Mental Slumming: The Prague Cemetery

I normally enjoy the work of Umberto Eco. A professor as well as a novelist, he all but invented the field of semiology, the study of the meaning of signs and symbols. It isn’t too long a step from this to his celebrated fascination with conspiracy theories, which I have long shared. Like Eco, I set out from the premise that all such theories are false, created to benefit their fabricators and promoters in some way. They can very easily turn dangerous, even lethal, and are intrinsically evil in any case, for they are nothing more nor less than inflammatory lies told with the intent of making trouble.

       The Prague Cemetery is the origin-story of one of the most infamous conspiracy theories of all. It is the third of Eco’s novels that I have read. The other two were also about conspiracy-theories and forgeries: The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum. I greatly enjoyed the first and absolutely delighted in the second, so I took up the present volume with high hopes. When I found that it was a historical novel set in Europe during the revolutionary phase of the nineteenth century, my hopes rose even higher; history, after all, is my subject. Here, I thought, is just the dish for me.

       The confusing opening sequence threw me a little, though all was easily (and perhaps too soon) explained. When the real action began in a series of flashbacks, I readied myself for a treat. The first part of the novel is set in Italy during the Risorgimento, a period about which I knew little and was keen to learn more. Forewarned by Eco that, apart from the central character, nearly everyone else in the novel is a real person, I read through this part of the story with my phone beside me, googling away at names and historical references. This slowed my reading down a bit, and probably kept me from getting properly into the story, but without it I should have been even more quickly put off, because the text is full of references to historical events and persons and much of the interest of the tale depends on the reader knowing who and what the main ones are.

       Meanwhile, another obstacle to reading pleasure had manifested itself. The central character, Simone Simonini, is a selfish, cynical, apparently asexual misogynist and introvert without a single redeeming quality in his make-up. It was Eco’s self-confessed ambition to create the most repulsive character in all of fiction (Shakespeare’s Richard III was the target he set himself to beat) and though he, arguably, succeeded, he did so at the expense of his book. Much of the tale is told in the first person and even the parts that aren’t are still largely focused on the protagonist, so Simonini’s repulsiveness rubs off on the novel itself. By the time the Risorgimento sequence ended and the action moved to Second-Empire Paris, where Simonini, who is employed by various secret services as a secret agent and fabricator of inflammatory propaganda, has been sent to make trouble, I was thoroughly nauseated, so I put the damned thing down for good. It had taken me almost a month (a pretty busy one, I must admit) to get through about two hundred pages.

       The Prague Cemetery was published when Umberto Eco was eighty, and although he still had all his marbles at the time, the book is indubitably an old man’s work, with all the infirmities and deficits that we, the superannuated, must endure in our declining years. Skip it is my advice, and – if you haven’t already – read Foucault’s Pendulum instead. At least that one has pretty girls in it.

Time is Only a Side Effect

The Order of Time

Carlo Rovelli

A strange, slim, captivating volume. Its scope is wide-ranging, the writing dense in terms of content and reference, yet it would be slimmer even than it is (and far less captivating) if you dispensed with all the digressions, elaborations and poetic flourishes that bulk it out. The notes at the back are as impenetrable as the text is lucid, mischievously reversing the traditional order of things. 

     Rovelli, a theoretical physicist whose speciality is loop quantum gravity, considers here what physics implies about time. The discussion is in three parts. In the first, he demonstrates how relativity abolishes universal simultaneity, absolute time and even the relation between past, present and future, before moving on to show us how quantum mechanics eliminates even the flow of time. We are left with a set of events that we are able to distinguish from one another only because our experience of reality is blurred. There is only one physical support for the contention that time exists at all: the Second Law of Thermodynamics. 

     Having narrowed things down this far, Rovelli then does his best to demolish the ‘illusion’ of time generated by entropy. I don’t think he wholly succeeds, but I am not clever enough, nor sufficiently well read either in physics or philosophy, to mount a meaningful criticism. The best I can do is report that I was able to follow his logic quite easily but found it unconvincing in places. As to why, the reasons are better articulated here than I could express them myself.

    The second part of the book is very short and describes some of the physical implications of discarding time as a factor in our calculations.
     The third and most important part is an inquiry into how the sense of time that is so real and familiar to us comes into being. The discussion ranges through philosophy and psychology as well as physics. This is inevitable, since time is both metaphysical and – in so many of its aspects – subjective. Rovelli, who seems to be as interested in philosophy as in physics, argues that it is wholly so, emerging from the peculiar way in which humans (and some other animals) have evolved to operate in the physical world. 

