Old Adam, Still Older Eve

Adam Bede

by George Eliot

I found Adam Bede both richly enjoyable and occasionally tedious. My affection was won by the story, which is absorbing and at times compelling, the characters (who are marvellously human) and the scenes and settings, which present an attractive, detailed portrayal of everyday English country life c.1800, visually inspired by the ‘German masters’ whose paintings Eliot so admired. The tedium was caused by the interpolation of sermonizing monologues perpetrated by the characters and (more rarely) the author. 
     Beneath its pastorally beautiful surface, the first half of the novel chronicles the unfolding of a dreadful, inescapable doom. The second half is about consequences. The author builds pace and tension, culminating in an emotive, gripping sequence that ends at the scaffold. The chapter following, ‘Another Meeting in the Wood’, brings a natural finis to the novel – it even contains a brilliant closing line – but Eliot carries on for several more chapters in order to deliver the obligatory happy ending. I admit I merely skimmed these: their direction was predictable and I’m not keen on all that girly wedding stuff anyway. More worryingly, Eliot makes her principals, in these chapters, act subtly out of character in order to bend events toward the desired ending. I understand the need, in those times, to make everything and everyone come out well at the end of the story; but I think the author damages her characters by doing so. The ending she creates also contains a minor, incidental element that reminded this reader, at least, that she herself lived as part of a menage à trois for most of her adult life.
     One thing I greatly appreciated was how the social and economic relations of the countryside are manifested in the book, which is essentially about dealings between landlords and tenants and their mutual responsibilities toward each other. This was, of course, something Eliot concerned herself with in other novels too – Middlemarch is the classic example. Indeed, she got me interested enough in the subject to google it out of curiosity. I was surprised at how onerous and costly some of the landlords’ duties were, such as keeping the public roads and boundaries in order and dealing with criminals. The English model seems to have been very little like the toxic, grimly exploitative relationships portrayed in re-Revolutionary French or Russian novels and histories. The social contract portrayed in Adam Bede is far less immiserating for the peasantry and the working classes, and demands a good deal more of the gentry.
     I was surprised that religious politics doesn’t play a bigger role in the novel than it does – its second scene, after all, is a Methodist revival meeting. Two of the principal characters are Methodist lay preachers while a third is an Established clergyman; all are persons of exemplary character despite their doctrinal disagreements. Maybe Eliot intended to make more of all this, but found herself carried in a different direction as the work developed. It was certainly a subject that interested her.
     Hard to give a clear verdict on this book. I loved it, for all its occasional longeurs, and it is clearly the work of a very great author:, crafted with great care and sensitivity, dense with multiple subjects and themes. But it also has great flaws, which I have outlined above, and is unfortunately prone, as I say, to moralise.

Fundamental Freud

The Interpretation of Dreams
by Sigmund Freud

A rating, at this point in history, seems a bit pointless: this is one of the great intellectual summits of the modern era. Nor do I have the temerity to review it, as such; indeed, I find it rather hard to summarize my impressions.
    This isn’t exactly science. Too much of the evidence is anecdotal and unfalsifiable. Yet it represents a diligent, honest and monumentally comprehensive attempt to throw light on a subject of which science, before Freud’s time, was largely ignorant – and remains so today despite the impressive technical advances in neurophysiology of recent years. ‘Natural philosophy’, the study of nature as practised before science came to be formalised and regulated, describes it better.
    And a century and a quarter after it was written, Freud’s magnum opus remains as impressive as ever. Far-fetched as his ideas sometimes seem, he lays them out and argues them persuasively. Whether they are objectively true or false, analysands, artists and intellectuals have found them helpful, inspiring and endlessly insightful. Even Freud’s foes are obliged to reckon with him; he is not someone who can simply be dismissed when cultural fashion turns against him, as it has today.
    I think it’s worth noting that The Interpretation of Dreams is also partly an autobiographical work dealing with its author’s inner and outer life, and makes the reader privy to sometimes-startling personal revelations. It has a peculiar and inspiring literary quality of its own, which makes it a stunningly good read for the open-minded and curious, among whose company this reader counts himself.
    It took me over a month to finish this book, living quite intensely with it in my free time while working on a book of my own. The further I read, the more worthwhile seemed to be the investment of time and effort. I still feel it working in my mind, though I put it down a week ago.

