Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Asia [Hardcover]

 

 

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This book is a compilation of adventures. It is the biographical sum of those travelers who, on behalf of its colonial empires, they went into in Asia to obtain political knots with the autochthonous towns. British and Russian played their peculiar game of chess in a board that extended from the India to Siberia. But they were not the only ones. The authors dedicate many pages to the strange Nazi expedition that Himmler organized in 1938, and to the intervention of the CIA in the Tibet after its occupation by China. It is a magnificent work, full of ethnological details, myths and legends, reality and magic. It combines the political macrocosm from the big powers with the existential microcosm of their explorers. It also combines the geopolitics with the anecdote, the history with the intrigue. It is an amusing book, and easy reading. But it has, in my opinion, a small defect: their cartographic poverty. Such a remarkable edition had required clearer and more numerous maps.

On the other hand, this book offers us a general vision of a whole time: spies, murders, bandits, mystics, magicians, demons, lost cities, the East and the West in their purest contrast. If what we look for is a historical and interesting story of adventures, we will have guessed right with its reading.

Scary - make errors in your review of this book and one of the authors will pop up and correct you. I shall endeavour to tread carefully, particularly as I'm not a colossal fan either.

This is a reasonably well-written popular account of the protracted cold war between Britain and Russia in Central Asia, variously called the Great Game or a Tournament of Shadows. Meyer & Brysac draw on journals, diaries, letters and official documents (not just secondary sources, as claimed elsewhere) to recount the adventures of the soldiers, explorers, archaeologists, mystics and miscellaneous tourists who criss-crossed this forbidding landscape between the 1820s and the 1950s, often in the service of one side or the other.

Other reviewers mention Peter Hopkirk's `The Great Game', as indeed do M&B, who are happy to acknowledge their debt to him. So why write another book covering the same terrain? The authors themselves say their goal was "to describe familiar events in a fresh way, drawing on recent scholarship and newly opened archives, and to throw a sharp beam on neglected or unknown figures and incidents". So they focus on the "the courage and brilliance of the Game's young principals, British or Russian", who were constantly being let down by their manipulative and incompetent superiors. This is, apparently, a "theme that resonates for Americans in this century".

The effort to resonate with the American reader is readily apparent, both by shoe-horning in American bit part players at every available opportunity, and by occasional irrelevant interpolations, such as a brief history of Russia's presence on the American west coast and an explanation of why dollar bills are decorated with weird cabalistic symbols. Needless to say, Britain's 19th century imperialistic bombast comes in for its usual share of Transatlantic tut-tutting.

The book opens with sometimes more detailed versions of the familiar stories - Moorcroft, the calamity of the First Afghan War, Stoddart and Conolly, etc - than are supplied by Hopkirk, but at the expense of any consistent insight into the changing military and political context, which is what makes Hopkirk's narrative so compelling. Each new episode is further isolated from the preceding ones by M&B's predilection for starting some way into the action and filling in the backstory later, or else opening with a lengthy, tangentially relevant introduction. The result feels like a collection of unrelated stories linked only by geography.

The Younghusband expedition, which ends Hopkirk's book, occurs about halfway through M&B's. After this attention shifts to the exploits of Sven Hedin, Aurel Stein and William Rockhill, who might have been rather surprised to learn they qualify as Great Game players (and who Hopkirk wisely consigns to separate books). By now the focus is almost exclusively on Tibet, and Great Game action elsewhere - in the Caucasus, Persia or Transcaspia - is simply ignored. Things are rounded off with the rather fey Roerich expeditions, Nazi and CIA shenanigans in Tibet, and some interesting but all too fleeting thoughts on Cold War geopolitics.

So is this book worth reading? Just about, although I would reverse Dr Herd's recommendation. If you are new to this subject, read Hopkirk first - he provides a better, more cohesive popular history of the Great Game. You might then turn to Meyer & Brysac for a different perspective and additional detail, if your appetite is not yet sated.

This is not a bad book, but it is not a good one either. The main problem with it apart from appalling copy editing which has left it full of spelling errors, is that the authors have simply strung together a series of accounts of different adventures with little by way of linking narrative. It is competently written, but the writing lacks excitement and appears to have been drawn from readily available secondary sources. Worth a read as an introduction to the subject, but avoid it if you have read anything else - The Great Game by Hopkirk is a much better book.

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2.0 out of 5 stars Close but no cigar
This is an interesting book but lacks the detail of, say, Peter Hopkirk who is acknowledged as the father of Great Game writing. Read more

Published on 13 May 2001

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