     I think I grasped the way in which, according to him, time emerges from entropy, and I love the insight that it is the latter and not energy that really makes the world go round. This is one of a handful of intellectual thunderflashes Rovelli detonates before our eyes: time is an effect of gravity, time is made of emotion (he’s a fan of Proust, as well you may imagine), the world is made up of events not objects. However, it seems to me that he hasn’t quite worked out how all that happens; he modestly advances the proposal that it has to do with the particular way we have evolved to experience reality, which in turn defines the reality we experience. This argument is closely analogous to the weak anthropic rationale for the hospitality of the universe to intelligent life.

     The physics of how, in this entropic argument, the past is constructed out of traces of former states of a system that lie preserved in its current state is both speculative and abstruse. It also seems a bit risky, in survival terms, for organic evolution to have proceeded on such a basis. To Rovelli’s credit, he isn’t laying down the law here; this is how he thinks it all works, but he freely admits that his explanation is merely the best one he has found that fits the facts.

     Despite this softness at the centre, the book seems to hang together well. Rovelli’s model is certainly more comfortable, conceptually, than those ghastly block universes in which, absent time, every configuration of the world exists simultaneously. In Julian Barbour’s version of this concept even motion in absent; consciousness (or experience) is just a ball bouncing from one point in configuration space to another. Beat that for futility.

     One thing that Rovelli doesn’t really address, though, is how come we all share a common experience of time even though it appears to pass differently for each of us and our perception of it is based on our different individual histories, etc. This, of course, is an aspect of a bigger question: our experience of reality is constructed, but how? He does gesture at an answer by explaining that we partake of aspects of the world that are relevant to us, and since we’re much alike as entities these aspects are roughly the same. Sadly, this doesn’t take us very far before we stumble over the question of how to account for the differences.

Girl, 2000

She

H. Rider Haggard

A lowbrow classic, She is a book for schoolboys of all ages from twelve to... well, two thousand, I suppose. I can’t imagine any woman of any age ever wanting to read it, but despite this apparent handicap, Rider Haggard’s famous adventure story is one of the most popular novels ever written, with over 100 million copies sold. It’s a specimen – perhaps the specimen – of what used to be called a Rattling Good Yarn, and oozing, too, with that all-important Sex Interest, which Haggard ladles on in part-sublimated Pre-Raphaelite dollops (you know the kind of thing – the Blessed Damozel leaning bosomily over the Bar of Heaven, Waterhouse’s Lamia with one tit frankly out, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth). It must have caused unnumbered nocturnal emissions, voluntary and involuntary, in the public-school dormitories of its day.

    Indeed, the formula has been more than good enough to keep us reading for well over a century, for though Haggard’s titillatory efforts seem merely funny today, the central character herself has an erotic power that cannot be denied. Jung held that Ayesha, the eponymous She, was one of the purest depictions of the anima in literature: a woman as near immortal as dammit and so appallingly beautiful that a single glimpse of her face is enough to enslave you and destroy your sanity, yet whose favour is also the key to untold wisdom, riches and power if only you can win it. 

    Everyone knows the story, or at least the outline of it. Since its first serialization in the Graphic, an English popular magazine of the era, it has appeared in multitudinous guises from feature film to comic strip to BBC radio drama, and inspired countless imitations (Indiana Jones is a descendant). To tell the truth, though, I didn’t find Ayesha nearly as eldritch or as archetypal as advertised; in fact I found myself liking her better and better as the story went on. She’s a girl of sturdy and loyal character, even if she doesn’t think twice about torturing deserving cases in her catacombs or giving love-rivals the kind of drop-dead look that actually works. 

    I wish I’d read She when I could have appreciated it properly – before, that is, age, experience and the countless other books I’ve read spoilt the innocent pleasure I might have taken in it at, say, age fourteen. I still enjoyed it well enough, though I had to skip through a few over-amped passages of description here and there, and put up with the fictional narrator’s half-baked amateur philosophizing. There’s a surprising amount of purple in Rider Haggard’s passages, some of it arguably fatal to the tension or excitement he is trying to build up; much of this occurs around the middle of the book and looks suspiciously like padding. Perhaps the author was simply trying to meet his contracted word-count-per-episode for the Graphic.