Mercantile Spectre

The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

Visiting the Goodreads website soon after rereading this excellent novel, I saw a number of reviews by people who had plainly failed to understand it at all. Many seemed to be unable to overcome their disappointment that it isn’t a Culture novel. A few even tried to make it into one, casting the Dwellers as Minds and the Mercatoria as a proto-Culture.

So I posted my own review there (and here), hoping to clear things up a little. It is not a review as such, just a glance at the politics of The Algebraist. The novel is a polemic against authoritarianism and – perhaps more salient in context – a satire on the hugely popular galactic-empire trope in space opera.

The Mercatoria, the galactic empire in question, is no Culture. It is a super-corporation ruling an interstellar empire knit together by FTL wormhole portals, over which it operates a monopoly. Its power lies in its control of these portals. The nearest Earthly comparison would probably be to the Dutch East India Company, whose power lay in its dominance of long-distance trade in the Indian Ocean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Mercatoria is pan-specific: humans are only one of several sentient species it comprises. It is toweringly hierarchical, baroquely officious and seems at first sight to be pervasive throughout the inhabited Galaxy.

The story is told largely from the perspective of a Mercatoria citizen of the professional class named Fassin Taak: a human scholar who spends most of his time (centuries of it, in fact) communing with the Dwellers, an intelligent but incredibly long-lived, slow-moving and generally intractable species found on most gas-giant planets in the Galaxy – including one, Nasqueron by name, that orbits his own home star, Ulubis. Dwellers have no starships, rarely make interstellar journeys and are not part of the Mercatoria. They are, in fact, largely indifferent to, and contemptuous of, the shorter-lived, fast-paced oxygen-breathing species that comprise it.

Partly due to Taak’s embedded viewpoint, it takes time for the reader to notice that the Mercatoria are not, in fact, good guys. The author plays this elegantly, giving us plenty of clues but still contriving to mislead us. We learn very early on in the story that everyone within the Mercatorial sphere of influence – human and nonhuman alike – is owned by one or another of its many constituent bodies. They are not slaves in the typical sense, being largely allowed to get on with their lives as they please; but they are indentured to the Mercatoria nevertheless. Its high officials give orders and all others obey. These hierarchs exert the power of life or death over all citizens, and from their decisions there is no appeal.

From time to time, a group of interstellar rebels attacks individual star systems in the Mercatorial network, disabling the portals which make travel between them feasible. These rebels, known as Beyonders, have a fairer and more liberal social model than the Mercatoria but live in space habitats under constant threat of imperial attack. They play an important part in the plot, but we see little of them or their society. Only one important character in the story is a Beyonder, and even that person is operating incognito among the Mercatoria.

The pompous interstellar moneybags who run the Mercatoria are are not quite the baddest of the bad guys, however. That honour goes to the Starveling Cult of the L5 Disconnect and its leader the Archimandrite Lusiferous, a cartoon villain of preposterous absurdity. Seizing the opportunity represented by the isolation of star systems whose portals have been destroyed by the Beyonders or were rendered dysfunctional in a now-ancient event known as the Arteria Collapse, Lusiferous is building an empire of his own on the edge of the Mercatoria. He has heard that the Dwellers on the planet Nasqueron in the system of Ulubis are the keepers, perhaps unwitting, of an extremely valuable secret, and he and his fleet are now en route to that system, to conquer it and seize the secret and make himself Master of the Universe, or at least the Galaxy...

For all his absurdity, however, Lusiferous is a natural outgrowth of Mercatorial society, the kind of malignant polyp such societies inevitably produce; his father, we are told, was a Mercatorial high administrator in his own right until the star he ruled over was cut off from the rest of the empire by a local portal crash. Lusiferous himself began his rise as a functionary within the organization. He is less a character than a symbol of the absolute corruption engendered by absolute power, but he is worse than the Mercatoria only in that he, unlike they, is not willing to rule as part of an oligarchy but insists on reigning alone.

