as the full moon floods the landscape with light (p.314).

Tom is depressed, with the duration of the war, with guarding the church, with his ended relationship with Bella who just gives him a hard stare and turns away. So at some cheap estaminet he pays ten shillings to go with a Malay prostitute. Pleasantly pornographic: ‘A soft warm hood of flesh began to press itself over the tip of him’. (p.318). She blows him then rides him to a climax.

On the subject of sex we learn that the Biographer and Perry have been (male, same sex) lovers for some weeks, regularly jerking each other off in the river.

Bella seeks out Nandi and asks for her help. These days Wellington doesn’t smuggle food in, he spends all his time roaming round the surrounding country looking for the sign his father said he would make. That night Wellington appears to Torres inside the church and tells him to follow him. They wriggle through a small window he’s loosened, then sneak across the empty space to the fence which has a square cut out of it. There’s a sentry box but as he watches, Torres sees a female figure approach the sentry, engage it in conversation, then kiss. It is Bella, calculatingly distracting Tom.

Torres is led by Wellington through back streets, out of town to a copse where there’s a brazier with one of the town’s many observation balloons tethered over it. In a little while Bella arrives, they climb into the basket, undo the ropes, and drift into the sky, escaping the imprisoned town.

Tom is flogged for letting Torres escape, so badly he is sent to Intombi camp, where his bloody back is tended by Jane Kiernan. Wellington Maseku brings in his wounded, badly ill father, who he found hiding in a shallow burrow he’d dug to hide from the Boers, but weak and emaciated and his leg wound badly infected. Because of all the goods Wellington smuggled into the camp, the doctors say they’ll see what they can do.

Ladysmith is relieved. The Boers pull out and head north. Buller’s relieving force enters from the south. We are shown the characters reacting differently (Mrs Frinton, of course, praying). Most vivid is MacDonald coming across Nandi weeping at the front of the ruined Royal Hotel. She’s just learned her husband died of blood loss as a result of the amputation of his leg. Perry Barnes is decapitated by one of the last, random Boer shells. The Biographer, who had been filming his lover at the moment of his gruesome death, collapses in hysterics.

Paintings and patriotic accounts record General Buller riding up to General White, dismounting and shaking his hand as the crowds cheered but no such thing happened; Buller just rode blithely by.

Part 4. The monologues of the dead

An oddity. A series of short, sometimes very short (half page), texts by various characters from the narrative, being:

• Tom Barnes (December 1901) – the British are in the ascendant and in this letter Tom describes razing Boer farmsteads he is completely disillusioned with empire, queen and country, thinks the entire war has been a shambles
• Mrs Sterkx (March 1902) – an unforgiving description of the concentration camps the British herded Boer women and children into, where they died by their thousands
• Nevinson (December 1915) – reporting at the conclusion of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign, reporting that many think Churchill should be publicly hanged for his part in promoting the campaign
• Bobby Greenacre (January 1916) – was about to sign up and go to the war when he is bitten by an adder
• Nevison (November 1916) – talks about his friendship with W.B. Yeats, his lover Maud Gonne who has gone off to nurse soldiers on the Western front, leaving the man she married, John MacBride who a) had led the Irish Brigade in Natal and b) took part in the famous Easter Rising in Dublin; he heard that Bella and Torres landed safely in their balloon and are presumably living somewhere
• The Biographer (February 1931) – during the main text the Biographer was always frustrated the moving pictures alone didn’t tell the full story; here he is now doing the voiceover for a Movietone News film about Mahatma Gandhi
• Churchill (February 1931) – speech to the West Sussex Conservatives in which he takes the time to execrate Gandhi turning up to meet the Viceroy of India dressed in peasant clothes
• Jane (May 1933) – multiple sadnesses; she has just buried Tom, who she married; and she remembers back to discovering her father dead in the ruins of the Hotel, having shot himself with his revolver and slowly discovered that he was the spy signalling information to the Boers; thought as much; then how she tracked down Bella and Torres, discovering he sold a bauxite claim for a fortune and took Bella back to Portugal where they lived the life of the 1910s and 20s rich, spats, feather boas and fast cars
• MacDonald (December 1938) – bumped into Bobby Greenacre who is now an eminent lawyer, a KC in Australia
• Gandhi (August 1942) – he has been arrested for publicly stating his party will not fight the Japanese if they invade India; so he’s been incarcerated, yet again; he marvels at the way everything – he, history – are misrepresented: ‘everything is distorted and misrepresented’ – this seems a rather obvious comment about the nature of fiction itself, and maybe about Foden’s own kind of historical fiction in particular
• Churchill (27 May 1944) – a secret cypher telegram which indicates Churchill’s vehement dislike of Gandhi right to the end
• The Biographer (July 1945) – retired now, he reflects on how Churchill will be kicked out at the election, how his time and his romance of the British Empire is over; the British will leave India as soon as they decently can; still, Churchill’s rhetoric and determination kept the British at it for six long years; respect
• Wellington – reflects on the Sharpeville Massacre, 21 March 1960, the enduring wickedness of the Pass Laws in South Africa’s history; Wellington is a member of the African National Congress (ANC) and in prison for burning his Pass Card in front of the press; he is being represented in court by a young Nelson Mandela; he remembers Ladysmith, the experience of being in prison, and reflects how, for people like him – South African Blacks – it has never been otherwise

