BOOK GROUP REPORT: 'Far Pavilions' by Mary Margaret "Mollie" Kaye (M M Kaye)

The Mills and Boon-style cover, the sheer size and weight of it and the tiny font size made quite a few of us baulk at this book. A few baulked so hard they either didn't read it or watched the tv series instead!

It can be a tricky book to get into but there comes a point, quite soon, where suddenly you are totally immersed in the sights and sounds and smells of the 19th century sub continent - then it's a difficult book to escape from. Its main glory is that M M Kaye was a natural story teller which makes for an absolutely rollicking historical tale of adventure, love and death with strong characters who you really care about.

M M Kaye points out at the end of the book how many of the events in it are historical fact, and a good chunk of it is based loosely around her own grandfather's military career. It's perhaps the latter part of the book, dealing with the second Afghan war (1878-1880) rather than with daring adventure and romance, that is hardest to get through. It did cause people to either slow their reading pace to better absorb the military detail or, in one case, give up on the book at the 11th hour.

In the end, the surviving main characters set off for the Himalayas - "the far pavilions" - where they hope to live out their lives in peace. Most of us thought the ending unsatisfactory - but apparently it was changed from the original at the request of the American editor, so it's not surprising it doesn't ring entirely true.

When the book was written in 1978 it's unlikely that most readers would have known where Helmand province - or even Afghanistan itself - were on a map. Perhaps then the idea of the 'Great Game' between the British and Russian Empires was fading. Sadly, it's more recent events that have made contemporary readers much more aware of the geopolitical landscape of the region, and that lessons from the last couple of centuries have just not been learned.

At its publication, 'Far Pavillions' was voted one of the books to have most changed history. At that point, looking at both sides of history - especially the history of the British Empire - in a work of fiction was a relatively new idea. M M Kaye managed to do this with a relatively gentle touch and to find a good balance, and her book is all the more human for it.

All in all 'The Far Pavillions' scored a healthy 7 Haddenham book group thumbs up. It also had 3 thumbs down (for those who had not read the book at all).