Novels that marry historical fiction with sweeping historical romance seem never to go entirely out of fashion. Its mix of high emotion, graphic violence, and 19th century colonial exploits makes Beyond All Frontiers by Elizabeth Darrell (also known as Emma Drummond, Edna Dawes, Eva Dane) a juicy example. Originally conceived before the late 1970s US and Soviet interventions in Afghanistan but published at the height of the Soviet occupation in 1983 (author’s introduction), one might expect super-power conflicts to colour attitudes in Beyond All Frontiers. Instead, historical Russian concerns get short but sympathetic shrift as Darrell gives her hero a Russo-English parentage and focuses on the consequences of British military aggression in the region. Lessening its effectiveness, however, history in Beyond All Frontiers is one-sided, relying so overwhelmingly on Western primary sources that the native populations are reduced to cartoonish bit players. In consequence, although the external plot poses as a critique of blundering imperialism, the execution portrays Afghans and Indians as menacing shadow forces whose cruelty and unpredictability are impervious to civilized Western codes. Despite the emphasis on its sober historical trappings, Beyond All Frontiers works best as a romantic melodrama.
1837. After being brought up by a spinster aunt in England, seventeen-year old Charlotte Scott cannot wait to rejoin her longed-for family in the northern territories of India. Sadly, on arrival she finds her parents as disenchanted with her as she is with them. Society on the remote East India Company station is ruled by mores and strictures she does not understand, and her coming-out is a disaster. Even her beloved brother, Tom, seems ashamed. While his best friend, Lieutenant Richard Lingarde of the Royal Engineers expresses interest in the mind behind her mousy exterior, Charlotte only has eyes for the dashing, daunting Major Colley Duprés.
As Charlotte’s personal life falls apart, the British invade Afghanistan and occupy Kabul. There, the biggest test of her life awaits Charlotte. But just as happiness beckons, a fateful event alters British fortunes. And after a march of terror through the snowy mountain passes between Kabul and Jalalabad nothing will ever be the same for Charlotte or anyone she ever held dear.
The energy in Beyond All Frontiers is infectious, and I started out highly entertained by the colourful and dramatic storytelling. While the omniscient narrator has a tendency to tell rather than show political and military developments, interspersing page-long explanatory summaries here and there, the plot’s concentration on points of high drama ensures the action moves swiftly forward. Historical fiction lovers may feel a shiver as they vicariously live through the vividly depicted trials and tribulations of the British contingent in a particularly bloody chapter of colonial history. And romance readers able to digest a hero whose behaviour today would be considered non-politically correct receive their fill, too, for although the ending is not of the triumphant type, the Happily Ever After is still piquant in an unpredictable way; Beyond All Frontiers compares well with the much meatier historical romances popular in the 1980s.
However, if like me you also expect some insight into Afghanistan and its people or at the very least a creditable look at shared history in a novel that centres on the First Anglo-Afghan War, the uppermost response may become frustration and a bad taste in the mouth. I explain why further down in this post.
First I would like to discuss the characters, because they are the reason I stayed with Beyond All Frontiers despite my problems with specific aspects of the story. Darrell creates protagonists who possess wonderful vitality and blaze off the page. Deeply flawed, they also evolve in interesting ways, and one or two of the characters who start out least likeable are eventually revealed to have more to their personalities than is evident at first. Thus Felicia Scott, Charlotte’s mother, grew into the character who most intrigued me and for whom I ended up feeling perhaps the most sympathy. I would have liked to see more of her, preferably through other eyes than Charlotte’s. Colley, too, is an ambiguous character who I felt needed more independent “on-screen” time to be fully explained and explored.
Charlotte is a heroine I did not always like but also a dynamic character with lots of personality. When she is introduced to the story, she is seventeen years old and full of illusions. Awkward and insecure, she is made endearingly real through her yearning to be loved and approved and her gauche attempts to fit in and impress. Her dramatic reaction when everything goes horribly wrong seemed quite in tune with her age, naivety, and sense of being unwanted – “a parcel”. In these early parts of the book I found the author’s portrayal of her honest and poignant and the outcome of her journey seemed refreshingly unpredictable. Charlotte grows and develops continuously throughout the six years spanned by the novel and so, because she is never a bland or static character, retained my interest even when she exasperated me. Her self-centredness and unforgiving nature seemed understandable in an immature girl trying so hard to earn affection or at least admiration and yet being made to feel a failure. But I had to take the narrator’s enthusiastic championship of her intelligence with a humorous dose of salt, despite being told that “her quick intelligence enabl[ed] her to follow the extremely complicated diplomatic nuances that were making nations nervy and suspicious of each other”.