    Apart from a short but evocative nautical episode near the beginning, the writing only really comes to life after Ayesha enters the story – halfway through the book, in the middle of a lot of cod-philosophy about people growing more cynical as they get older, and suchlike. The later chapters, in which she transforms from villainess to heroine, are by far the best of the book, full of genuinely exciting scenes and images.
    She is the kind of novel that excites the contempt of intellectuals, and the long-outworn familiarity of its tropes – a product, lest we forget, of its own vast success – obviously works against it as far as the present-day reader is concerned, but it remains a pretty good read for all that. Ayesha may not truly have been immortal in the flesh, but as a literary creation – and a manifestation of the collective unconscious – she will never die. 

Intermittently Fascinating

The Book of Imaginary Beings

by Jorge Luis Borges 

A literary bestiary. The Classical monsters, from Kronos to the satyrs, are well represented. So are the cobbled-together cacozens of the Middle Ages, part this, part that and part the other: plausible as heraldic images, impossible to picture as living, breathing beasts. But Borges, in this short book, also brings us a haul of imaginary creatures from China, Latin America, the Malay Archipelago and just about everywhere else. Now and then we find among the specimens something genuinely exotic, like the Simurgh of Sufi fable or the Celestial Stag believed in by Chinese miners. Other beasts here were first imagined by famous modern authors: Kafka and C.S. Lewis each features more than once, and Kafka’s Oradrek is by far the most lovable monster in the book. Going in the other direction, readers of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun will discover in this bestiary a Talos and a Baldanders – though on reading the entries for these beings, they are likely to find themselves more mystified than ever.

Although the subject-matter of the book harmonizes perfectly with Borges’s oeuvre, The Book of Imaginary Beings is too heavily in debt to its sources to give us much of the pure, the veritable elixir. Only two of the beings featured in it appear to me at all Borgesian. The Á Bao A Qu, an allegedly Malay monster (it sounds Chinese to me) could, in its aspect, character and setting, have sprung fully formed from the brow of the master, while The Sow in Shackles, who terrifies Argentinean peasants by tightrope-running along the telegraph-wires at night, rattling her eponymous chains, partakes of the Latin American magical realism of which Borges was a forerunner. She could have been imagined by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but she wasn’t. Yet for me, the most hauntingly Borgesian piece here is the one describing the fauna of mirrors, which speaks fascinatingly but obliquely about that mysteriously visible but strangely inaccessible world.

Sadly, many of the entities described – such as dragons, unicorns, or the Phoenix – are too familiar to be really interesting to us. The author does his best to find exotic traits and tall tales attributed to them in obscure and often dubious authorities, but this only partly ameliorates the tedium of over-familiarity.

I don’t know who would love this book. Bestiaries aren’t as unfashionable in our day and age as you might think; consider, for example, Monster Wiki and the character menus of RPGs. But film and video monsters come ready-made; the hard work of picturing imaginary creatures has already been done for us – and done breathtakingly well, by experts. This bestiary doesn’t have a single picture in it. 

Any work of this genre is ultimately a series of index entries lacking either plot, narrative or theme: an assortment, a farrago, a grab-bag filled with unfamiliar but not necessarily delightful treats. Most twenty-first century readers would be bored and mystified after a few pages. In the end, as with certain other works of Borges – ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, for instance, or ‘Funes the Memorious’ – the appeal seems to be mainly to hopeless bookworms and literary trainspotters, the kind of people who are fascinated by old books and long-dead writers. I am one of those people, but I am sorry to say that I found The Book of Imaginary Beings only intermittently fascinating.

Turn Down the Sound, Abate the Fury

How to Deal With Idiots (and 

Stop Being One Yourself)

by Maxime Rovère

trans. David Bellos

All writers struggle with the limitations of language. Philosophers have it particularly hard; the ideas they work with are complex and often counterintuitive, easily misinterpreted or misunderstood, and the effort to be as precise as possible often ends up making things worse. Many great philosophical tomes are – let’s face it – damn near impenetrable in places. Usually the most important places.

    Aware of this, philosophes down the ages have addressed the problem in various ways. Some try to divide their thoughts up into bite-sized chunks: Aristotle was perhaps the first of many to publish his lecture notes. Others have sought to distil their work into a set of handy aphorisms, while the more literarily inclined devise allegories or works of alleged fiction as vehicles for their ideas. Nietzsche famously succeeded with both these methods: see, respectively, The Anti-Christ and Thus Spake Zarathustra. More recently, Jostein Gaarder got excellent results with his philosophical novel Sophie’s World.

