bloody tales from a vast empire of characters

The mulberry empire by philip hensher (flamingo, (pounds) 17.99)

NEAR the beginning of this epic tale of empire, military disaster, love and loss, is a description of a room. An early 19th- century room, it is filled with "precisely the right amount of old furniture to be respectable; it had precisely the right amount of new objects to be fashionable". As a description of Hensher's own achievement, it couldn't be more accurate. With respectable nods to his 19th-century forefathers and a healthy mix of postmodern tricks, it would seem he has omitted nothing.

The historical novel is facing something of a dilemma. A self- conscious piece of artifice ever since John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, it embraced all the stylistic devices that postmodernism could muster. More than 30 years later, we are wearily familiar with sleights of hand, unreliable narrators and multiple time frames. We don't expect a historical novel to tell it straight - we expect, as Hensher acknowledges in his Errors And Obligations, "a pack of lies".

It is with such knowledge in mind that famous practitioners of the historical novel, such as AS Byatt, have asked lately, whither the historical novel now? Should it recreate an age of historical innocence or tell it straight once again? Or leap forward into ever more complex, ever more allusive postmodern gimmicks? Hensher is sure enough of himself to think of an answer, one that allows him to have his cake and eat it too. For him, The Mulberry Empire has just the right amount of historical fact, without forgetting that history is a mass of fictions.

The novel begins just before the disastrous 1839 British campaign in Afghanistan. Alexander Burnes, a British officer renowned for his exploits in India and Afghanistan, has befriended the Afghan Amir, who is engaged in a struggle to obtain Peshawar. His enemy, Sha Shujah-al-mulk, the former king of Afghanistan, unites with the British government to get his country back and they are brutally defeated at the Khoord-Kabul pass by the Amir's forces.

Hensher has taken one of the most bloody and most complex battles in the history of the British Empire to demonstrate the utter vincibility of a super-power by meagre, but determined, forces. Veering from London drawing rooms to military barracks on the Indian continent and Russian country houses, he demonstrates an enviable mastery of the period in a vast epic, where central characters jostle for space among minor players such as Charles Masson, the homosexual soldier raped by a brutal sergeant; the frustrated, ambitious, Stokes, a periodicals editor; and the real-life figures Macnaughton and Sale, responsible for the disastrous military campaign.

However, getting to the heart of a relationship in the midst of such noise, especially the romantic entanglement of Burnes and the feisty Bella Garraway, is difficult. When Burnes makes his first return to London from his Afghan adventures and meets the unconventional Bella at a drawing-room soiree, he is immediately attracted to her. Six weeks later he departs for India and Bella finds herself pregnant. She retires to the country with her child, shutting herself up in an ancient stately pile surrounded by books.

That this relationship has very little impact on either the narrative or the reader is partly due to the more modern elements of Hensher's novel - characters pop in and out without giving us the chance to develop a relationship with them. As a result, Bella's fate becomes a touching one, but little more than that. She is a cipher for the rebellious, atypical 19th-century heroine, a potentially brilliant character mired in a tale that repeatedly checks its credentials against 19th-century works. Wandering through her lonely home she thinks of those whom she has known through novels: "These people, who were they? They could be anyone. And yet someone had created them and thousands of readers had cared about their fate, quite as if they had been flesh and blood."

It is unfortunate, that in appropriating so many aspects of the 19th-century novel - expansiveness, commitment to realism, topicality - Hensher has failed to capture its humanity. In short, he does not make us care. It is The Mulberry Empire's weakest point among many successes.

Copyright 2002
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