Later on, after hard life lessons cause Charlotte to mature and to reform her attitude to the people around her, that self-centredness I mentioned develops into a self-righteousness that gradually began to erode my appreciation for her. The final straw was when she – far from a saint herself, often seeming affronted when people don’t feel sorry enough for her – exhorts her brother to take “his belt to his wife”, whom she considers “selfish” and “spoilt” (p. 443 in my edition, Severn House hardcover, 2002). In the end, to me, her redeeming feature was her capability to acknowledge her mistakes and pick herself up and humbly try again.
The narrator often seems under the impression that Charlotte and Richard Lingarde are the only competent people in India or Afghanistan. In subjects ranging from diplomacy to medicine, these two correct and instruct friends, colleagues, and professionals. But Richard seems cursed like Cassandra to have his warnings and predictions disbelieved, always powerless to prevent catastrophe. Also like Cassandra, although the circumstances are different, he is driven into (temporary) madness. Unfortunately, he behaved too much like a self-imposed martyr for me to find his suffering tragic or affecting. For more than a year, he drinks himself into stupor, shoots anything that moves, plans revenge “on everyone he could think of”, and calls his wife a slut and a selfish, heartless creature. Pot, meet kettle. His orgy in destructive self-pity makes the original cause for these excesses pale by comparison. It also compounded my unease about my and the narrator’s divergent opinions about what constitutes justifiable grounds for anger/punishment (a childhood incident involving a whip and a gypsy, p. 61).
Another aspect that drew nervous reactions from me was the language of sexual domination. On one side, Charlotte is afraid of marriage, keenly aware that marriage turns a woman into her husband’s legal possession, thus changing the balance of any prior friendship. On the other, she longs for sexual mastery by the man she loves. At one point she justifies her “overriding desire to surrender” to temptation by seemingly taking the attitude that marital infidelities are the norm rather than the exception in the society of which she is part, and reasoning that women are “weak creatures” who find it nearly impossible to resist other men’s attentions when deprived of their own husbands: “she would be a willing victim” and “It had probably been merely what all the other women had felt”. When around the same time the narrator describes as “indecorous” the women who (unlike Charlotte), on a long, arduous journey, are cooling their bare feet in a stream, I muttered a long litany that included several repetitions of the word “hypocritical”. As for the man who loves her, he wants “a demanding wanton”, “a mistress as well as a wife, a submissive tormentor, a girl to whom he could be a passionate master besides a tender guardian [...] who could make him conqueror rather than mentor.” See what I mean about 80s-style romance?
The emphasis the story places on physical beauty and attraction took me aback. Looks may have been of great significance for a woman whose main career would be an advantageous marriage, but the implications in the story go well beyond historical realities. In a scene that discusses Tom Scott’s little son, for example, Tom is put off by the boy’s looks and sighingly implies that he would be more inclined to be affectionate toward his son if the boy were as attractive as another character’s toddler child. That parent drops a few consoling words about children improving with age, but his internal thoughts indicate satisfaction at having had a child who has been beautiful since birth. Even more remarkably, each and every time we encounter them we are given long and detailed descriptions of the two women acknowledged to be the most beautiful in society. Countless paragraphs are devoted to making comparisons between them, and to the excitement the opportunity to compare them side by side engenders among the characters (“at last, the matter would be settled”). Yet when one of them, Felicia Scott, who is “nearing forty” and retains “the shape of a girl”, is seen by Charlotte in the privacy of the former’s bedroom, without makeup and dressed in a lacy nightgown, the tearing down of beauty's façade does not show Felicia as human but laughable: “the effect was almost vulgar; the lace confection she wore gave a touch of the bizarre to a woman desperately holding on to her youth [...] Her beautiful mama did not exist”. And when a character who has been determined to reject his child sees that child for the first time, he forgets his resolutions and takes the toddler to his heart because “All this time he had pictured a small monster of some kind – a grotesque female picture of [...], or a miniature of that blotched-faced travesty [...] But Anna was beautiful, entrancing”. Great care is also taken to describe Colley's clothing every time he appears on the scene. And, as my final example, in one of several instances of clunky exposition through dialogue (these disappear later in the book) Lady Lingarde remarks to her son, Richard: “You know that I have always been absurdly and outrageously fond of you. But despite a mother’s prejudice, no female has ever denied you are irresistibly attractive, destined for brilliance, and virile to the point of a woman’s desperation.”