    Sometimes philosophers attempt to leaven the heavy dough of their cogitation by expressing themselves informally, adopting the terms of common parlance or whatever they imagine common parlance to be. Maxime Rovère does this in How to Deal With Idiots, which is presented and packaged as a popular self-help book, or rather a parody of one. Though he gamely maintains the conceit all the way to the end, his material inevitably overflows the mould he has created for it as philosophical disquisitions tend to do. By Chapter Four or so the game is well up (the chapters are very short, by the way, as is the book as a whole), and we’re starting to grapple with the gnarly ethics of personal interaction, which is what the book is really about. Rovère’s speciality (one of several, it seems; he’s also an expert on Spinoza and an accomplished translator) is something called ‘interactional philosophy’. In this book, at least, a better name for it might be ‘transactional ethics’. Most of us will recognize it as a type of moral philosophy.

    It is not a spoiler to reveal that the book never really teaches the reader how to deal with idiots; rather, Rovère hopes to teach us how to avoid ‘creating’ idiots, which he defines as events rather than persons, and how to minimize the unpleasant consequences when we fail, as we are bound to do more often than not. Some of the methods he suggests will be familiar to practitioners of Buddhism – not of Buddhist meditation, but of the attitudes and mental hygienics of Buddhism. The roots of his thought are not Buddhist, though; they are planted firmly in the history of Western philosophy and moral criticism, and a short bibliography appended to the book cites Kant, La Boetie and Nietzsche along with Sacher-Masoch and de Sade, as well as a number of modern philosophers whose names I don’t recognize and forebear to mention on that account.

    I found the book enjoyable and much easier to read than the general run of philosophical works, though that’s not saying much. I did not think it wholly persuasive. At times I found that I could reinterpret the author’s explanations or refute them entirely just by changing the context of his words from the one he obviously had in mind into another that would fit them equally well, but convey the opposite conclusion. I think this is one of the risks you run when you try to put complex thoughts into simple language.

    There was little in the book that I found entirely new, though it did make me reflect on my own attitudes and behaviour, which was clearly the author’s intention. Rovère’s advice would certainly make us all kinder, more understanding and accommodating people if we followed it, but the difficulty, as always, lies in practising what one has embraced as precept while coping with the stresses and strains of everyday life, and with the implicit understanding that the world itself can never really be made better. Idiots (as the penultimate chapter admits) always win in the end.

    An intellectually and sympathetically engaging read, then, though I do wonder whether the format the author has chosen puts his case as convincingly as it could be put. It’s a strange book this, neither flesh nor fowl, and although there’s nothing wrong with the taste I am doubtful of the nutritional value. 

Art Deco Pulp Fiction

The Demolished Man
by Alfred Bester

Another of those classics of science fiction (like this one) that I should have read when I was a teenager. This isn’t quite Golden Age SF but its author was a figure from that era, and The Demolished Man certainly reads as if it was published in the 1930s rather than in 1953. Also, though he doesn’t make it too obvious, Bester clearly imagines his future setting as an Art Deco world, a bit like Batman’s Gotham City. The few visual descriptions he spares us all point unmistakably in that direction.
    What else to say about this book, as briefly as I can? It’s a science-fiction policier set in a world in which a powerful minority of humans are telepaths. A big tycoon murders a business rival and a telepathic detective sets out on his trail. Being telepathic, he already knows whodunit, and why, and how, and when; his problem is to find evidence that will convince a non-telepathic prosecutor (a computer, as it happens). All this is thoroughly implausible, of course, but in science fiction that’s never been a deal-breaker. 

    An equally improbable pitch of hysteria is sustained all through the narrative, as if the book had been produced by a comic-book writer, or else an advertising man. And it was: Bester really did work in both those capacities between the height of the Golden Age and the publication of The Demolished Man. People don’t talk normally in this book: they shriek, scream, howl, roar and otherwise communicate in exclamation marks. They run, or ‘jet’, more often than they walk. They are constantly getting pounded and pummelled, yet bounce back into action with more resilience than Wile E. Coyote. And no matter how long they go without food, sleep or even rest, they never, ever get tired. But all this, too, is fine; most Golden Age SF was a bit like that in any case. 
    One aspect is even, at a stretch, justifiable. Bester has created a world in which many people are telepaths, so concealing one’s emotions out of politeness or self-interest is futile. In such a society, it does seem possible that people would take to speaking their minds without restraint. A world full of telepaths may well be a world in which everyone talks like a comic strip. But that doesn’t explain why they should act like one too.
    More dated even than the Golden Age narrative style is the psychology. As an adman (PR man to be precise), Bester was well up on the psychological theory of his day, which was largely Freudian or Behaviourist. The book is chock-full of Freudian ideas and jargon, all of which have since been superseded in psychological theory as well as in therapeutic practice. In consequence, the rationales for both the plot and the characters’ actions now come across as mere far-fetched twaddle.
    Enjoyable twaddle, though. Funny, too. And if you squint hard enough, you may even detect some of the literary quality a few highbrow readers (Carl Sagan, of all people, among them) have found in the work of Alfred Bester. I’m sorry to have to admit I am not one of these readers, though I still had fun reading The Demolished Man.

