Lionel Davidson Revisited

Some years ago I wrote a little about the late Lionel Davidson http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/11/goodbye-to-a-fine-author.html , an author who continues to give me great pleasure.

 

Having just re-read two of his books for perhaps the fifth or sixth time (I had been feeling a bit under the weather, and thought (rightly) that a voyage into the land of imagination would make me feel better) , I thought I’d try once more to communicate my enthusiasm for a writer who really ought to be better-known and more widely read.

 

The books concerned were ‘The Rose of Tibet’ and ‘A Long Way to Shiloh’ (published in the USA as ‘The Menorah Men’ because there are so many places in the USA called Shiloh, and it’s not about any of them) . I tend to turn to ‘The Rose of Tibet’ when I’m feeling a bit out of sorts,   because it makes normal life feel so blessed. Like all accounts of wild and dangerous encounters with extreme cold, pain and fear, it intensifies the comfort and cosiness of an armchair in a warm, softly-lit room in a peaceful and ordered land.

 

But this is not just a formulaic shilling shocker, but an astonishing work of imagination, mixed with politics, history, satire and moral commentary.  It features some of the most gruesome violence in literature, but the killing is surprisingly easy to accept, since almost any reader will regard it as just punishment for the victims. Davidson hated writing it (by his own account), and never visited the landscapes he describes so movingly and with such power. I’ve never been closer to Tibet than Bhutan, which is quite a lot lower but similar in many ways, and form what I know he got it right.

 

The book begins in a publisher’s office in London, and I’m told it’s a severe satire on the particular publisher involved, if you know who’s involved. The discovery of the manuscript on which the book will be based is very, very funny about old age and infirmity, if you can bear to laugh about such things ( I think it’s good to, myself) and the accelerating process through which the hero finds himself plucked out of normality into a world of exotic surprise is beautifully done.

 

At what point in this strange journey does it become inevitable that he will cross the high Himalayas, guided only by a hopelessly mistaken map and an inexperienced but movingly courageous Sherpa,   into Tibet and become entangled in the fate of nations? There are several moments, each beautifully described.

 

On the way he must spend many weeks in Kalimpong, a real place alluringly described (I was reminded of it, years after I had first read the book, by a sojourn in Thimphu, the tiny capital of Bhutan. Every sensation is enhanced by the thin clear mountain air, thousands of miles from normality and seemingly designed to lift the spirits. Davidson plainly loves mountains, the way they exhilarate, the way they seem to close in on you as dusk comes down, the way the really huge ones fool you into think they are clouds, until you realize that actually they are solid. The flights to Bhutan go past the Himalayas, which I described at the time as resembling a great frozen storm, and I have seen few such moving sights in all my time on earth.

 

It is in that frozen storm that the book sets and adventure as marvellous as anything Rider Haggard ever wrote about, only very definitely in the modern world . To describe it too carefully would be to spoil it, but imagine a grown-up adventure featuring secret passages, she-devils, sacred treasure, and a terrible chase across the beautiful empty lands of Southern Tibet, and you’ll get the idea. People get very badly hurt, thousands of miles from medical help. It is unsparing about that, and desperately sad about Tibet.

 

‘Shiloh’ is almost as good. Long before Indiana Jones, it casts an archaeologist as a hero in a very dangerous hunt for a scroll which will reveal the whereabouts of, well, something very old that a lot of people would like to find. The setting is Israel a few years before the 1967 war, and the old border, and the crude division of Jerusalem of the time, play a significant part in what happens. Davidson is especially good at being realistically funny without in any way losing the tension or the fear. If his heroes do brave things, they do them believably, as urban cowards would do them if they had to.  Tiny allusions to the past lives of his heroes (which you could miss very easily if reading too fast) are extraordinarily telling.  There is drinking. There is extra-marital sex (though Davidson never regards this as uncomplicated or free of moral problems, rather the reverse, but his heroes don’t necessarily shy away from it). But I can’t imagine any other thriller writer whose hero solves half his conundrum by listening to an old man’s Sabbath speculations on the Torah, and then the other half (amid a stormy night) by studying the text of a beautiful old Bible, part of the collection of an army officer marooned in a desolate oasis in the wilderness of Zin. A good map of the region makes this book even better.

 

I won’t here dwell on his first success ‘The Night of Wenceslas’ (read this if you are planning a visit to Prague) or on the curious, wistful ‘Making Good Again’, which isn’t really a  thriller at all. I’ll just note, as I think I did in the original article, that Davidson had an astonishing childhood, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants to Hull, who taught his own mother to read English, served as a submariner in the 1939 war, and then became an office-boy at the ‘Spectator’.  Would such a person now have any chance of becoming what he became? I rather doubt it. I picture him, as a child in Hull, perpetually seeking solace in books in a cramped and chilly family home in that fishy, remote city, and finding much more than solace.