Obviously deliberate that a Black African is given the last word in this story about Africa.

Foden’s multifarious styles

There were fairly frequent moments in ‘The Last King of Scotland’ when I was surprised by an oddity of Foden’s prose style, but assigned it to the narrator. But there are more here, so I’m concluding they’re part of Foden’s essential approach to language.

Formal prepositions

He has an old-fashioned way with prepositions, for example he insists on using their full formal versions, ‘upon’ instead of ‘on’, ‘whilst’ instead of ‘while’.

He is much given to the old-fashioned inversion of phrases to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition.

People were saying that the first real shots of the war had been fired at Dundee, to where a column had rashly been thrown forward. (p.45)

Flight to Intombi was now a measure of which many non-combatants availed themselves. (p.105)

In a battered hansom cab Churchill, together with Atkins of the Manchester Guardian, went up to the Mount Nelson Hotel to plan their campaign and to conduct interviews with the military staff staying in that grand residence, before leaving for East London by rail, therefrom to catch the mail packet to Natal. (p.52)

Is this meant to convey the archaic quality of late-Victorian prose, the formality of late-Victorian social life, or the stilted pompousness of this particular pair of characters? Or does Foden just regard it as a valid form of phrasing he can mix in with other far more modern, even slangy, phraseology? Whatever the motive it results in a text which is a mosaic, or mashup, of multiple tones and registers.

He has a similar fondness for an antiquated use of the word ‘so’.

The Klip took a tortuous course through the town and its environs, and the bank in parts was fairly high. It was so where he was walking… (p.119)

Wouldn’t this be more naturally be phrased as ‘it was like this where he was walking’? Is the unusual phrasing ‘It was so…’ intended to evoke Victorian phraseology, because I’m not sure it does. It reminds me more of Captain Picard’s catchphrase in Star Trek Next Generation: ‘Make it so.’ It’s a conscious style decision; Foden repeats it later:

Forced to meet this turning movement in the British attack, the Boers had had to extend their line. Churchill reported it so. (p.295)

It’s one among many odd, anomalous, unmodern turns of phrase which Foden deliberately deploys. Much earlier in the book, describing the town council debate about whether the non-combatants should leave the town:

Others, in particular those who had suffered injury to family or property from the bombardment, were all for leaving the soldiers to it and getting out from under the shadow of shell. (p.87)

‘The shadow of shell’ is an odd phrase, isn’t it? It’s not Victorian or modern, if anything it reminds me of the alliteration of Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Ornate phrasing

There are many such unorthodox or contrived phrasings, not massive in themselves, just a continual trickle of unusualness:

‘Let me explain,’ intervened Bella, in agitated fashion. (p.111)

But there were larger quarrels, ones in which such discriminations counted for naught. (p.189)

All seemed set to enjoy themselves in fair measure. (p.195)

This sounds more like Shakespeare than late-Victorian prose.

Yet, if truth be told, there were other constants… (p.214)

Is the deployment of ‘if truth be told’ an attempt to mimic late-Victorian oratory? Is it conscious pastiche or irony? Or is it Foden writing in his own style? Does his own style combine this odd range of registers, taking in modern slang, through boys’ adventure clichés, oddly formal word order, to passages of fairly contemporary psychological description and analysis?

Slang

Ladysmith above ground could get very nippy at night (p.230)

‘There must be something we can do,’ said Bella. She reached up and clasped his fingers, with the wire between them. Torres gave a dry laugh, but he did not remove his hand. ‘I cannot see how. Unless you mean to bring guns and spring me out.’ (p.262)

Use of the word ‘spring’ made me think of a 1940s film noir, or the thousands of American movies where the associates of criminals ‘spring’ them out of gaol.

