The Malaysian Insider :: Books
The Malaysian Insider :: Books |
| First Conan Doyle novel to be published Posted: 07 Jun 2011 07:00 AM PDT  File photo of a life-size bronze figure of Sherlock Holmes in the main square in the town of Meiringen, some 100km from the Swiss capital Bern. Meiringen was the location of 'The Adventure of the Final Problem' in which, writing in 1893, Conan Doyle killed the detective off — only to be forced by public pressure to resurrect him 10 years later. — Reuters pic "The Narrative of John Smith" was unfinished and differed radically from the Sherlock Holmes stories that made him famous, but experts said it offered a window into the mind of Conan Doyle as he started out as a young doctor and author. "What is interesting about it is not the story for its own sake but as a look inside the mind of this very young man — a struggling physician who is struggling even harder to become a published writer," said Jon Lellenberg, one of the book's editors and a Conan Doyle expert based in Chicago. To be published by the British Library which owns an extensive Conan Doyle collection, the book was written in 1883 and 1884, a few years before the publication of "A Study In Scarlet", the first story to feature the character of Holmes. Through the character of John Smith, a 50-year-old man confined to his room by an attack of gout, Conan Doyle sets down his thoughts and opinions on subjects including literature, science, religion, war, and education. Lellenberg said that while Smith was not a precursor to Holmes, other characters bore more than a passing resemblance to future personalities in the detective stories including his sidekick Dr Watson. "He's clearly thinking about characters who would become major figures (in the Holmes novels)," Lellenberg said. According to the introduction to the novel, "The Narrative of John Smith" is not what modern readers might call a "page turner". "There is very little in the way of plot or characterisation: the work is essentially a series of lengthy reflections on contemporary debates occupying the young Conan Doyle in his early twenties," it reads. "The Narrative is not successful fiction, but offers remarkable insight into the thinking and views of a raw young writer who would shortly create one of literature's most famous and durable characters, Sherlock Holmes." Conan Doyle himself once remarked that he would rather the story never saw the light of day, according to Lellenberg. "It's not because of the issues in there as he was never afraid to tackle controversial issues. But I think he recognised how immature the work was." Conan Doyle was in his early 20s when he wrote his first novel, although he had already had a number of short stories published in literary journals of the time. They had been published anonymously, and the doctor living in the southern English city of Portsmouth realised he would have to move into novels to establish himself as a writer. The original manuscript of "The Narrative of John Smith" was lost in the post on the way to the publisher, and Conan Doyle had to rewrite it from memory. British comedian and actor Stephen Fry said the publication of the early Conan Doyle work would add to people's understanding of the breadth of his knowledge and curiosity. "He was the first popular writer to tell the wider reading public about narcotics, the Ku Klux Klan, the mafia, the Mormons, American crime gangs, corrupt union bosses and much else besides," he wrote in a statement. "His boundless energy, enthusiasm and wide-ranging mind, not to mention the pitch-perfect, muscular and memorable prose is all on display here in a work whose publication is very, very welcome indeed." — Reuters Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
| Following the man who stole tea from China Posted: 07 Jun 2011 05:45 AM PDT  Rose spent weeks tracing Fortune's trail through China. His venture required years of toil up China's rivers by boat to places where no Westerner had gone before, overcoming illness, pirate attacks and untrustworthy associates in the quest for tea seeds and plants that could be grown in India. For much of his second journey, he dressed in Chinese clothes, a fake queue of hair down his back. "People had tried to do what he had done, people had tried to sneak it out via the treaty ports, people had tried to appropriate tea seeds and take them to India, and it ended in failure," said writer Sarah Rose, who spent weeks tracing Fortune's trail through China. "The plant hunters were the R&D men of the (British) Empire. They took raw materials and said, what can we do with this, and created an entirely new world. And he was one of the very last guys to do that." Rose's efforts resulted in a book, "For All the Tea in China," that chronicles Fortune's journeys, which finally enabled tea to be grown in India and broke China's monopoly on the beloved beverage for good. The son of a Scottish farm worker, Fortune's knowledge of plants and science came from practical experience, not higher education. His low social station meant he was only grudgingly provided with weapons by the Royal Horticultural Society, which sponsored the first of his plant-hunting journeys.
Besides this, Fortune was the first to determine that black and green tea actually came from the same plant. He also introduced many trees, shrubs and flowers to the West, including varieties of roses, tree peonies and azaleas. For Rose, who stumbled onto Fortune's story thanks to a comment from an ex-boyfriend, the years she devoted to his life, travelling in China and in the stacks of the British Library, then writing, were both joyful and frustrating. "At some points I found him very unlikable — that kind of haughty Victorian notion of the West, a superior race, and the East as an uncivilised, wild place that they could dominate," she said. "At the same time, I would have to locate him in the who he was and the world he came from, and out of that he was extraordinary. He was so full of daring — gone from the entire world that he knew for three years at a time, leaving his family behind, to explore this wild place." Though she began working mostly from Fortune's own papers — "he's not a very joyful writer" — she had exciting moments when, combing through handwritten documents in old, leather-bound books, she discovered stories behind what Fortune himself knew, rounding out the overall drama. In the end, she also came to feel that Fortune's life and experience may hold a message for modern times. "There is still a kind of espionage between China and America, there is still so much mutual suspicion," she said. "I think I might say there's a lesson that when both sides sow so much suspicion and the stakes are so high, somebody has to step down and trust or you are going to get a lot of stealing of national secrets." — Reuters Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
Though most of the delicate tea seedlings died due to shipping mishaps on his first try at sending them to India, his experiments with a special case to transport them meant that a later attempt was more successful.| You are subscribed to email updates from The Malaysian Insider :: Books To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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