Of What They Had Not

For what the Protection of Absolute Monarchy is, what kind of Fathers of 

their Countries it makes Princes to be, and to what a degree of Happiness and Security 

it carries Civil Society, where this sort of Government is grown to perfection, 

he that will look into the late Relation of Ceylon may easily see. 

– John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, II.vii.92

 

❦

 
OF WHAT THEY HAD NOT

Robert Knox on the Kingdom of Kandy

 

Offices or titles by inheritance.

Passable roads. Bridges over rivers.

Streets in their towns and villages.

Liberty to move about the country

Or to make a choice of occupation.

Of markets and manufactures, but few.

 

Home-pride, chimneys,

Walls whitewashed or tiled

(Save they be the King, or I);

Curtains, cushions,

Cupboards, shelves or chairs;

Sundials, hourglasses, clocks.

 

Forts or castles built by man,

Fishing-nets or chicken-feed,

Doctors, chirurgeons,

Elaborate obsequies for the dead,

Shoes or stockings; nor even

Candles, less they be the King.

 

Lions. Wolves. Horses, asses or sheep. 

Dung in use for fertiliser. Iron ploughs.  

Schools, secular books, or paper;  

Of sports few, nor delight in play.  

Much of feasting, drink or drunkenness.  

Mention of sodomy.

 

Chastity, fidelity in marriage,

Wooing for a wife,

Sanctions against adultery,

Jealousy of their women.

Professional whores

Or midwives.

 

Loving or private conference with kindred,

Account or conscience of lying,

Moral instruction unto children,

Great malice toward one another,

Zeal in worship, or much matter

Of esteem for their gods.

 

Laws, save the whim of the King.

Justice in any wise.

 

©Richard Simon, 27 Jul 2023

 

Taking Our Knox

An Historical Relation of Ceylon 

by Robert Knox

Robert Knox in the Kandyan Kingdom 

by E.F.C. Ludowyk

 

I don’t know whether they still teach Lankan children about Robert Knox in school, but he remains a household name in my country. The story of his nineteen-year captivity under the tyrannical King Rajasinha II of Kandy and his meticulously planned but hair-raising escape and return to England, first published in 1681 as An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon in the East Indies, is often retold in the media here. Although it tends to be full of errors and often misrepresents its subject, this abundant coverage reflects a public interest in Knox that has held remarkably steady ever since The Ceylon Historical Journal first published his book locally in 1958. 
       Abroad, of course, he is largely forgotten. Though his unpolished seafarer’s prose remains easy enough to read despite the quaint seventeenth-century syntax, his story seems to have little appeal to modern-day readers. It was not always so: when the book was first published in London it caused a genuine, if modest, sensation. No doubt the human interest and pathos of Knox’s tale played their part in this, as did the exotic and perilous setting – white men who saw the Kingdom of Kandy from the inside seldom returned home to tell the tale – but the earliest readers and champions of the Relation were more impressed by the wealth of geographical, commercial and political information the author had folded into its pages. The East Indies were a part of the world in which England, at the end of the seventeenth century, was beginning to take a serious interest, and Knox’s encyclopaedic survey of Ceylon was a godsend to aspiring imperialists and merchant princes.
       The book had, in fact, begun its existence as a report Knox had written for the directors of the British East India Company, which had sponsored the ill-starred trading voyage that ended with his capture (along with his father, the ship’s captain, and fourteen other sailors). Among the directors of the Company was the architect and scientist Sir Christopher Wren, who read Knox’s report with interest and, ‘conceiv[ing] that it may give great Satisfaction to the Curious’, recommended it to the secretary of the Royal Society, his friend and collaborator Robert Hooke, as well as to a printer by the name of Chiswell who duly published the first English edition of the Relation in 1681. Hooke contributed a preface.
       Interest in the book was by no means confined to Britain. Ceilaõ, or Ceylon, was familiar enough to the Portuguese, whose dominion over the coastal provinces of the island had begun in the sixteenth century. To other Europeans, however, it was terra incognita. Even the Dutch, who by Knox’s day had largely supplanted the Portuguese in the East Indies – and whose opportunistic alliance with Rajasinha, made decades earlier, had enabled them to do the same in Lanka not long before – still knew so little about the interior of the country that the Dutch governor in Colombo, Rijkloff van Goens, personally subjected the escaped Englishman to a courteous but intense grilling before shipping him off to Batavia. Unsurprisingly, the Relation also aroused considerable interest on the Continent, with editions in Dutch, French and German all in print before the end of the century.
       In England it grew to be part of the common property of the age. Philosophers made reference to it in their works; popular authors were inspired by it (at least one American historian insists that Knox, not Alexander Selkirk, was Defoe’s model for Robinson Crusoe). All in all, the Relation did so well that its author was encouraged to prepare a greatly-expanded second edition, to be printed together with a brief autobiography and various other addenda. But he took too long to complete the work and died before it could be published; and with that, the Historical Relation and its author faded slowly into obscurity. No more comprehensive – nor more accurate – description of Lanka and her peoples would appear in print for nearly two hundred years. When it did, that book – James Emerson Tennent’s Ceylon – would owe much to Knox, not least in its first volume, which bears a clear structural resemblance to An Historical Relation.
 