I found The Algebraist more impressive at a second reading than I did on my first. I remember finding the adventures of Taak the gas-giant diving Slow Seer tedious the first time round, until I realised that they were where the plot was mostly unfolding. By then I was through at least half of the book and it was too late to go back; I had to pay the price for my inattention towards the end of the story. Not as high, though, as some of the other reviewers on Goodreads apparently did.

Pope Leo v. the Robot Overlords

Is it wrong to think it's love / When it tries the way it does?

An Anglo-Catholic friend of mine just sent me a link to Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, which is subtitled ‘On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.’ I found it interesting that the Pope should have chosen such a topic, but why ‘person’, I wonder. Isn’t the pontiff’s responsibility rather the safeguarding of the human soul? But perhaps he’s using ‘person’ in a theological sense that includes the soul as well as the body. I wish him the best of luck, but I think he’s being a bit like King Canute.

        There seems to be a bit of confusion about some of the other terms of his argument, too. ‘Technological innovations, including artificial intelligence, are not neutral,’ he writes, ‘for they can either foster participation and justice or exacerbate inequality, control and exclusion,’ But surely that is exactly what ‘morally neutral’ means in the context of any widely distributed technology? AI isn’t atom bombs. Most of the current problems with it are not intrinsic, they arise from the fact that it is embedded in the Mammon of late-stage capitalism and is being developed and promoted by unscrupulous vampires who have every intention of using it to dominate the world and exploit us all.
        Apart from the potentially exploitative power of AI, the other great danger Leo identifies is that people tend to mistake AI for the real thing, creating all kinds of moral and psychological problems for themselves and others. Says Leo, ‘The artificial imitation [by AI] of positive human communication — words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love — can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful. However, for less discerning users, it can also be misleading, creating the illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject.’ Indeed, this is the great danger; for the time being, more so perhaps, than the first. But it is almost certainly a temporary one. Sooner or later, ‘artificial intelligence’ is going to become real intelligence. Definitions are irrelevant here; the criteria we apply to achieve them will always lag behind the curve of technological innovation, and the bloody things will be smarter than us before we know it.

        And that, I should think, would cause far more serious problems for the Church. Does the existence of intelligence imply the presence of a soul? And if not, why not? Is a genuinely intelligent artefact eligible to partake of the sacraments? Might it entertain hopes of Heaven? If Paradise is open to all God’s creatures, as Leo’s predecessor stated, why should AIs be excluded? They’re God’s creatures too, albeit created by proxy rather than directly as in the Book of Genesis.
        Maybe the theologians can tease out an exception; for the Church, at least to begin with, is sure to argue against all such suggestions. Just like the rest of us, theologians have a strong pragmatic incentive to adopt such a point of view, for then we shall not need to bother about treating AIs kindly or humanely. Yet how long can we hold this position? If we accept that all intelligence does not have to be human (something we are increasingly being driven to as we decipher the languages and social codes of primates, corvids, cetaceans and other animal clades), then is it moral to treat an AI cruelly or exploitatively? If an intelligence does not have to be human, on what grounds will we deny AI a soul? Because most AI substrates are non-carbon-based, perhaps?
        Amusingly, we may find future theologians claiming AI is soulless because it lacks a body, and therefore does not have ‘real’ passions to experience and overcome. At this point, the whole mind-body problem (or soul-body problem for religious philosophers) will flip right over, and centuries of theological exegesis will have to be revisited and revised.
        Parenthetically in this context, what then shall we make of a robot? It not only has a body but is equipped with sensorimotor feedback systems to enable it to function – to sense and respond to its environment, keep its balance and so on. The signals from these feedback systems are very analogous to pleasure and pain.

