Jim Newton is a former TV employee who has also worked in the film industry. Drawing on a professional background in broadcasting and film, he reviews fiction with a particular eye for storytelling, character, pace and atmosphere.
Arvind Ethan David begins The Great Game with an irresistible piece of literary misdirection. It is London, 1905, and A. J. Raffles, the celebrated amateur cracksman, arrives at his friend Bunny’s door profoundly shaken. While attempting to steal a diamond from an imperial grandee, Raffles has witnessed the aftermath of an apparently impossible murder. The killer, endowed with extraordinary strength and agility, has disappeared into the night.
It sounds like the beginning of a pleasingly outrageous Edwardian pastiche but the author has something considerably more ambitious in mind.
The first surprise concerns Bunny. This is not Raffles’s familiar companion Harry “Bunny” Manders but Lieutenant Balvinder dev Singh, a 36-year-old Sikh, former soldier in the Second Boer War, pupil barrister and sometime accomplice in Raffles’s burglaries. It is a clever piece of appropriation because David is not simply importing E. W. Hornung’s characters into a new adventure; he is changing the position from which their world is observed.
Balvinder is both participant and outsider, sufficiently Anglicised to move through London society but never permitted to forget that the society is built upon assumptions about race, class and empire. His dry, self-aware narration gives the novel much of its personality.
The murders, meanwhile, multiply. Their victims are not randomly chosen. Soldiers, administrators and beneficiaries of empire are being killed in increasingly elaborate ways, and Balvinder realises that the violence has a political grammar: these are attacks upon imperialism itself.
Before long, Raffles and Balvinder find themselves in splendidly crowded company. Scotland Yard becomes involved, as do Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes, while a young Winston Churchill enters proceedings as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies. David cheerfully throws historical and fictional figures into the same pot, but the resulting mixture is more disciplined than the premise might suggest.
Indeed, one of the novel's pleasures is the way familiar characters are viewed from unfamiliar angles. Holmes remains formidably Holmesian, but he is no longer automatically the cleverest man in every room. Raffles is charming, courageous and exasperating. Churchill is energetic, amusing, casually offensive and disturbingly certain of himself. Balvinder regards them all with an affection tempered by scepticism.
Behind the increasingly fantastical adventure lies Michael Maduka, whose anti-imperialist campaign gives the novel its moral complication. He is a murderer and terrorist, but David refuses the comforting proposition that a villain must therefore be wrong about everything. When Maduka challenges Balvinder for serving the very empire that subjugates India, their confrontation becomes an argument about complicity, resistance and whether violence committed in the name of liberation merely reproduces the brutality it opposes.
This is where The Great Game distinguishes itself from straightforward literary pastiche. David enjoys the conventions of Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction while simultaneously interrogating the worldview that produced them. Kipling, Conan Doyle and Hornung are plainly in the book's bloodstream, but their imperial Britain is being inspected from the other end of the telescope.
The approach occasionally risks becoming too explicit. There are moments when characters articulate twenty-first-century arguments with a neatness that strains the period setting, and the procession of literary and historical references sometimes threatens to become a game of spot-the-allusion. Yet David's wit and narrative momentum generally carry him through.
And momentum matters. Beneath the political argument is a genuinely entertaining thriller, escalating towards an audacious conspiracy aimed at the heart of Britain's ruling establishment.
The action can be gruesome, sometimes startlingly so, but it is balanced by banter, mystery and an evident affection for the adventure stories the novel is busy dismantling and rebuilding.
Most intriguing of all is Balvinder himself. He begins in the shadow of more famous fictional men and gradually becomes the character who matters most. His loyalties to Britain, India, Raffles and ultimately himself, prove considerably harder to resolve than the mystery.
The Great Game is consequently both homage and argument: a brisk, mischievous collision of crime fiction, literary history and imperial politics. It borrows some of the most recognisable toys in the Edwardian adventure box, turns them upside down, and asks who was previously missing from the game.
My Verdict: An audacious, witty and frequently exhilarating reinvention of the Edwardian adventure story, with a hero in Balvinder Singh who deserves further adventures of his own.