*     *     *

 

The original edition of Knox’s book begins with an introductory essay in which the author explains how and why it came to be written. This seems to have eluded the editorial hand of ‘my Cousin John Strype a Minister,’ who had sorted the rest of the manuscript ‘into heads & Chapters for my papers ware promiscuous & out of forme.’ Unlike the main body of his text, in which point follows point with great clarity and discipline, this introduction exhibits a discursiveness worthy of Montaigne himself. Knox meanders through his childhood, his education under his mother, ‘a woman of extraordinary Piety’, the accident in which his younger brother lost an eye, his keen sense of God’s special favour towards him – a subject to which he devotes several paragraphs – his schooldays and his first voyages abroad, closing at last with an account of how he came to be captured by the Sinhalese.
       Then comes Hooke’s preface, written in a concise, urbane style a world apart from Knox’s own. It places great stress on the book’s most remarkable feature, its encyclopaedic detail and diversity. ‘The Statesman, Divine, Physitian, Lawyer, Merchant, Mechanick, Husbandman, may [each] select something for their Entertainment,’ Hooke wrote, ‘the Philosopher and Historian much more.’ 
 

After a general view of the Sea Coasts, he will lead you into the Country by the Watches, through the Thorney Gates, then Conduct you round the Mountains that Encompass and Fortifie the whole Kingdom… He will shew you their chief Cities and Towns, and pass through them into the Countrey, and there acquaint you with their Husbandry, then Entertain you with the Fruits, Flowers, Herbs, Roots, Plants and Trees… Then shew you their Beasts, Birds, Fish, Serpents, Insects; and last of all their Commodities. From hence he will carry you to Court, and shew you the King in the several Estates of his Life; and acquaint you with his way of Governing, Revenues, Treasures, Officers, Governors, Military Strength, Wars… He will bring you acquainted with the Inhabitants themselves, whence you may know their different Honours, Ranks and Qualities. Then you may visit their Temples…and see…their Priests, Religious Opinions and Practices both in their worship and Festivals, and afterwards go home to their Houses and be acquainted with their Conversation and Entertainment, see their Houswifery, Furniture, Finery, and understand how they Breed and Dispose of their Children in Marriage; and in what Employments and Recreations they pass their time. Then you may acquaint yourself with their Language, Learning, Laws, and if you please with their Magick & Jugling. And last of all with their Diseases, Sickness, Death and manner of Burial…

This impressive catalogue, further elaborated in a table of contents running to twelve close-printed pages, represents both the virtue and the weakness of the book. Knox set out to tell all he knew about Ceylon and the Kingdom of Kandy, hoping to make his account as useful as possible to his corporate sponsors. But the encyclopaedic approach seldom makes for easy reading; the editors of the Britannica do not, after all, expect you to devour their work at a sitting. Yet the Relation is more than a reference work; it is also, by turns, autobiography, traveller’s tale, adventure-story, ethnological (and moral) treatise and a polemic against the tyranny of kings. Any halfway competent hack could have worked up several books out of the material Knox poured into the Relation. As it is, the reader is left to tease them apart by herself. Lankans – particularly Kandyans, to whom the abundant descriptive content is of special relevance since it chiefly concerns their ancestors and their homeland – may be fascinated by all of it, but others, chiefly interested in the story of the author and his adventures, may find the surfeit of material indigestible and conclude, as one critic did in the Guardian, that Knox’s great work is nothing but ‘a drearily prolix ramble.’
       In fact, readers looking for a good yarn would probably do well to skip the bulk of the Relation, reading only Knox’s introduction (which provides a necessary frame for the rest) and Part IV of the main text, which contains the account of his capture, his years as a prisoner and, finally, his exciting escape into Dutch-held territory north of Arippu. Such readers will, perforce, miss some of the most interesting features of the book, such as the chapters on King Rajasinha and his extraordinary style of government, Knox’s shocked account of Kandyan sexual mores and several other bonnes bouches which those having a ‘gust’ (as Hooke put it) for more exotic nourishment may well relish. But they will be spared a great weight of tedium.
 

