The Way of the Kings by Andre Malraux

(Book Review)

My History with Andre Malraux

            So, who out there has heard of Andre Malraux?

            He was an interesting guy—Wikipedia biography HERE, and an essay on his life by Christopher Hitchens HERE.  He is somewhat like the French version of Ernest Hemingway in the sense that he adventured around various global hotspots in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s and wrote novels about the places he visited.  He was an ardent leftist in his early life and supported the Communists in China, fought with the Republicans in Spain, and served with the French resistance during World War II.  (…or at least, so he claimed.  He seems to have fabricated much of his resume, and there is now considerable debate about which of his claims are actually true.)

            I had previously encountered Andre Malraux back in my school days when I had to read his book Man’s Fate* (W) for a college class entitled Western Perceptions of China.**

           

            The book completely blew me away at the time.  Mind you, that was some 17 years ago now, and I’m not entirely sure how it would hold up to a re-reading.  (It may have just been that it was exactly the sort of pretentious book that would appeal to a pretentious 19 year old.)  But at the time I loved it.  It was about the Shanghai Massacre of 1927 (W) , and it combined the exoticism of 1920s Shanghai with a romanticized leftist view of revolutionary struggle and martyrdom with plenty of philosophical discussions.  (As my professor said of the book, it read as if someone was intending to make an action movie out of a philosophy discussion.)

            [I read that book back in 1998, long before I had started this blog or this book review project, but a couple times in the past few years I have mentioned my fondness for that book—see here and here.]

* The book was published in French as La Condition Humaine and I’ve seen it published or referred to under several English titles: Fate of Man, The Human Condition, Man’s Estate, Storm in Shanghai, et cetera.

** Western Perceptions of China was the same class in which I encountered Fu-Manchu.

Why I Read This Book

          I found out a while back that Andre Malraux actually spent some time in Phnom Penh, where I’m currently living.  (It was this article here [LINK HERE], which alerted me to the fact.)

            And then I stumbled upon The Way of the Kings, Malraux’s Cambodian jungle adventure story, shortly afterwards in a bookstore.  I leafed through it, but didn’t immediately pick it up.

            What caused me to pick this book up was another book: The Map of Lost Memories by Kim Fay (A), a recently published adventure story that takes place in 1920s Cambodia.  I discovered The Map of Lost Memories when a student of mine presented this book to the class for her reading journal.  (One of the advantages of having my students do weekly reading journals is that I get all sorts of interesting book recommendations from them.)  And after tracking the book down in the local bookstore, I discovered that some of the characters in that book are fictionalized representations of the Cambodian adventures of Andre and Clara Malraux.

            So, I decided I might as well go back and read Andre Malraux’s account first.  I temporarily put The Map of Lost Memories on hold, and went back to Andre Malraux’s original Cambodian adventure book. 

Background Information

          Andre Malraux and his wife travelled to Cambodia in 1923 with the intention of trying to make their fortune by obtaining some of the statues from the ancient Cambodian temples and selling them.  The French authorities had some idea of what they were planning, and sternly warned them that taking artifacts from the Cambodian temples was strictly prohibited.  Andre Malraux and his wife attempted it anyway, and they were promptly caught and arrested.  (The most generous possible spin you could put on the whole affair is from Kim Fay, who writes that the 1920s were “an era in which there were not black and white attitudes about the morality of trafficking and owning art”).

            The first part of The Way of the Kings is partly a fictionalized recreation of that journey, and partly Malraux’s attempt to justify his actions.  (The justification, such as it is, appears to be that since the French government archeologists did not dare to go up into the dangerous areas of the Cambodian jungle themselves to study these temples, private adventures like Malraux were doing the world a favor by taking the risks and obtaining the statues, and thus fully deserved the reward from whatever they found.)

