Book review: An Honourable Man

An Honourable Man

by Gillian Slovo

Virago, 341pp, £14.99

Review by Allan Massie

The death of General Gordon was dramatic and horrible. He was an imperial hero, sent to Khartoum – then in name still an Egyptian province, just as Egypt was still nominally a province of the Ottoman Empire, but in reality already a British dependency – in order to evacuate a garrison threatened by the army of the Mahdi, who had roused Islam against the infidel. Gordon’s appointment had been made with great reluctance by Gladstone’s Liberal Government, and only as a result of Press agitation. Gordon was an imperial hero and a former Governor-General of the Sudan.

He was also a religious zealot, a student of the Bible; one of his biographers, Anthony Nutting, described him as “Martyr and Misfit”. More importantly he was quite the wrong man for the task. It was soon clear that he had no intention of obeying the orders he had been given, but intended to hold Khartoum until the government was compelled to send a relief army which would then engage the Mahdi’s forces and re-conquer the Sudan. It was months before the government gave way. The relief force, commanded by General Sir Garnet Wolseley, made its slow way up the Nile, while a Camel Corps set off across the desert. It was too late. Khartoum had been taken. Gordon was dead. Gladstone was execrated, rebuked by Queen Victoria.

Gilliam Slovo has made this the subject of an intelligent and gripping novel. It is a work of the imagination playing on historical fact. As she says, she has “run a multitude of fictions, date and event changes … reshaping and reinventing history to suit my story”. Her publishers say she explores “the folly of empire”. Inasmuch as she does so – and I am not clear this was her intention – she imposes a 21st-century interpretation on a 19th-century story.

Her novel is structured in three parts: Gordon besieged in Khartoum, looking for the relief force and preparing for death; the slow, painful and laborious advance of Wolseley’s force; and events in London. The first is presented to us mostly through the eyes of a boy called Will, one of the ragged boys Gordon befriended when he was in charge of the construction of forts in the Thames estuary and whom he had insisted on taking with him. Will alternately reveres and fears the General, whose sanity he questions. The second part is seen through the eyes of Dr John Clarke, who has joined the expedition as a surgeon; and the third through his wife, Mary, left miserably and fearfully at home, and increasingly dependent on laudanum. It had been made illegal and Mary’s craving for it leads her into the lower depths of society.

Dissipation of interest in this way is always risky, readers being likely to find one part of the novel more satisfying than another. This is the case here. While it may be that Slovo was fascinated by Mary Clarke’s predicament, she fails to make it wholly convincing, and Mary herself is more tiresome than pitiable. The Khartoum passages are much better, partly because the boy Will is both convincing and likeable. If she doesn’t make the strange tormented character of Gordon wholly persuasive, it is fair to say he has always seemed a mystery to his biographers.

It is in her account of the advancing relief army, and the tensions that arise as Dr Clarke – a man with no military experience, struggles to understand and come to terms with the ethos of army life – that Slovo is triumphantly successful. Her portrayal of the physical and mental hardships, even horrors, of the march is an extraordinarily fine piece of historical imagination. There is a tremendous battle scene and rich humour, as well as practical information, in a sergeant’s instructions on how to mount a camel and how to deal with these refractory beasts. Dr Clarke discovers that while he knows more about medicine and advances in medical knowledge and surgical techniques than his superior officer, he knows a lot less about what it means to be a soldier than does the man he begins by despising.

Slovo brings the threads of her novel together in a satisfying manner. Those of her characters who survive have all come through an ordeal which in some strange manner has strengthened them. They have all learned something about who they are and how life should be lived. If General Gordon escapes her, one can say only that he has in a sense escaped everyone who has written about this Bible-obsessed heroic, but scarcely likeable, eccentric.

An Honourable Man

by Gillian Slovo

Virago, 341pp, £14.99