*     *     *

 
For those wishing to have their cake and eat it, a happy compromise does exist – if they can find it. Robert Knox in the Kandyan Kingdom is a book of selections from the Historical Relation edited by E.F.C. Ludowyk, an author, critic and academic who became, in 1942, the first occupant of the Chair of English at the then-brand-new University of Ceylon. This work contains the whole (as far as I can tell) of Knox’s Part IV, together with some heavily expurgated chapters from other sections of the book. For someone who only wants to know who Knox was and enjoy the most fascinating parts of his tale, this, rather than the Relation itself, is the book to read. But it was published in the first year of Lankan independence, has never been reprinted, and is now almost vanishingly rare.

       I read it many years ago; it was, in fact, my own introduction to Robert Knox. I thought it excellent, an instructive and absorbing yarn with more than enough pace in it to keep me reading to the end. And, as I found when I finally came to read the Relation in full, Ludowyk’s sensitive editing has done an excellent job of preserving the tone of the original, accurately conveying the character of Knox himself. If you can find a copy, I heartily recommend that you read it first, and decide afterwards whether you really want – or need, any longer – to take on the whole of the Relation.

       Sadly, there can’t be many copies of Ludowyk’s unlikely gem left in the world today. Of the few that are, one may well have found its way into the hands of that American historian I mentioned earlier, the lady who thinks Knox was the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe. I don’t know whether she acknowledges it in her own book, but Ludowyk earlier made exactly the same suggestion in his introduction to Robert Knox in the Kandyan Kingdom. He seems, in fact, to have been convinced that it was true, for he repeated it in print on at least two later occasions. I have no idea whether we’re looking at a case of intellectual plagiarism here, nor do I especially care – though I suppose somebody ought to. Still, if you ever get your hands on Ludowyk’s book, don’t fail to read the introduction. Except for the Crusoe punt, it is a solid, insightful essay by one of the best-ever Lankan writers and critics in English.
 

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But what of the Relation itself, and its remarkable appeal to Lankans?
       Technically, since he was involved in the India trade under the sponsorship of ‘John Company’, Knox was an imperialist – albeit a prentice one. But Lanka at the time lay out of British reach; its central regions, together with its thinly-populated southern and eastern littoral, belonged to the King of Kandy, who ruled what was left of the ancient Kingdom of Sinhalé after four hundred years of steady decline, endless wars, shifting capitals and gradual encirclement by foreign powers. The rest of the island was in the hands of another European corporation, the Dutch East India Company or VOC. Knox’s vessel, dismasted in a storm, had put in at Trincomalee for repairs; young Robert himself was a member of the shore-party sent to locate and fell a suitable tree to replace the lost mast. But Trincomalee, halfway down the east coast, was Kandyan territory, and the party were quickly – if very civilly – taken prisoner.

       Yet though they had been arrested on his standing orders, Rajasinha had no interest in the captives. Europeans were scarcely a novelty to him; his own court was full of white men – who were treated as privileged guests or ‘ambassadors’ until they tried to leave, whereupon they learnt their true status. Rather than have the prisoners brought to him, the king ordered them dispersed among certain villages, whose inhabitants were enjoined to provide them with security and sustenance. This was hard on the villagers, who were already very poor and were granted no additional resources with which to support their charges. It was also very much in keeping with the generally cruel and exploitative character of Rajasinha’s regime. Knox expiates at great length on the king’s tyrannical nature, describing the traditions and decrees that reserved to the ruler nearly all the land in the kingdom (only Buddhist temple lands were exempt) and all of its finest produce, squeezing the people dry. He also lists many of the cruelly whimsical dictates that forbade ordinary Lankans the simplest of household conveniences, such as stools, chairs, bedsteads, candles, tiled roofs and walls and even, in the case of lower castes, clothing enough to keep them warm and decent. 