How thrilled I would have been if the minute observations about dress had been extended to the physical setting, too. Instead, there is no texture to the Afghan and Indian landscapes. One reads about rivers, mountainous terrain, icy snows, busy bazaars, and provincial towns, but descriptions tend to create only generic pictures: “Spring came. The snows melted to swell rivers that rushed down the mountains into the valley. It grew lush and beautiful once more, with blossoms on the fruit trees scenting the air that was clear and pure.” I cannot recall a single instance of a plant or wild animal being identified by name, but rarely is the colour of a gown omitted.
This brings me back to my early comment about the novel’s rendering of Afghanistan.
At first glance, it may seem an outrageous claim about a book that painstakingly dedicates so much space and effort to detailing the First Anglo-Afghan War that there is hardly anything to be learned in it about Afghanistan or its people (or indeed India, for all that a couple of hundred pages take place there, too).
But what we are shown is really only British policies and attitudes and the pleasures and hardships of British soldiers and civilians. Not one Afghan with a speaking role makes more than a fleeting appearance in the book. Of the ones we meet, none are shown in a light that is positive, admirable, virtuous, or independent. The only Indian character lives entirely at the mercy of a British character. Once that relationship becomes an impossibility, it signals the character’s exit.
Every Afghan action seems merely a reaction to something done or said by a British character or authority, and Afghan motivations are left to be enigmas unless one accepts British interpretations of them. For example, the surrender of Dost Mohammad Khan, a key historical personage frequently referred to in the book although he appears in the story only indirectly, comes out of the blue. It is fine for the protagonists and the British civil and military authorities to be stunned by this unexpected turn of events, but Dost Mohammad’s reasons for the surrender also remain entirely unexplained to the reader. The omission is symptomatic of the novel’s treatment of everything and anything Afghan.
It is true that none of this is atypical of popular fiction stories that place the principal protagonists in a country not their own and weave the plots around tensions arising from this situation. Moreover, unabashed popular fiction that makes no excuses for making entertainment its sole reason for existing is something I regularly read and enjoy. When, however, a novel purports to present a serious and measured interpretation or explanation of something, it is asking to be judged not merely on what it is (entertainment/art) but on what it says (messages).
And that is where Beyond All Frontiers took a nosedive. I find it astounding that the story was written thirty years or more after WWII. Quite apart from the “Rule Britannia” opinions of its nineteenth-century British characters, the blinkered attitude exuded by the narrative itself is disconcertingly at odds with both the tone and amount of research poured into the historical setting. Pointedly phrased, the history in Beyond All Frontiers has a human, three-dimensional face: British; and an inhuman, one-dimensional: brown.
Afghans, Sikhs, Persians, and the various tribal groups of Central Asia take on uniform, crude and brutal traits without ethnic or national distinguishers. The sepoys who swell British Army ranks receive only slightly less hysterical treatment. Consider the descriptions applied: “barbaric cutthroats”, “rabble of [...] brutes” (40); “cruel, arrogant [facial] features”, “fanatical shrieks” (57); “Persians were quite as viciously barbaric as Indians” (62); “greedy” (89); “treacherous”, “murderous and bloody” (90); “lazy” (93); “cruel faces” (105); “rabble of Persians” (107); “viciously cruel and tyrannical” (164); “[an army’s ceremonial parade is] ‘exciting, if one cares for the wail of native bands and the smell of elephants’” (167); “maniacal fighters”, “supreme insolence” (170); “these people did not hesitate to mutilate and torture others in ways that made an Englishman sick with revulsion” (197); “treacherous villains” (210); armed forces are “ragged” (256); “cruel downward tug of [a] fleshy mouth”, “a man of few virtues” (304); “a personality verging on insanity” (386); “‘at a whim, can abandon fine feelings and indulge in cruel practices that defy all pretence of sanity’” (394); “a tide of petrified brown faces that saw nothing, heard nothing but the evidence of their own panic” (419); tell “cruel lies” (440); “cruel in the extreme” (446); “enjoying the discomfort of the infidel women” (446).
“Eastern delights and sensuality” become titillating subjects that are marvelled at or scorned without any qualms about stereotyping. “The Sikh leader’s own erotic interest in females – to the extent of having a corps of mounted amazons to perform for his pleasure – was famed over India, yet the haughty covered women of the British who had their menfolk bowing before them, earned his great admiration. It was as big a mystery as the scarlet jacket!” (165); “her hands were moving over his body in ways that only women of the East understood” (230); (my italics) “The ladies of Kabul found the pale-skinned gentlemen in scarlet coats quite as beautiful as their conquerors found them and, the Afghan men being overwhelmingly homosexual, seized every opportunity to enjoy the delightful bounty while it lasted” (220); (my italics) “was strongly built and handsome in the aggressive and somewhat dissipated manner of his race. The features were bold and striking, but already showed signs of cruelty, self-indulgence, and sensualism” (307).
