Competing with a ghost
Philip Glazebrook
THE TROUSER PEOPLE by Andrew Marshall
Penguin, £14.99, pp. 307. ISBN 0670892378
It is not easy to infuse the objective of a journey with sufficient romance to explain to the reader its hold on the writer's imagination. Andrew Marshall's physical objective, in this lively book about Burma, is to reach a small lake in the jungle highlands of the Wa country; the lake is a magical one. the people of its shores were until recently headhunters, the garrison which patrols that mountainous border of Burma with China are involved in the opium wars. Marshall sets out from China to walk towards the lake's surmised position with the only man willing to accompany him, a 22-year-old American who was 'completely and utterly fearless' — just like, so we respectfully infer, the modest 33-year-old Mr Marshall. Now Marshall's reason for seeking out this lake. Nawng Hkeo, is to rival and even outdo the travels of a shadowy colonial servant, George Scott, who had made many expeditions into the Wild Wa country at the turn of the 19th century but had never seen Navvng Hkeo.
Marshall describes the country vividly and succeeds in making his misty little lake sufficiently magical for the journey to have been worthwhile, although the narrative is not far from collapsing into farce when the two bold travellers find, in clearing mist, that they have walked onto the barrack square of the dreaded UWSA militia, who treat them like old friends. But it is not with his own travels or his own experiences in Burma that Marshall is in trouble, it is with his hero, George Scott, that his book falters. This dapper midget has caught Marshall's fancy, perhaps for the way he typifies the colonial servant — Marshall, like so many of his generation, seems to veer between ritualised derision for British imperialism and surprise at the appeal of many of the men who put imperialism into practice. But Scott resists all Marshall's efforts to draw him out and display him as an interesting man. His obstinate taciturnity extends from his official journals to blight his private diaries also. When he was to marry his first wife, a woman as intrepid as himself, she does not rate a single mention in his diary until his wedding day. A biographer cannot make much of a man who concedes even to himself such poor scraps of his humanity. Having attended the 1905 Delhi durbar on an elephant in the train of the paramount Wa chief, Scott wrote in his diary for that resplendent day, 'Altogether, I think Burma scored today.'
Perhaps the second-eleven feeling I got from Scott is in part due to the action taking place in Burma, a 'blind alley' then as now, a country and a regime outside the rest of the world's history. Scott spent his career buried in Burma where a worldwide reputation was not to be made. Stories there were of his daring and his nerve, of how he made a party of prowling headhunters laugh so long and loud that they forgot their business, but it is the man himself, the tiny tough, who should be at the heart of this book. Instead there is a small, hollow space. Andrew Marshall is at his best when he describes his own travels, the baffling Scott forgotten.
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