How good is this book? Sadly, not as good as it might have been. Too many situations are left unresolved; too many characters crop up too late in the action; and, most surprising in the work of a previously published novelist, there is far too much amateurish "telling," and precious little vital "showing."
Literary shortcomings here consist of an excess of passivity, a tendency to begin sentences with "It", and a narrative voice that is pretty much generic Brit-Lit; nowhere in the book does the writing call out, "This, this, is Philip Hensher -- no one but he could have written this book." Hensher's background in journalism insures his indefatigability, but inflicts serious harm upon his prose style. Characters approach three-dimensionality but, in almost every case, fall short of complete fleshiness (the exception being one Masson, a British Army deserter with a taste for boys and other beautiful objects). A slew of Russian characters appear and disappear, leaving not so much as a ripple on the surface. Murders happen, dogs are shot, atrocities alleged, yet repercussions are in short supply or simply nonexistent. One thinks of slightly above-average TV fare -- a second-tier PBS costume drama, for example -- in which sense counts for less than appearances.
Much of "Mulberry" is praiseworthy -- Hensher's evocation of the landscape, for example, his occasional comic turns among the Governor General's party, his portrayal of a stoic unwed mother in the Gloucestershire gloom -- yet overall the novel projects a plodding quality, a sense of work to be got through, rather than a delight to be savored by the mind and senses. Hensher's pace is leisurely and diffident, hardly a virtue in a historical novel, with exciting events tending to take place off-camera. Intoning, in leaden fake-Islamic tones, ÒAnd the snow was crimson with blood,Ó is no substitute for the actual battle that has been looming for four hundred and forty pages. The reader may well feel justifiable frustration.
If you are interested in the "Great Game," the 19th century power struggle over Afghanistan between Russia and Great Britain, this novel will provide you with a great deal of information; on the other hand, since the author assures us in his Afterword that we have just read "a pack of lies," you will probably learn more from a good history. If you want to read an incandescent novel, a superb work of the imagination, "The Mulberry Empire" most emphatically should not be your first choice.

Mulberry Empire concerns itself with the events leading up to the British occupation of Kabul and its aftermath. Hesher is more interested in his characters than in the actual events. While often corresponding to real people, the characters are fully imagined, and, according to an afterward, Hesher also takes great liberties with the actual events. A particularly memorable character is the Afghan Amir. Conversely, Hesher decides to have a Russian chapter,(Russia sent an envoy to win Afghan favor), sort of a condensed "Father and Sons", which almost reads as an unintentional satire on Russian novels. There is social commentary on English aristocratic society and its attitudes toward the colonies, which is fun, if not very original. The writing is often eloquent, sometimes overdone. Hesher is particularly good with scenes and dialog. I liked the book, but when I read the afterword, and discovered I was learning much less about Afghan/English history than I had thought, it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Ambitious and absorbing, British author Hensher's tale of the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839 encompasses London "Seasons" and glittering Eastern palaces, dusty Kabul streets and English country estates. It takes place over ten years and, while centering on British explorer Alexander Burnes, shifts points of view among the London upper crust, a Russian emissary/adventurer, a supercilious English journalist, several merchants, Afghanistan's Amir, a homosexual British deserter, various misguided British officers, a brief appearance by a modern-day archaeologist coming upon a field of unburied bones, and more.

Far from being confusing, this plethora of views grounds the novel in its time; a world which not only appears to be, but is, very different to Dost Mohammed, the Amir of Kabul, than it is to the serious and fashionable Bella Garraway, falling in love with Burnes at the height of his London Season, or to Burnes' younger brother on his first passage to India or to a nervous, charismatic Russian with a shadowy past. It's a story full of romance and treachery, politics and intrigue, merchant caravans, intrigue, imperialism and arrogance and war.

The narrative moves at a leisurely pace, opening in Kabul with Burnes, passing his days as a virtual prisoner, awaiting an audience with the Amir Dost Mohammed. He is Britain's eyes and ears - the British are wondering whether the Amir should be replaced by an Afghan leader less hostile to their Indian allies. Impressed by the spare order of the Amir's court, the Afghan leader's canny questions and the welter of strange sensations and smells of Kabul, Burnes writes a book on his Eastern adventures and becomes the toast of London. He wins Bella's heart, but she retires to the country with a secret of her own as he travels East again, already replaced by the next London sensation.