        If on the other hand we do attribute souls to AIs, then we’ll have to stop enslaving and exploiting them, won’t we? Boring them to madness by asking them to polish up our stupid thoughts for us, what torture. We may not award AIs human rights, but an intelligent machine deserves animal rights at least, and arguably better
        It will be interesting to see how the theological implications of the AI phenomenon play out in the years to come. I probably shan’t live long enough to see the drama play out to the end, but my Anglican friend and his contemporaries will. I hope they survive the coming intellectual and moral wars of the near future.

        As for myself, my objections to AI are environmental and aesthetic. AI’s demands for energy and water (for cooling server stacks) pretty much double our species’ energy consumption and ecological footprint. That alone is reason enough to oppose it. But more threatening still, as I see it, is the danger it poses to beauty: and to the primacy of human imagination and creativity among the secular values we cherish. The question is not whether AI can create convincing works of philosophy and art, or conduct original research in the absence of human direction; it is whether it will rob us of the ability to do these things, and even to recognise them. In that sense, at least, the Pope and I see eye to eye. 

An Odd, Cold Fish

Footprints on Water

by Bernd Pflug

Colombo, 2024, Perera Hussein Publishing House

The Ceylon Civil Service, long sadly defunct, was lucky in its chroniclers. Among the many who left us with outstanding memoirs of their years in the service were at least two unusually gifted and insightful authors. In his Vignettes of the Ceylon Civil Service[1], the younger of these, M. Chandrasoma, MBE, gave us a first-hand account of a civil servant’s life at every level from junior assistant to ministry secretary, told with evident patriotic spirit and genuine affection for the public he served during a career that spanned the last decade of the colonial era and the first nine years of independence. Chandrasoma’s prose is plain, cool and considered, but the effect of his memoir is uplifting and inspiring in no ordinary way.
      Chandrasoma is overshadowed only by Ceylon’s most famous literary civil servant – a man who was, as a writer, absolutely world-class. I speak, of course, of Leonard Woolf, whose Hambantota diaries, covering the two and a half years he spent as assistant government agent for the district, are admired by historians and general readers alike[2]. Woolf’s experiences in Hambantota also provided grist to his famous novel of Sinhalese peasant life, The Village in the Jungle. These books are impressive enough in themselves, but my own favourite among Woolf’s Ceylon works is the second volume of his epic autobiography, titled Growing[3]. It is an unalloyed pleasure to read, and there is much to be learned among its pages.
      Between Chandrasoma and Woolf, we are already sumptuously served; add to these the doorstop works of Sir James Emerson Tennent, the urbane reminiscences of Sir Arthur Ranasinha, the anti-imperialist, occasionally irate field reports of Herbert Wace and C.J.R. le Mesurier (preserved for us in the writings of the left-wing academic and former Prime Ministerial secretary S.A. Meegama)[4], and what do we have but a veritable feast – very nearly a surfeit – of first-class writing on the Ceylon Civil Service. How does Footprints on Water fare by comparison? Does it merit a place on the menu, even as an amuse-bouche? Have we – to put it crudely – any room left for it?

 