            The second half of the book is about a search for a French adventurer who has gone missing in the jungle, and is highly reminiscent of Hearts of Darkness.  [Hearts of Darkness is another book I had to read for a class back in my college days, although I remember very little of it, and it might be time for a re-read one of these days.]

The Review

          I’m still trying to make up my mind whether this was a good or bad book.  But it’s definitely a fascinating little book.

            As I already mentioned above, my college professor characterized Man’s Fate as a philosophy book someone was trying to make into an action movie.  The same could perhaps be said of The Way of the Kings (at least if you substitute “jungle adventure” in for “action movie.”)  It’s a bit heavy on the themes of mortality and physical decay, but it’s also feels like a great adventure story as well.

           If you like these sort of old-fashioned jungle-adventure stories, you should enjoy this one.  (Written in 1930, this book is firmly in the 1930s jungle-adventure genre that would later inspire the Indiana Jones movies.)

            The set-up is also interesting.  On the jungle expedition, a young intellectual man is paired with an older reckless man.  The older man is completely free from any restraint, and is in many ways the person that the younger man wishes he could be.  Except that the older man is all too aware that his best days are behind him, and is obsessed with the thoughts of the inevitable decay of his body.  Both men are searching for Grabot, a man who has become so completely free of society’s constraints that he is rumored to have “gone native” among the wild Cambodian jungle tribes.

            It’s a fascinating set-up for a jungle adventure story (albeit one that is slightly ripping-off Hearts of Darkness.)  I’m not sure this short little story fully takes advantage of all the possibilities offered by these characters, but it’s a great premise at least.  (This short story doesn’t have time to take these characters on half the adventures I wanted to see them on.  Perhaps somewhere out there, there’s a longer and much more epic story waiting to be written involving these same character types.)

            There are a couple short action scenes in the book, but most of the book is tension and suspense rather than action, and what is really great about the book is how Malraux builds up the tension in each scene.  Rachel Seiffert, who wrote the publisher’s introduction to my edition of this book, describes this eloquently, so I’ll just steal from her: “I was most struck by the intensely visual quality of his writing.  The description of Claude watching Perken walk out to their native captors is stunningly evocative.  Claude’s hands shaking as he holds the binoculars, the blurry, frenzied searching until at least he gets a visual fix.  Having to watch this crucial scene unfold in frantic snatches is breathtaking” (Publisher’s Introduction p. viii). 

            Malraux’s descriptions of the Cambodian jungle are really good as well.  You can practically smell the jungle reading this book.  I’ll quote a short bit to illustrate this—this is a description of one of the characters exploring the ruins of an ancient temple deep in the jungle:

            “The wall cut across the vegetation like a path, but it was covered with sticky moss.  If Claude tried to walk along the top, the fall would be extremely dangerous: gangrene is as much the master of the jungle as the insect.  He began to move forward on his stomach.  The moss smelled of decay, and was covered in leaves that were half viscous and half reduced to their veins, as if partly digested.  So close to his face, the moss looked very big—he could see the fibrils stirring slightly in the calm air—and he was reminded, too, that there were insects here.  After three metres, he felt a tickling sensation.

            He stopped, and scratched his neck.  The tickling moved over his hand, and he pulled it away immediately: two black ants as big as wasps, their antennae distinctly visible, were trying to slip between his fingers.  He shook his hand as hard as he could, and they fell.  He was already on his feet.  No ants on his clothes.  At the end of the wall, a hundred metres away, a brighter gap: that had to be the gate, and the carvings.  Below, the earth, covered in fallen stones.  Against the bright gap, the silhouette of a branch: large ants, their bellies in silhouette too, their feet invisible, crossed it like a bridge.  Claude tried to push it away, but he missed it at first.  ‘I absolutely have to get to the end.  If there are red ants, it’ll be bad, but if I go back it’ll be worse…’ ” (p. 62)

            …and there are many more passages like that throughout the book, giving the reader a real feel for the setting.