Worried by Russian incursions and influence, the British Governor General moves a massive army, complete with officers' wives, baggage and lapdogs, from the Punjab to Afghanistan. Meanwhile a digression to the Crimea introduces Vitkevich, a brilliant and mysterious Russian soldier, whose concern with serfs and land improvements becomes sidetracked by a trip to Afghanistan where he will share Christmas dinner with Burnes.

And back to the British army for domestic difficulties, social wrangling, desert hunting games and inept diplomacy. Eventually the British reach their goal and settle outside the gates of Kabul to enjoy their victory, blind to the end. The cultural misunderstandings, born of ignorance as well as arrogance, are sympathetically developed, and suggest chilling echoes for the present day.

Hensher's writing is rich and unhurried. He envelops the reader in the feel of a place - it's smells and weather, architecture, clothing and people. Though the characters are many they are well developed. Almost all remain enigmas to some extent, but that is entirely intentional. The narrative draws the reader deep into the subtleties of culture and aggression. Beautifully organized and realized, this epic tale should win Hensher a wide audience.

of the sort that cannot be written nowadays. (The modern equivalent would be seven times as long and would be a study in grey, as exciting as a slab of concrete.) Admittedly the book is racist. No, on second thought, "racist" is not at all the word. Buchan clearly thinks British culture is superior to other culture; but that's the sort of thing it's easy to live with in a book - and if he shows a lack of understanding of other cultures, well, a book of this kind needs villains, and it doesn't matter (for our purposes) if the villains never really existed. As for his view of Islam ... well, a writer is surely allowed to show contempt for doctrines, if not people; and, after all, he never does so in order to sell us a religion of his own. Despite the absurd things Hannay says he is clearly a man of intelligence - as is the author. This book is my introduction to both Hannay and Buchan. I hope to encounter them both again.

This story is a strange one if you do not understand the world as it was during the confusing times of World War One. However, if you are reading this book simply for enjoyment, you picked a good one. It is a little rascist, but if only you consider the time it was written and the beliefs then, I don't think you can consider it a bad book. It is not proper to judge a book written in the early twentieth century by our current standards of political correctness. It is simply a good indicator of past views of various people. If you don't mind the little rascism this book has and remember that it was written when that was perfectly normal, you should enjoy it immensely.

This book had all of the elements of a good spy novel--danger, exotic locations, and neat plot twists. It is about a young mining engineer's espionage adventures during World War I. The book was a real page-turner and I couldn't put it down. However, some of the political information confused me. If you're a World War I buff you might understand some of the technical stuff, though. This book also continues the adventures of one of my favorite characters, Richard Hannay, who first appeared in The Thirty-Nine Steps. He is an extremely likable character and this book is a great one if you like espionage novels and adventure stories. P.S. Read it and you'll see why this would make a great movie.

Was there any American more European than Henry James? "The Ambassadors" begins in England and takes place mostly in Paris, and even though most of its characters are American, it is only referentially concerned with its author's native country. At the same time, the novel is not about Americans frivolously sowing their wild oats in exotic ancestral lands, but rather how they use their new settings to break away from restrictive American traditions and conventions and redefine their values and standards of living.

The main character is a late-middle-aged widower named Lambert Strether who edits a local periodical in the town of Woollett, Massachussetts, and is a sort of factotum for a wealthy industrialist's widow named Mrs. Newsome, a woman he may possibly marry. Strether's latest assignment from Mrs. Newsome is to go to Paris to convince her son, Chad, to give up what she assumes is a hedonistic lifestyle and return to Woollett to marry a proper, respectable young lady, his brother-in-law's sister to be specific. There is a greater ulterior motive, too -- the prosperity of the family business relies on Chad's presence.

