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The Mulberry Empire [Paperback]

Philip Hensher
3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 544 pages
  • Publisher: Fourth Estate; (Reissue) edition (29 Mar 2012)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0007112270
  • ISBN-13: 978-0007112272
  • Product Dimensions: 19 x 12.7 x 3.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 97,167 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Philip Hensher
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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk 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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Daily Mail

‘Loaded with exotic local detail, from London to Calcutta, St Petersburg to Kabul... Irresistible.' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I'm surprised by a previous reviewers suggestion that this isn't an evocative book - I really disagree. Hensher conveys a complex mixture of character, history, politics, strategy and place very effectively. Yes it is a long book, yes it is detailed, but it is far from pompous or lecturing - if anything I would say it was touching and moving. The different narrative strands also manage to coexist without confusion. Normally I am quite put off by such a fractured narrative and wish the novelist could return me to whichever sub plot has most engaged me, but not here. I felt happy to follow where Hensher led.

My main other reaction to The Mulberry Empire was one of embarassment that I do not know more of Afghanistan and its history. Something I feel provoked to correct - but I was very convinced by Hensher's take on it. It reminded me of my embarassment as a student when I started quoting events from I Claudius in a seminar as historical fact, because I had so accepted Graves' interrpretation that I'd forgotten they were from a novel. So, knowing no better, I believed what Hensher has written and accepted his analysis completely. It also makes a very chastening read as America and Britain play out their modern imperial agendas in Iraq. Will the world ever change?

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24 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Leisured 14 May 2002
Format:Hardcover
There is nothing like a stately, well-crafted novel that creates a populous world entirely its own, that simultaneously pulls you up sharp and drags you along willingly. And contrary to the pay-off you were expecting, this *is* such a novel. But I didn't love it as much as that suggests.

Nobody can accuse Philip Hensher of lacking in ambition or being insufficiently protean: indeed with his books progressing further and further away geographically and chronologically - from contemporary London ("Kitchen Venom"), to Cold War-era Berlin ("Pleasured") and now 19th Century Afghanistan with "The Mulberry Empire" - we might be forgiven for expecting that his next book will be Jim Crace's "Quarantine." ("Pleasured," incidentally, is a superb book, and contains easily the most brilliant opening chapters of any novel of the 90s, an attribute often wrongly accredited to Ian McEwan's "Enduring Love.")

But even though Hensher says here on Amazon that the subject chose him rather than he choosing it, it's clear in the reading that he was also making a forced effort, spurred on apparently by A.S. Byatt, simply to write a big important book. His publishers consider it "an earthquake, a carnival, an awe-inspiring achievement." But they would say that, wouldn't they?

The good things about "The Mulberry Empire" are indeed numerous: it is beautifully written with not a word out of place; it has an air of diligent research and truth worn lightly; it excels in its portrayal not only of London (the scene in Hatter's Society permitting a rare and welcome outlet for Hensher's wit) but of Afghanistan's lands and cities; and it is a pleasurable read overall.

But the whole does not seem greater than the sum of its parts. In particular I felt let down by Hensher's inability to illustrate what he considered one of his primary interests in writing the novel: that is, "the calm expansiveness of the Islamic mind." In the circumstances of the last year which make Afghanistan of so much contemporary interest, one would have thought this was a point well worth establishing. But it fails. Although the Afghan ruler at the start of the novel, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, is both calm and expansive and also a good man, by virtue of his masterly inactivity he is less a presence than an absence. Of the main Afghan characters it is his son Akbar who stands out. Unfortunately, as he masterminds the vicious massacre of the retreating British forces, it is less the calm expansiveness in the Islamic mind that he illustrates than brutal zealotry. And some might say that that was an attribute that it is hardly helpful or necessary to reinforce.

So although Hensher's sympathies, rightly, are with the Afghan people, and we are well capable ourselves of denouncing the foolish hubris of the British occupying forces, he ends up, through the brutal sadism of their slaughter, tilting the balance of sympathy back to them and near the end he needs to remind us just what to think:

"And so the tale is done, and justice restored, and wisdom and virtue triumphed. Ended, the interlude of the English and their vainglory; over in four winters; ended, that mulberry empire, that season of wrong."

No doubt he was limited by what really happened. Nonetheless, read "The Mulberry Empire" for the wholly fictional parts, for the journey rather than the destination, and for the fine characters in the likes of Bella Garraway, Stokes, Masson and Vitkevich, which are the best of it.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Well may he ask. But these are not the words of a political commentator on Sky News but those of a journalist in Philip Hensher's well-researched, if rather corrupted, near-epic tale of colonial shenanigans in Southern Asia in the 1830s. Alexander Burns, a Scottish adventurer, leaves his lover Bella Garraway who is subsequently exiled in disgrace to Gloucestershire, to indulge in a dangerous game of political chicanery on behalf of the British Empire. By first sucking up to the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan and then replacing him with a puppet potentate the British were breaking what was to become the second cardinal rule of war by getting involved in Afghanistan (the other is don't invade Russia). Burns's principal rival is enigmatic multi-lingual Russian explorer Vitkevich. The story of the First Afghan War is well-documented and here in The Mulberry Empire the author depicts the inevitable denouement with skill, graphically demonstrating how colonial hubris and triumphalism can rapidly degenerate into foreboding and terror.
Nobody could accuse Philip Hensher of formulaic writing. All his novels take place in different worlds. As would be expected The Mulberry Empire is technically flawless though the long impressive narrative is occasionally halted by some curiously naff side-events. But despite some thin characterisation and slightly clichéd orientalism this is a hugely ambitious and expansive novel which switches effortlessly between London and Gloucestershire, St Petersburg, the Punjab and Kabul. I am surprised that The Mulberry Empire was not at least short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in the year that it was won by the quirky Life of Pi.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Walled-up alive
This is a splendid fictional account of Britain's dealings with Afghanistan in the early years of Victoria's reign. Read more
Published on 16 Sep 2009 by Eileen Shaw
A critic writes a novel
I believe Hensher was a literary critic with a well known paper, has been a booker prize judge and edits new versions of Dickens etc so I was intrigued to see what he would... Read more
Published on 10 Sep 2009 by Dr Phibes
A modern classic.
This is a wonderfully told story. Entertaining and informative. It captures perfectly that strange air of menace and otherworldliness that characterize Afghanistan (anyone who's... Read more
Published on 24 Mar 2009 by A. W. Jones
A Rich and Prescient Epic
Philip Hensher can not have known about the prescience of his 2001 novel when he wrote it. Within months of finishing it, history was, if not repeating itself, then certainly... Read more
Published on 10 Jan 2009 by Leyla Sanai
Mixed feelings
Parts of this novel were very very enjoyable, the characters and beautiful narative made it a very entertaining read. Read more
Published on 16 Dec 2004 by Jane Coles
The Mulberry Empire
This book was very descriptive and a great deal of research had went into it.
However, we do feel that this book needs more editting and that it could have been half the... Read more
Published on 17 Dec 2003
Brilliant, moving story.
I've been waiting for a while for Hensher to write a novel as humane, witty, and moving as his journalism can be, and this more than exceeded my expectations. Read more
Published on 13 Mar 2003 by James Palmer
Confidence is not enough.
... To me it felt as if the only strength of this novel was the author's confidence, which at least allows the narrative a certain loftiness. Read more
Published on 22 Jan 2003 by G. Cross
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