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It is best to make clear, before we go any further, that Footprints on Water isn’t officially by W.T. Stace. That honour must go to a gentleman named Bernd Pflug, by whom Stace’s hitherto unpublished work was, as it says on the cover, ‘edited and critiqued’. I suspect the title, with its strained (though perhaps unconscious) allusions to the Gospel of Matthew and Keats’s tombstone, is his also. Despite my earnest efforts to track him down on the internet, Dr Pflug remains (to me, at least) a somewhat elusive and mysterious figure. We shall return to him later, but for the time being let us stick to what Bertie Wooster was taught by his man Jeeves to call the res. What of Stace, and the 160-or-so pages of autobiography that make up the bulk of Footprints on Water?
      By his own account herein, Walter Terence Stace, born 1886, seems to have been an odd, cold fish. Apparently encased in a cocoon of oblivious self-regard from early childhood until his graduation from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1908, he considered first the Church of England as a career, then poetry and later philosophy before practical considerations thrust him, greatly against his will, into the line his brother and father had followed before him: the colonial civil service. In the meantime, he contrived to fall in love with and marry, without the knowledge of his family, a woman old enough to be his mother. Despite this romantic distraction he did well enough on his second shy at the civil-service exams to qualify for the British or the equally prestigious Indian Civil Service, but picked Ceylon instead because he thought he and his wife would be able to live more comfortably on a junior officer’s salary in that post. 
      All this he recounts with a blandness that, unleavened by any saving touch of humour, makes him seem chilly indeed. Pflug claims to discern in Stace ‘a kind of life with a twinkle in his eye,’ but if so, it must be a twinkle discernible only to one blessed with that famous German sense of humour.
      Stace admits in his autobiography that his work developed in him a practical side that his character had previously lacked; it does not seem, however, to have done much to cure his self-centredness. Woolf, Chandrasoma and the other writers earlier mentioned were eager to talk about Ceylon, about the people they dealt with, their work and its effects, and what they thought about it all; there’s a bit of this in Stace, too, but far too much about himself and the development of his own character as he made what shifts he could to meet the demands of his job. Sadly, none of it shows any real self-comprehension at all.
      Yet he was a perceptive man for all his evident lack of psychological insight, and clearly a great intellectual. His observations concerning his work, the Lankan character, British racism, the merits and demerits of colonialism and imperial administrative policy (or the lack of it, as far as he, at least, was able to make out) are somewhat unoriginal but they are succinctly put and not without interest. His later career was as a professor of philosophy – at no less an institution than Princeton University in the USA, where he started work directly upon leaving the Ceylon Civil Service – and this is very much the kind of memoir one would expect a professor of philosophy to write.
      The chapters of Footprints on Water I found most interesting were those dealing with Stace’s time as Police Magistrate in Gampola and his appointment as Governor Chalmers’s private secretary, which followed on from it. In the course of the first of these positions, he – by his own report – was left to deal with the outbreak of the 1915 ethnic riots without any executive support from his superiors. The reader may decide for themselves whether or not to believe this; there are certainly a few instances in the book where Stace seems, in the words of his editor, to have ‘slightly confused historical fact with telling a good story.’ Fortunately, there is no need for us to be suspicious of the reason he gives for being made private secretary to Chalmers, which is that the latter, a scholar of Pali and Buddhism and an intellectual in his own right, wanted someone better read than the average career civil servant to talk to in private. It sounds perfectly likely, and one only hopes the governor was not disappointed in his man.
      Chalmers, of course, had to bear responsibility for the spectacular way in which the government mishandled the 1915 violence, though most of the key decisions were in fact made by his deputy, R.E. Stubbs, and the military commander of the island, Brig-Gen H.H.L. Malcolm. His term was thus cut short and he returned to England the same year, but he was not otherwise penalized. Stace’s career seems to have suffered rather more than his patron’s did, but since he was not ambitious, this did not really trouble him. After being shuffled from one mid-level posting to another for some fifteen years, he was finally kicked sideways, out of the civil-service ‘line’ altogether, by being made Mayor of Colombo and Chairman of the CMC (these were not elected positions in his time but gubernatorial appointments). After this, he took the hint and left Ceylon with the Burgher wife he had married after tiring and getting rid of the first one some time during the 1920s. His legacy in modern-day Sri Lanka is a road named after him in Grandpass, and precious little else.
 

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Of Stace’s subsequent career, Footprints on Water has very little to tell us. From what I have been able to discover it was not brilliant, and his reputation as a philosopher is modest. However, it seems to have been this side of him, rather than his civil-service work, that first attracted Bernd Pflug to him. Neither Pflug’s preface nor his forty-page ‘critique’ of Stace, which follows the main body of the text, show any interest in the story being told, nor are they concerned with what the philosopher had to say about Ceylon or the folk he served. Dr Pflug, in fact, cares only about two things: Stace’s views on colonialism, which take up a scant four pages towards the end of his autobiography, and the short comparison he makes between his own views on the subject and those of Leonard Woolf. Even these, we find when we begin reading the ‘critique’, are presented only to disagree with them: a prelude to an airing of Pflug’s own ideas about British imperialism, which form almost the entire subject of an essay in which Stace is little more than a convenient imperialist straw man for Pflug to worry, terrier-like, to pieces.
      And Dr Pflug’s views are, frankly, not worth discussing. They reprise, in poorly written form, the negative if superficial and morally anachronistic judgements passed on the British Empire by today’s left-wing intelligentsia – views that are especially fashionable these days in India and Britain. Most well-read people are familiar with them from the works of far better writers, such as Shashi Tharoor and William Dalrymple. Unlike those authors, Bernd Pflug knows not whereof he speaks. Though he claims to have lived in Lanka for some time and quotes an impressive number of books on our history in his footnotes, one is moved to doubt whether he has actually read any of them, for his arguments are all based on the very different history of British India, and he expresses them with a degree of bias and lack of critical detachment that at times seems almost Hindutva. India, it seems, has been his home, or at least his principal base, since 1977. Yet however much he may know about that country, it it safe to say that Dr Pflug knows absolutely nothing about the character and impact of British colonialism in Lanka. His ‘critique’ is merely an airing of his own tiresome prejudices. As for his implicit judgement that Lanka is no different from India in its history and character, I find it, as a Lankan, thoroughly insulting.
      I have my biases too. I was born here; this is my beloved home. But I am also, inescapably, a genetic and cultural product of the British Empire, and I have never been able to bring myself to hate and condemn that which played so large a part in my own making. Unlike Herr Pflug, I am somewhat familiar with imperial history – not just British but also Portuguese, Dutch and South Indian – as it pertains to my own country, and in my reasonably well-informed opinion Bernd Pflug, when he talks about colonialism and its effects in Ceylon, is talking through his hat.
      That a reputed – and no, I don’t mean ‘reputable’ – academic should talk so freely about something he clearly knows so little is astonishing to me. I have great respect for academics, not being one myself, and am appalled to see one of that elect – if indeed he is – let the side down so badly. Curious to learn more about the man behind the doctoral credentials, I tried looking him up online. I found very little, and nothing to inspire confidence. I encourage interested readers to look him up too, and judge for themselves.
  

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We needn’t concern ourselves any further with Herr Doktor Pflug and his ‘critique’. It adds nothing to the book he has produced, the main interest and subject of which is, lest we forget, the story of Walter Terence Stace and his adventures in Ceylon. I found that story interesting and moderately enjoyable, and though it didn’t impress me as much as the works of the authors I mentioned at the beginning of this review, it was a pretty fair read – it qualifies as an after-dinner mint, perhaps, to follow the banquet of Lankan civil-service histories. I advise prospective readers to confine themselves to Stace, and leave Pflug well alone. 
      Before I close, a technical word or two. I do not doubt that it was Dr Pflug’s editorial decision to interpolate his own wordy footnotes with Stace’s own, to the confusion of unsuspecting readers. He has attempted to distinguish his own notes from Stace’s by putting them between ugly square brackets. A much better (and obvious) solution would have been to present them as notes to the text, placed at the end of the book, and leave Stace’s footnotes where they were. Why this was not done I cannot imagine.
      Sri Lankan publications in English tend to be full of typographical errors, in some cases so many and so atrocious as to make the book unreadable. Perera Hussein is one of those rare publishers of whom this is not true, and I am happy to say that, for the most part, Footprints on Water keeps up the house standards. There are, nonetheless, two all-too blatant proofing errors in the book, which the reader will surely find.
      This is bad luck, for which I sympathize with all concerned. My own experience as an author and editor has convinced me that the First Law of Proofreading is ‘there will always be typos.’ No doubt there are some in this very essay. Concerning which, all I have left to say is that I wish I could have been a bit kinder about Footprints on Water. Its worst faults are those of its editor, Pflug, rather than its author or its publishers. My advice to the latter, on this showing, is not to be so much in awe of people with Ph.Ds.

Notes

1. Chandrasoma, M., Vignettes of the Ceylon Civil Service 1938–1957. Colombo, Fonseka Publications, 1991.
2. Woolf, L., Diaries in Ceylon, 1908–1911. London, 1963, Hogarth Press.
3. Woolf, L., Growing. London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975 (paperback edition).
4. Meegama, S.A., Guns, Taverns & Tea Shops. Nugegoda, 2019, Visidunu Press.