In Paris, Strether finds that Chad has surrounded himself with a more stimulating group of friends, including a mousy aspiring painter named John Little Bilham, and that he is in love with an older, married woman named Madame de Vionnet. Providing companionship and counsel to Strether in Paris are his old friend, a retired businessman named Waymarsh, and a woman he met in England, named Maria Gostrey, who happens to be an old schoolmate of the Madame's. When it appears that Strether is failing in his mission to influence Chad, Mrs. Newsome dispatches her daughter and son-in-law, Jim and Sarah (Newsome) Pocock, and Jim's marriageable sister Mamie, to Paris to apply pressure. Ultimately, Strether, realizing that he's blown his chances with Mrs. Newsome and that Chad has the right idea anyway, finds himself enjoying the carefree life in Paris, which has liberated him from his lonely, stifling existence in Woollett.

Not having cared much for James's previous work "The Wings of the Dove," I felt something click with "The Ambassadors." Maybe it's because I found the story a little more absorbing and could empathize with Strether; maybe it's because my reading skills are maturing and I'm learning to appreciate James's dense, oblique prose style. I realize now that, for all the inherent difficulty in his writing, literature took a giant step forward with Henry James; if the Novel is, as he claimed, "the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms," it takes a writer like James to show us how.

Reading "The Ambassadors," I was awed by the subtletly of emotion and social gesture James was able to describe. Clearly here was a crafted that had been years in the honing, and I appreciate the book's liberation from the plot-heavy mechanics of earlier books like "The Portrait of a Lady" and "The American." Everything is only subtly insinuated; whole lives can hinge upon half-meant gestures or long-buried social prejudices. In this way, the book has some of the wistful tone of "The Age of Innocence," but more depth if less elegant prose.

The prose is the thing -- James was dictating by this time (how on Earth does one dictate a novel?), and it shows. His chewy ruminations and meandering, endlessly parenthetical sentences are hard to digest. I think James went too far in his late style, and "The Ambassadors" might have benefited from a sterner editor. Still, this is an important book, absolutely worth the read.

James' novel affected me in part because I also fell in love with Paris, though not with a Parisian. The sinuous, difficult prose provides the perfect vehicle for the adventures of aging Lambert Strether as he goes to Paris to try to recover a New England son who will not return to his domineering mother and take a role in the family business--manufacturing an article that is never named. In Europe he meets a degree of sophistication he had never known but also a jungle of moral ambivalences. If I gave the novel only four stars, it is not because of the difficult prose, which I sometimes cursed, but because the crucial instance of moral turpitude which he describes seems practically banal now. I once bundled up all my Henry James books in a fit of pique and was on the way to taking them to a library book sale, but thought better of it. And it was a better thought.

The blurb looked interesting. The author was picked as one of Granta's Best British Novelists and the book won the Somerset Maugham Book Award. So, it should have been more than an even bet that I was on to a winner. Sadly not.

"Kitchen Venom" makes a pretty dreadful read. Philip Hensher offers a particularly cynical and hateful perspective of English parliamentary life. If he is to be believed, it's one great big circus. Nobody does anything of value. The scribes sit around all day gossiping, swapping tales and visiting rent boys in the afternoons. The novel's narrative tone is also deliberately cold and distancing, as if the creatures Hensher writes about aren't worthy of being named. Those he deems worthy of specific identity aren't much better. They're all emotionally deformed. Is John's hump some kind of metaphor ? I wonder. Anyway, John, his daughters Jane and Francesca and fellow clerks Henry and Louis are all hideously repressed. Their external lives are so meaningless they have to invent and act out their fantasies to remind themselves they're alive. There's not a single dialogue between any of these main characters that sounds remotely human or real. Sometimes, mid-chapter, you even get visited by a mysterious first person narrative voice who remains unmasked. Pretentious rubbish.

If there's one single stunt Hensher pulls that works, it's the murder scene. The timing of it is so unexpected it leaves the reader in shock. But don't miss the significance of this scene. There's no room in Hensher's world for love and tenderness, only secrecy and lies, so when love rears its head and threatens to blow his cover, there can only be one outcome. Violence and death from a permanently clenched fist.

I found much to dislike in "Kitchen Venom". It's smug, unpleasant and pretentious and I couldn't wait for it to end. Sorry, but I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone.