Book Reviews – Page 10 – Interesting Literature

Rider Haggard’s Minor Achievement: Maiwa’s Revenge

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a lesser-known Allan Quatermain novella

Maiwa’s Revenge is not a major novel in the H. Rider Haggard canon. Indeed, it’s a ‘minor’ novel even in terms of size and scale, running to just over 120 pages in the wonderful Macdonald illustrated edition from the 1960s which I own. And yet despite its status as a minor work in his oeuvre, Maiwa’s Revenge is worth reading, and worth a review (of sorts) here, not least because it features Rider Haggard’s most enduringly popular character, Allan Quatermain, ‘the Indiana Jones of Victorian literature’.

Maiwa’s Revenge, first published in 1888 shortly after Rider Haggard had enjoyed runaway successes with King Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quatermain, and She within the space of just a couple of years, seems to have been churned out at speed. Set in South Africa, it’s really two loosely linked stories in one, which Quatermain relates to his friends as they have a story-sharing evening.

Fantasy Book Review: John Gardner’s Grendel

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a classic fantasy novel that responds to the epic poem Beowulf

History, they say, is written by the victors. Although this isn’t universally true – there are many testaments and narratives by those who were on the losing side, or who were victim to tyrannies or empires which overran or subjugated them – it’s certainly broadly true of literature. If we think of Anglo-Saxon literature, for every ‘Battle of Maldon’ – the poem telling of the Saxons’ defeat at the hands of the Vikings in Essex in 991 – there are many examples of triumph, victory, and glory, of which Beowulf is the supreme example.

Beowulf is a fascinating poem in itself. It was effectively lost for the best part of a millennium, and it would have been lost from literary history altogether if it hadn’t been for one nineteenth-century scholar who made a copy of the single surviving manuscript, shortly before that manuscript was badly damaged in a fire.

The Lexicographer of Misinformation

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews Tom Burnam’s little-known dictionary of misinformation

Joan of Arc wasn’t French. Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent the telephone. Winston Churchill didn’t coin the phrase ‘iron curtain’. The ‘grey’ in ‘greyhound’ has nothing to do with the colour. The Wright Brothers weren’t the first aviators to build a heavier-than-air flying craft. Contrary to the title of a famous film, Krakatoa is actually west of Java.

This blog began life in 2012, largely because I’ve always been attracted to such fallacies, misconceptions, urban legends, and old wives’ tales, especially those relating to my chosen profession (not to mention my hobby – and dare I say it, life), literature.

Sneaky Blinders: Edgar Wallace’s Complete Four Just Men

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle escapes to early twentieth-century London with the crime-fighting Four Just Men

There is something irresistibly inspiring about an author who rose from humble beginnings to become popular and successful. J. K. Rowling is the most notable recent example. Charles Dickens went from being put to work in a blacking factory aged 12, after his father was imprisoned for debt, to amassing a fortune of £93,000 – quite a few million in today’s money. But perhaps my favourite ‘rags to riches’ story is that of Edgar Wallace, who was born out of wedlock to two actors in 1875 and adopted by a Billingsgate fish porter. Wallace rose up the journalistic ranks to become a hugely popular – and prolific – writer of thrillers in particular, and was perhaps at one stage the most famous author on the planet. Years later, when he had become a household name, Wallace was asked to contribute to a celebrity feature in a newspaper, titled ‘What I Owe My Parents’. Wallace’s postcard-reply was as long as the feature’s title, at just five words: ‘sorry, cock, I’m a bastard’.

Moriarty Meets Derren Brown: Guy Boothby’s Dr Nikola

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Guy Boothby’s fiendish fin de siècle creation

What happens if you cross Professor Moriarty with his arch-nemesis Sherlock Holmes, add in a bit of Svengali from George du Maurier’s Trilby, a dash of archetypal James Bond villain, and a smidgen of master-conjuror and illusionist Derren Brown? The answer is Dr Nikola, the creation of the prolific Australian writer Guy Boothby, who was once a hugely popular author and the protégé of Rudyard Kipling.

Dr Nikola arrived on the scene in 1895, just two years after Sherlock Holmes had supposedly gone to his death over the Reichenbach Falls with Professor Moriarty; in many ways, Boothby’s creation represents a reincarnation of both figures, whose characteristics have been merged together to create a super-villain who shows powers of perception (not to mention a flair for the dramatic) which Conan Doyle’s great sleuth would doubtless appreciate.