Helmintholog

One of the stupidest things I ever did was to decide, at an impressionable age, that since Shelley was respectable, I wanted nothing to do with him. He is a thinker of extraordinary toughness and force who just happened to write in delicate singing metre.

So here I am, making up for lost time in the local second hand shop, and there is a 1946 biography of him by Edmind Blunden which has dated horribly. It is mannered, smug, and anachronistic, whcih is to say that it might, with different mannerisms and smugnesses have been published any time in the last five years, perhaps as a TV tie-in.

I persevere, and learn that the last dragon outside Horsham was recorded in 1614: there was one in St Leonard’s Forest, and Blunden quotes a pamphlet from August that year: [the dragon] was alive and well in the Forest “to the great annoyance and divers slaughters of both men and Cattell, by his strong and violent Poyson.”

How interesting, and how sad, to see that dragons were kept alive not by their fiery breath and wings, but by the pestilences creeping through a swampy forest. The breath of dragons shrinks into mosquitos.

If you are near London, and hurry, you may find in the basement of Forbidden Planet a sale of the paperback collected editions of Brian Aldiss’ novels at a pound each. They were just coming out when I profiled him in 2001. I picked up there last week A Rude Awakening which is the last of his three autobiographical novels about a randy soldier in the Far East between 1943 and 1946. The first, A Hand Reared Boy, was a rather scandalous success in the late Sixties.

A Rude Awakening is scandalous, all right, dripping with coarse descriptions of licentious soldiery at play. But it is also funny, frightening, and tragic, sometimes all at once. It appears to be a novel about sex, but it is also and more profoundly a story of colonialism and race. The action takes place in 1946 in the last sputter of empire: part of the British army that had reconquered Burma was diverted, after the Japanese surrender, to administer Indonesia for the Dutch, who had surrendered it to the Japanese in 1942, and found itself in the middle of a nasty little war of independence.

They aren’t really fighting and most of their time is taken up with heroic drinking bouts on such unlikely elixirs as Black Tartan Wombat Wiskey, Made in Scottland, Bottled by PV Ramakrishnan Bottling Mart, Kuala Lumpur.

The British cannot properly understand that their defeats by the Japanese in the earlier half of the war have finished their authority, which was grounded on fear. They understand the role of fear, all right. There is a horrible portrait of a torturer, who boasts of his work in the mess at night; though some of the other men denounce him, and one beats him up, there is no question of the Army stopping him. One soldier is saved from execution by the rebels because they are afraid of the retaliation that murdering him would bring. But they can’t really believe that India will be abandoned, and that a bloodbath will follow, no matter how often they are told. They can’t, in the end, believe that anyone but a white man can run a country. This is a book that works on post-imperial smugness like paintstripper but the didactic or reflective purpose is beautifully concealed in the abundant and enchanting life of it. It has all the basic merits – you want to read more, you shout with laughter, you remember it afterwards.

The virtuosity of the drinking scenes is astonishing – think of Kingsley Amis without any showing off. Below the fold I will have scanned in the first seven pages because the whole scene is such a triumph of naturalistic writing.

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