            Having thus far praised Malraux’s writing, I have to admit that there were any number of sentences or sections of dialogue that just went completely over my head—I often had no idea what Malraux’s sentences meant.  It was slightly frustrating, but the odd incomprehensible sentence here and there didn’t interfere with my overall understanding of the story, so I just kept on reading through the book.

            (Of course with any translated book, you always have to wonder if anything is lost in the translation.  But I suspect it might just be Malraux is one of those highbrow authors who occasionally likes to make the reader work a bit to understand the book.  I should also note that I’ve searched the Internet for other reviews of this book, and I seem to be the only one complaining about this, so it could just be me.)

            And then, when the whole story was over, I had to ask myself what the purpose of it all was.  There’s a lot of talk in the book about the problems of aging and death, but I’m not sure the book adds anything new to the discussion. 

            The central human dilemma is that all of us must someday get old and die, but none of us want to get old and die.  This conflict between our desire to stay alive and our inevitable death is perhaps the basis for all human philosophy and religion.  But in this particular book, I’m not sure Malraux does much more than shine a spotlight on the problem.  His characters talk a lot about their inevitable decay and death, but I didn’t feel like I left the book with any more insight on the problem than when I started it.

            Although you could perhaps argue that it is not the job of the novelist to solve these problems, only to write about the human condition as it is.  I suppose it just depends on what each particular reader wants to get out of a book.

Other Notes

* There are some interesting experiments with changes in perspective in this book.  In the beginning of the book, everything is seen through the thoughts of the younger man, Claude, but at about the halfway point the narrator’s perspective begins to switch over to the older man, Perkins.

* When talking about Grabot, who is rumored to have set up his own private kingdom in the jungle, the characters talk about several real-life historical white men who have done the same thing.  Brooke of Sarawak, who is a major character in Flashman’s Lady, is one of the people mentioned.  ( Josiah Harlan, who was in Flashman and the Mountain of Light, would also fit nicely into this category, but Malraux doesn’t mention Josiah Harlan.)

* In my Internet research on this book, I’ve often seen it mentioned as part of Malraux’s trilogy on revolution in China, or sometimes revolution in Asia.  However unless I’m missing something, it has nothing to do with either.  There’s certainly no connection to China that I can see, and there’s not much here on the themes of revolution.  There is a section about the jungle tribes resisting the extending authority of the central government, but this isn’t really the same as a revolution in the traditional-Marxist sense of the word. 

            (By the way, the government troops sent in at the end of the book were the Siamese government troops, and not the French, right?  If someone out there has read the book, help me out on this.  That was one of the parts of the book I was slightly confused about.)

* I linked to the Christopher Hitchens’ essay on Malraux at the beginning of this review, but it is perhaps worth mentioning twice.  [The link, once again, is HERE.]

            In the essay, Hitchens compares Malraux to the fictional Flashman.  (“I was put in the mind of a Gallic version of Harry Flashman: fast-talking and protean, covered with unearned glory and full of embellished traveler’s tales from many plundered colonies.”)

            Hitchens also includes Trotsky’s acid commentary on Malraux: “Malraux is organically incapable of moral independence; he was born biddable.”

            …and yet, for all that, Hitchens is full of praise for Man’s Fate, which makes me think that I might not have been wrong about the book and it’s power after all. 

            Hitchens writes: “Published in 1933, it [Man’s Fate] did for fiction what Harold Isaacs’s “Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution” did for scholarship.  It pointed up the increasing weight of Asia in world affairs; it described epic moments of suffering and upheaval, in Shanghai especially (it was nearly filmed by Sergei Eisenstein); and it demonstrated huge respect for Communism and Communists while simultaneously evoking the tragedy of a revolution betrayed by Moscow.  Somewhat lushly Orientalist in its manner, the novel was ridiculed for its affection by Vladimir Nabokov and hailed as prescient by Arthur Koestler.  

 Link of the Day

The Unsolved Mystery of Language