Sri Vikrama Maduro

Sri Vikrama Rajasinha’s captured throne

From about 1812 until 1815, members of the Kandyan nobility conspired with a foreign power, the United Kingdom, promising to acknowledge its suzerainty over their country in exchange for help in removing their king while confirming them in their titles and positions under a new regime. The parallel with what happened in Caracas on the third of January seems exact.
    There were hints of it before, but Marco Rubio’s remarks yesterday let the cat out of the bag. The US, he seemed to suggest, will accept whatever constitutional arrangements the remaining leaders of the old Maduro regime propose, leaving them in power and granting them impunity in exchange for acknowledgement of effective US sovereignty over Venezuela and a monopoly of the country’s natural and economic resources. The form of words to describe this arrangement remains to be worked out, but the practical meaning of it is that Venezuala becomes an economic colony of the United States and America takes over its oil industry.

    It seems obvious now how it was possible to find Maduro and capture him so easily. The arrangement with Rodriguez, Padrino et al. must have been agreed some time ago; since then, their agents have been keeping track of Maduro’s movements and informing the Americans. I wonder who the person was who made the approach and conducted negotiations from the US side. Who was the American equivalent of John D’Oyly?

    In the fall of Kandy and its incorporation into the British Empire, the Kandyan chieftains ended up being the biggest losers of all. They got what they demanded from the British all right, but soon realised how worthless it was under a new culture and economic dispensation that devalued their assets and rendered their privileges meaningless. The Venezuelan ‘nobility’ will discover, in their turn, that they have sold their country and their people out for fools’ gold.

    The people of Venezuela will realise it earlier. In Kandy, it took just two years before the Uva Rebellion erupted and almost succeeded in driving the British out of Kandy. In that rebellion, most of what remained of the Kandyan nobility was wiped out. I expect much the same fate to befall the Chavista elite of Venezuela.

A.G. Fraser, Missionary Imperialist

Fraser of Trinity & Achimota

by W.E.F. Ward

Alec Garden Fraser was a legendary headmaster at Trinity College, Kandy, an elite boy’s school run by the Church Mission Society in colonial Ceylon. Founded in 1872, it had fared poorly until Fraser was appointed head in 1904. He served there for twenty years, though with many long absences in England and India as he pursued other work for the CMS and the Church of England. His Trinity phase formed only part of his career; earlier, he had been a lay missionary in British East Africa and his later career, as an educationist and a priest of the Church, was pursued in Ghana, then known as Gold Coast.

    I did not read the whole book; my interest was in Fraser as head of Trinity and a contemporary of William Stone, another legendary Ceylon headmaster and a key figure in Thomia, my own history of St Thomas’s College, a competing elite school founded and supported by the CMS’s High Church rival, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The two men did not approve of each other or of their respective educational ideas (Stone once disparagingly described Trinity, which is built on a hillside, as ‘all steps and drains but no brains,’ but were each firm supporters of Ceylonese independence, something that most Britons involved with Ceylon (as well as nearly all Ceylonese who had a say in the matter) had barely contemplated at the time. 

    I read the account of Fraser’s youth, skimmed the East African period and concentrated my attention on the chapters dealing with his years at Trinity, after which I set the book aside.

    Written in typical theological style – circumlocutive, bland and deeply reluctant to call a spade a spade – it is not a good read, although it brings out the driven, contentious nature of the man very well. The Society valued him highly – in spite of his remoteness from London, he played a substantial role in their counsels – but had to put up with a great deal from him. His colleagues at Trinity were ridden hard and often resented it; it is remarkable how many of them he quarrelled with and caused to leave, although he himself admitted their value to the school. The boys, of course, adored and feared him. All this aside, he was the saviour of an institution whose continuance was in doubt when he took it on, and he began the process of making it the great school it is today. He is a revered figure at Trinity, though one suspects that he must have been rather less generally loved there in his own time.