Timbuctoo in Q&A with Tahir Shah

Jun 25, 2012 Paul rated it it was amazing

Timbuctoo
It must be said straight off that Tahir Shah’s new, and self published, book Timbuctoo is a triumph of design.Congratulations Rachana. With it’s gold title lettering,sumptious marbled end papers,silk bookmark and large fold out maps, it’s in the style of a 19 Century travel book,indeed, it’s very like the original Narrative of Robert Adams on which it is based.
Whilst the usual Shah energy, the ability to tell a tale, the gallery of fascinating and sometimes grotesque characters are all Timbuctoo
It must be said straight off that Tahir Shah’s new, and self published, book Timbuctoo is a triumph of design.Congratulations Rachana. With it’s gold title lettering,sumptious marbled end papers,silk bookmark and large fold out maps, it’s in the style of a 19 Century travel book,indeed, it’s very like the original Narrative of Robert Adams on which it is based.
Whilst the usual Shah energy, the ability to tell a tale, the gallery of fascinating and sometimes grotesque characters are all here this is a very different book from his previous ones. Here he has put Robert Adams, the first westerner to see Timbuctoo and live to tell the tale firmly in the forefront. Adams was found in 1815, half-starved and penniless on the streets of London.His descriptions of Timbuctoo, where he had been taken as a slave following a shipwreck, were nothing like the fantastic beliefs held in London and European society of the time. They believed Timbuctoo to be made entirely of gold and were in a desperate race between nations to reach there and claim it for their country.
The ensuing attempts to supress and discredit Adams are what holds Shah’s tale together.Adams was American and thus less than popular at that time in England.According to some reports his mother was a ‘mulatto’ and he was illiterate .Therefore what hope could he have of putting forward his story against the rich and powerful ,not to mention greedy and corrupt,powers of the day.As Shah says in the foreward,this is a tale looking at the enthusiasms and pre-occupations of the Regency era and is only very loosely based on Adams true story.He has ‘massaged facts and fictions into place,re-conjuring history’.
It is set in 1815, a few years after England lost America, fewer after the first Abolition of Slavery Act was passed but Wellington had just defeated Bonaparte at Waterloo and an extravagant,self indulgent and self absorbed Prince Regent was on the throne. The Regent was passionate in his pursuit of exotica as well as of food,wine,portraits of himself and women.Other great characters and themes are present.Byron, Beau Brummell, Lady Caroline Lamb, Joseph Banks, intriques against the throne,hangmen, showmen, slavery, excess, poverty, corruption, violence and love all make their appearance. There’s no great examination of these themes, even of Adams’ invented great love back in Hudson but it becomes clearer that there are parallels between this glittering age and the view of Africans as ‘barbarous’. In England at the time slavery was still being hotly defended by many and fortunes were still to be made from it.There were public viewings at Bedlam, public hangings, public dissection of corpses, all offered as entertainment.
What Shah has done is to capture the rambunctious Regency spirit.It was a time of huge extravagance , when appearance,absurdity,fiction and reality were all forged together in the heat of Regency profligacy and Shah has written and invented a tale to match. There’s also a hidden treasure within the book, see if you can solve it.If you do you can dig up a fabulous gilded African head, there’s one hidden on each continent.
If this book leads anyone to look at Adams’ story,slavery, the Regency period or anything else that gallops across these pages,then good for you.There’s a wealth of extra stuff on the Timbuctoo website. Otherwise, sit back, hang on and enjoy the ride.
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Jun 28, 2012 Borut rated it it was amazing

THE SINGULAR FUTURE OF THE BOOK: AN ARTEFACTUAL WORK OF ART

How else to summarize Timbuctoo, Tahir Shah’s first novel, that has just come out, but by quoting a verse from Kasidah, the long philosophical poem written by Sir Richard Burton, the great 19th century British explorer:

“We dance along Death’s icy brink, but is the dance less full of fun?”

It is definitely Tahir Shah’s most complex project, in which a traditional novel with an almost archetypal plot, new media, ‘reality show’, self-publis ...more

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