Grandiloquent

But sometimes Foden’s prose is the opposite of slangy and goes beyond historic pastiche to take on a conscious pomp and circumstance, as here, where the correspondent Nevinson is meditating on the futility of war:

No wonder that the armies of the past vanish, their ancient dead only rising from the furrows of buried time to laugh, invisibly, at the very pageants of memory by which we seek to summon them. (p.286)

Grandiloquent, meaning: ‘pompous or extravagant in language, style, or manner, especially in a way that is intended to impress.’ I understand that this grand style reflects the personality of Nevinson who, as the novel progresses, becomes increasingly prone to grand reflections on history i.e Foden is capturing the style of a specific character.

Grandiloquence of a different type is deliberately deployed in the climactic scene when Ladysmith is finally relieved by British troops and you can feel Foden reaching for a different, feverish style to try and convey the emotional release of the moment, to evoke the hysteria of the crowds:

The crowd opened to let them [the liberating army] trot past, and then followed as they swung into the main street, the vanguard of an exultant avenue of humanity, each crying or laughing as the moment took them, letting go their emotions as if the siege walls had tumbled in their very breasts (p.331)

‘Very breasts’. The whole liberation scene is written like this, in a deliberately high heroic but sentimental Edwardian style, which is very noticeably different from most of the rest of the book.

Prose poetry

And sometimes into the mix Foden throws long, lyrical sentences of prose poetry. Here’s the funeral of the highly literate correspondent George Steevens who dies of enteric fever after a long delirious illness:

A soft rain was falling and, every now and then the donkey pulling the hearse let out its ghastly bray, which echoed between the silent rocks. On the way, Nevinson saw Tom Barnes and his friend, who stopped and saluted in the moonlight. This silvery pall, falling down through ragged edges of cloud, reflected on the hearse, the glass of which was covered in black and white embellishments, and on the lines of white crosses marking the graves of earlier fatalities. (p.290)

It doesn’t have the lustral mellifluousness of, say, the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde, but it is obviously a conscious effort at lyrical landscape painting.

Playful prose

Sometimes Foden indulges in wordplay, picking up on his own phraseology for the lolz:

So that day the censor escaped the unconscious wish of the correspondents – although as he had been on the lavatory at the time, it didn’t really count as a hair’s-breadth escape. Some did escape by such a measure. (p.102)

I had to read that twice before I realised the phrase ‘such a measure’ is referring back to the hair’s breadth (that the person he goes on to talk about, Bobby Greenacre, did escape death by a hair’s breadth). This picking up, echoing and playing with his own phrases occurs fairly often. The soldier Perry Barnes swears when he describes the murderous effect of the Maxim gun:

In his notebook, the correspondent marked the expletive down as a double dash. That night dashes were to the point, and points also: the searchlights at Buller’s camp and in the invested town again communicated by flashing Morse on the clouds. (p.293)

See how he picks up and plays with his own phraseology.

I’m not complaining, I’m not meaning to criticise in the negative sense. The opposite. I’m celebrating the complexity of Foden’s style. I’m trying to analyse out some of the many different lexical tricks or quirks, along with the varying registers, tones and strategies going on in Foden’s prose style, which make it sometimes odd and unpredictable, always interesting and highly readable.

Imperial politics

Strangely, there’s relatively little politics in the book. Early on there’s a set-piece argument or friendly debate, between the journalists Nevinson and Steevens, about the point of the British Empire.

Nevinson, in his youth tempted by the teachings of the anarchist Kropotkin, puts the standard liberal view that the Boer War is unnecessary and has been fomented by jingos such as Lord Milner, Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain purely out of greed, to annex the Boer republics so Britain can get its hands on their diamonds and gold.

‘Do you really believe in that stuff any more, after wat we’ve been through these last few days? Is Empire really worth it, George, after all?’ (p.83)

And his colleague, Steevens, puts the standard riposte that the war must be won because failure, or even weakness, will inspire the hundreds of millions of other subjects of the empire to rise up and end it. Nevinson:

For if Ladysmith fell, why not Natal, the Cape, indeed why not, as subject peoples everywhere saw that it was possible, the Empire itself? (p.48)

When Nevinson points out how shabby and squalid many of the doings of the supposedly ‘noble’ Empire are in reality, Steevens is given some pithy lines about how the Empire shouldn’t be judged by any of its practical applications, but as a platonic ideal of perfect community and administration:

‘I’m with Thucydides, I’m afraid. On the Athenian Empire. It may seem wickedness to have won it…but it is certainly folly to let it go….