Warning: plot spoiler
In the above context of sex and race, here is an episode that particularly disturbed me. In consequence of the degradations he perceives he endured at the hands of a captor, a principal character’s longtime mistress is rejected in the blink of an eye. Throughout the story it has been stressed how crucial she has been to his sanity and well-being, but his experience in captivity suddenly causes him to feel “an involuntary revulsion so strong that he had to stand away from her”. Why? The mistress and the captor are not known to each other or related in any way. Only one reason is directly stated: “He stood staring at her beautiful face, her slender perfection of body, her miniature dusky feet that had aroused him sexually on so many nights, and saw only an echo of [the captor] in her dark eyes and brown skin” (351). Four pages later, the same day, he notices that a British female protagonist’s skin is “beautifully pale in colour” (355) and admires her face which “contained no hint of Eastern passion, no expression of sadistic pleasure, no promise of erotic mystery”. Note that – in addition to the automatic parallel drawn between perversion, eastern peoples, and sex – until the time he summarily dismisses his mistress, he has expressly dwelled on the fact that he has never experienced anything from her but kindness, devotion, and soothing pleasure.
End of plot spoiler
Like Patricia Maxwell/Jennifer Blake with Bride Of A Stranger, Darrell too fails to draw any distinction between her character’s opinions and the general narrative. The particular appeal of light skin colour to Western protagonists may be an accurate reflection of 19th-century attitudes, but paired with the numerous negative associations with “brown skin” and a complete absence of challenging commentary in a book released in 1983, I felt plunged into The Twilight Zone.
Any compliments about regional people are derogatory: “Despite his severe rule, he was as just as any sovereign one finds in this part of the world” (276). At other times, even that effort is dropped: “ [he] followed the trend of eastern rulers by living surrounded by opulence whilst his subjects starved in squalor.” (305).
A look at how British characters, in their turn, are represented reveals an interesting paradox. Keep in mind that Beyond All Frontiers conscientiously portrays how the British made a bungle of the situation in Afghanistan, that its hero is the sharpest critic of the war, and that it includes a scene depicting torture of prisoners by a British character. Here are some descriptions of British individuals and groups: “noble” (62); “inexhaustible patience and moral courage” (105); “had been forced into absolute invasion” (127); “courageous tenacity” (135); “chivalry”, “marched out bravely” (137); a Sikh army trained by Europeans is “therefore, quite disciplined” (164); “laying down his life for his country”, “gallantry in the face of the enemy”, “brave nonchalance”(175); “mesmerizing the simple natives into slavering submission” (101); “helpless captive of cruel sadistic tribesmen” (62); when the British ice-skate for pleasure, “the watching Afghans gazed with awe upon such wondrous and magical skill” (220); “fighting now with gritty determination under leadership inspired by outrage and true British wrath over ungentlemanly practices” (431); “retained an air of command which, despite the fact that he was a prisoner in great danger of his life, greatly impressed the Afghans” (440); “The garrison had orders to remain until Shah Soojah effectively ruled his people, and this the Amir was making no attempt to do [...] With their characteristic calmness, the British simply heaved a sigh and resigned themselves to doing their duty for a little longer” (290). “‘They [the Afghans] are barbarians. We are Christians’” (260).
What did Elizabeth Darrell intend to say with Beyond All Frontiers? ‘We bungled, but did it nobly; “they” sort of won, but foully’? ‘Don’t mess with people you don’t understand’? Did she truly mean to express some of the other messages I have taken away from the story? I suspect not. Or rather, I hope not. I am assuming her concern was not with articulating the point of view of the Afghans, but to shed light on a monumental but overlooked episode in history as experienced by the British. And indeed, the story successfully conveys how the British perceived the unfolding events. In taking this approach, however, the author also chose to become a mouthpiece, and that causes a host of moral and ethical tangles. Any distinction between views held by a particular character and those of the omniscient narrator are blurred by the absence of contextual commentary, by a lack of characters or events or situations that challenge or analyse or demolish prejudice and discriminatory messages. A partisan view of history is one thing; demonising and vilifying quite another.
Thank you to Misfit of At Home With A Good Book And The Cat for consistently finding and blogging about buried historical fiction treasures. While this one fizzled for me, many others have become keepers.
This is my first entry in the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.
