The Mulberry Empire - Softcover

Hensher, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007112270 ISBN 13: 9780007112272

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2003

Synopsis

The bestselling novel from the Man Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Northern Clemency and King of the Badgers.

‘The Mulberry Empire’ recounts an episode in the Great Game in central Asia – the courtship, betrayal and invasion of Afghanistan in the 1830s by the emissaries of Her Majesty’s Empire, which is followed by the bloody and summary expulsion of the British from Kabul following an Afghani insurrection.

At its heart the encounter between West and East, as embodied in the likeable, complex relationship between Alexander Burnes, leader of the initial British expeditionary party, and the wily, cultured Afghani ruler, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan.

For those who enjoyed William Dalrymple’s ‘Return of a King’, ‘The Mulberry Empire’ is a must-read.

About this title

Review:

Award-winning novelist Philip Hensher announces a radical departure from his earlier books with The Mulberry Empire, an extraordinarily ambitious, sprawling historical epic that deals with the route of the British from Afghanistan in the late 1830s. Hensher has established a reputation as a waspish commentator on contemporary English and European life in previous novels like Pleasured, but in The Mulberry Empire he draws on an earlier tradition of Kipling, Trollope and Conrad to recreate the moment at which the early 19th century eyed Afghanistan as an addition to its growing Asian Empire.

The novel begins in Kabul with the arrival of Burnes, an ambitious young Scot, eager to open up the country to the English. News of his arrival soon reaches the Amir, for whom "the arrival of the new European in town was like the dropping of a rock into the opaque pool of water which was the city, ruffling the surface immediately in ordinary and predictable ways, but disturbing the substance and mass beneath in a manner which could not be seen, or predicted". Hensher then weaves his story between Burnes' return to London, his romance with the daughter of an opium-addicted hero of Trafalgar, the Amir's court, encounters with Carlyle and Palmerston, and the bloody "Great Game" of imperial politics that catapults the novel into the murderous events with which its culminates. Hensher's novel takes on added significance following the events of September 11, but ultimately he is unable to control the vastness of his historical canvas. At times the book unwittingly reads like a parody of the purple colonial prose of Rider Haggard, and many of its descriptions of Afghanistan and its people are painfully exotic and orientalist. Hensher should be applauded for extending his novelist range, but not for the results. --Jerry Brotton

Review:

‘Prepare to be dazzled ... A really terrific read’ Daily Telegraph

‘There is pleasure here, in passion and in absurdity, in landscape and in conversation, in costume and in food. There is pleasure, above all, in writing. A delightful entertainment, a timely social and political commentary, and a highly literary and ambitious novel.’ Ahdaf Soueif, Guardian

‘Outstanding...Hensher reveals the significance of the small moment, of great figures seen in close-up, and of a subtle, sensuous intimacy with the fabric of these long-gone lives. The effect is exhilarating.’ Helen Dunmore, The Times

‘A huge, perhaps unique achievement...deeply human, gorgeous, glittering and never dull.’ Murrough O’Brien, Independent on Sunday

‘Exuberant, overflowing with life, highly-coloured, entrancing: a novel to lose yourself in...Nabokov said that the novelist must be storyteller, teacher, and enchanter. In this novel Hensher is triumphantly all three.’ Allan Massie, Scotsman

‘Loaded with exotic local detail, from London to Calcutta, St Petersburg to Kabul...Irresistible.’ Daily Mail

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0007112270
• ISBN 13: 9780007112272
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 546