Coromandel!
I was going to write about forgotten or neglected good books. I will do so in the future. Today, I write about an author, John Masters, and his novel “Coromandel!” that will be in my list of forgotten books.
A few days ago, I walked into Black Letter Books, a used book store in Stillwater, Minnesota.
Why bother with used bookstores? Why not just go to Barnes & Noble? Black Letter Books is locally owned and operated. In a used bookstore, one can find great books that will never again be found in a new store. I quickly found five such books that I picked up for about $5.00 apiece. One was “Coromandel!”. I bought Coromandel!” because I read and enjoyed another of Masters’s novels, “Bhowani Junction.”
There is a paragraph of biography on the back cover of the Penguin paperback. Masters had an adventurous life like few others.
Born in Calcutta in 1914 . . . After being educated in England, he returned to India in 1934 and joined the Prince Of Wales Own Gurkha Rifles, then serving on the North-West Frontier [of India]. He saw active service in Waziristan in 1937 and, after the outbreak of war, in Iraq, Syria, and Persia. In 1944 he joined General Wingate’s Chindits in Burma. He fought at the Singu Bridgehead, the capture of Mandalay, and at Toungoo, and on the Mawchi Road. John Masters retired from the Army in 1948 as Lietenant-Colonel and with the D.S.O. and O.B.E., and shortly afterwards went to the U.S.A. He turned to writing and soon had articles and short stories in many well-known American magazines.
He wrote a half-dozen novels in the 1950s plus his autobiography, “Bugles and a Tiger.”
Coromandel!’s plot starts in rural England under Charles I in the 17th Century. Jason, the protagonist, is a young dreamer of adventures he knows he can never experience in the village where he was born. He’ll have to leave.
They had no right to disbelieve him. They had no right to tell him he was going to be here all his life, because then his dreams, being impossible of coming true, would be like a madman’s. If he was really to be here until he died he could not, even in his mind, ride deserts and sail oceans. He could not use his power to make the sounds of the night blur until they became anything he chose. He could not turn silence into music and his thoughts into poetry... He could not make new stars out of an old moon or change the midday sun into a fresh dawn, or the fields into a foreign shore - the strand of Coromandel.
I confess that I’ve not finished the book. I’ve skimmed a few pages at the end of the book, and it appears that Jason eventually makes it to the Coromandel Coast, the southeast coast of India.
Enough. I’ve written enough. I will stop writing and go back to reading “Coromandel!”.
Black Letter Books