‘It’s the vital ideal of Empire one must hang on to – however tawdry the reality, however full of outrageous postures and cheap tricks. We’ve got to keep aiming at something beyond the truth. I suppose, at base, it is all to do with spreading light.’ (p.84)

I enjoy bits like this not because I agree with them (at all) but because it’s a point of view you never hear nowadays, drowned by today’s blanket execration of everything to do with the British Empire.

Also, reading contemporary debates about the point of an empire from the 1880s, 1890s, 1900s and so on, sheds quite a bit of light on absolutely modern issues in international affairs. Michael Ignatieff’s series of books from the 1990s wonder whether there aren’t many countries which are too poor or chaotic to run themselves and where ‘the international community’ needs to step in and run them in order to save the populations from massacre – Bosnia, Yemen, Syria, Gaza.

Obviously he’s not talking about the same kind of exploitative conquest as characterised the European empires but, to many of the peoples watching the arrival of Western armies in, for example, Iraq or Afghanistan, the subtle moral differences made by liberal commentators are irrelevant: they were just the latest waves of Western invaders and they needed to be resisted.

Twentieth century politics

The short final section four has a powerful but, I think, questionable affect. In very short order (i.e. in a hurry) we are shuffled through extremely brief descriptions of:

• the concentration camps set up in the later stages of the Boer War
• the First World War
• the disastrous Gallipoli campaign
• the Easter Rising in Dublin
• three or four brief snippets which ask us to consider the role of Winston Churchill in twentieth century British history and the defeat of Nazi Germany in particular
• ending with Wellington talking about the Sharpeville Massacre, the ANC, Nelson Mandela and the struggle against apartheid

This is a lot of stuff to take in and process. In my opinion, too much. As in ‘The Last King of Scotland’ only more so, it feels as if the novelistic subject matter – the focus on people, their characters, and interactions and thoughts and feelings – is swamped by the powerful associations attached to the historical events Foden describes.

Just considering the role of Winston Churchill in twentieth century British history and the defeat of Nazi Germany, in particular, but also his increasingly outdated attempts to preserve the British Empire, is a vast, simply enormous subject. Its scale and complexity completely overwhelm the thousands of fine and beautifully imagined details Foden has filled his book with (the descriptions of the fruit in Mr Grimble’s orchard spring to mind, or the cricket match, or Torres’s escape from the church, Major Mott’s sealion moustache, and hundreds of others).

This final section feels like wave after wave of overwhelming, each one eclipsing the one that went before – concentration camps, Gallipoli, the Easter Rising, Indian independence, the Second World War – the scale of each of them is too enormous and also too historical, in the sense that it’s more interested in political issues than in people.

And the last wave, the last three pages containing Wellington’s thoughts, his references to the Sharpeville Massacre and then onto the figure of Nelson Mandela, now universally acknowledged to be a secular saint, completely erases everything that went before, burying much of the fine detail so carefully depicted in the previous 350 pages, to become the abiding image and memory of the book. It’s a shame.

I can see that Foden intended these snippets to demonstrate that history doesn’t end with one event but is a continuum and that people’s lives continue way after the significant events they’ve been part of. That’s seems to me a fine and fairly traditional strategy for a novel, thousands do the same thing, tying up loose ends of characters’ afterlives. It’s the fact that Foden associates every one of these loose ends with major political events which is the dubious decision, a decision which – to repeat myself – risks swamping the subtlety and detail of much of what came before.

Christian feminism 1899

Mrs Frinton, in normal times a figure of fun (to Bella, anyway) for being an uptight old widow lecturing everyone about Our Lord, in wartime becomes reliable and solid (if still given to lectures). At one point she tells Bella all this trouble is down to men, the same everywhere:

‘They [men] are just like us, really,’ [Bella] ventured. ‘Only most of the time we don’t realise it.’
‘That’s a very new-fangled view,’ said the widow. ‘It’s not one I hold with myself. You or I wouldn’t fight – not just brawling, I mean, we wouldn’t be fighting this war. This – it’s all men, just men. Believe you me, when we get to the Good Place, we will find many more women there than men.’ (p.229)

I know plenty of feminists who would wholeheartedly agree, 123 years later.

Credit

Ladysmith by Giles Foden was published in paperback by Faber Books in 1999. References are to this Faber paperback edition.

Giles Foden reviews

• The Last King of Scotland (1998)
• Ladysmith (1999)
• Zanzibar (2002)
• Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika (2004)
• Freight Dogs (2021)

Related reviews

• The Boer War 1899 to 1902 by Thomas Pakenham (1979)
• Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes by Andrew Lycett (2007) [for the section about Doyle’s enthusiastic support of the Boer War, which led to his knighthood]
• Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts – part 2 (1999)

• Africa reviews