      In spite of its deprivations and discomfort, Knox and most of his shipmates eventually adapted to the strictures of Kandyan life. The terms of their captivity were mild; they were given houses to live in, permitted some freedom of movement and allowed to engage in various forms of trade (making knitted caps was Knox’s speciality) in order to support themselves. Their status as prisoners of the crown ensured that their condition was, in fact, less miserable than that of the king’s native subjects. Still, their lives were far from easy, and some soon died; among the casualties was Knox’s father, who passed away, apparently of malaria, in spite of all his son’s efforts to preserve his life.

       Knox himself was something of a refusenik compared to his fellow sailors, abhorring intercourse with the native women (he found them unattractive and their sexual morals revolting, or so he says) and holding as aloof as possible from native society. He did what he could to preserve his own faith and culture, saying his prayers regularly, maintaining his reading skills with the help of a Bible sold him by a Jesuit and sternly holding out against ‘going native’ except in practical matters such as dress and diet. Even so, he had none of the typical imperialist’s contempt for ‘lesser breeds without the law’ and took a close interest in Lankans and their ways, as well as in the country to which Fate had brought him. The greater part of An Historical Relation is dedicated to an account of these matters.

        The picture Knox draws of Kandyan society and culture is, on the whole, balanced and persuasive, and provides us with a detailed picture of ordinary life in the kingdom that is rivalled by few other olden-day travellers’ tales. European travellers and explorers prior to the nineteenth century generally fared from court to court and saw relatively little of the lives of the common people, whereas Knox saw nothing but the latter, and wisely took pains never to bring himself to the attention of the mighty. That his portrayal of the Kandyans has been so equably accepted by its subjects is no mystery: though he finds much to condemn in their customs and manners, he was also quick to give credit where it was due and was clearly sympathetic towards the poverty and oppression they suffered. Racism and other forms of prejudice seem to have been alien to him, a fact that partly accounts for the unusual clarity and accuracy of his observations. The only exception here was religion: a devout Christian, Knox found the superstition and syncretism of the Sinhalese repellent and literally damnable. Of Buddhism he knew little, because his peasant neighbours were similarly ignorant; Buddhism in those days was far from the cultural monolith it has since become, and though enjoying royal patronage it was only one among many forms of spiritual consolation pursued by the Sinhalese.

       
 

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Apart from the sections recommended above, readers with an interest in history and politics are sure to relish the depiction of Rajasinha himself, which, though drawn from hearsay only – Knox admitted to van Goens that he had never set eyes on the monarch – portrays a despot so selfish and capricious as to make his royal contemporary Louis XIV of France, then in the pomp of his own absolutist reign, seem a philanthropist by comparison. The liberal philosopher John Locke was deeply impressed: ‘What the protection of absolute monarchy is,’ he wrote in an introduction to one of his own essays, ‘what kind of fathers of their countries it makes princes to be, and to what a degree of happiness and security it carries civil society… he that will look into the late Relation of Ceylon may easily see.’ The maxim ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’ would not be coined for another two hundred years, but it describes Knox’s Rajasinha to perfection. 

    The king was, admittedly, driven to extreme shifts by the reality that his kingdom was encircled and cut off from the outside world and that he himself was – or fancied he was – under constant threat from enemies domestic and foreign. All the same, the Kandyan kingdom, as Knox describes it, was little better than an open concentration-camp for its neglected and mercilessly exploited inhabitants and rich only in deprivations – so rich, indeed, that, listed in the form of a poem, the lacunae Knox identified cover two whole pages.
       His popularity among Lankan readers endures in spite of rather than because of his portrayal of Rajasinha, whom we commonly speak of as a hero for holding off the Portuguese and Dutch as long as he did, ignoring his grotesque treatment of his own people and the deadly paranoia that saw him slaughter so many of his noble Kandyan contemporaries. It rests, instead, on Knox’s depiction of ordinary life among the Sinhalese and the judicious compliments he paid them. Some of the latter have, it is true, been improved upon over the years – for instance, his much-quoted observation that a Kandyan ploughman only needed to have the mud washed off him to be fit to rule a kingdom was made with special regard to the aristocratic residents of Udunuwara, but today is commonly taken to apply to all Sinhalese. Such frailties are perhaps excusable in a people whose history has been unhappy as ours has, and our affection for an unwilling guest who was, in the end, no particular friend of Lanka arguably does us credit.