The Pale Abyssinian: A Life of James Bruce, African Explorer and Adventurer by Miles Bredin
Published by Harper Collins, price £17.99
Miles Bredin has failed, in his attempt at redressing the hostile opinion that Horace Walpole, James Boswell and Dr Johnson held of James Bruce. "The Pale Abyssinian" leaves the moral character of James Bruce in tatters. He has however brought the ruddy, oversexed, 6 foot 4 inch Scotsman, vibrantly to life.
James Bruce, hitherto a half-remembered 18th-century explorer, bursts out from the pages. As a young man he is the very model of a modern anti-hero. A London-dwelling laird, enriched by the labour of his coal-mining serfs, he was a slavish supporter of the Hanoverian monarchy, the English establishment and Free Masonry. A sexual hypocrite of the first order and a brilliant scholar, he was manifestly too proud, clever and lazy to even lay claim to one of the genteel professions. He half-heartedly fails at them all: the kirk, law, wine trade, free-lance spying and as His Brittanic Majesties consul at Algiers.
Like many a clever and indolent young man, it is travel that saves him from himself. His talents for map-making, intrigue and love-making, come brilliantly to the fore on the shores of the Red Sea and the highlands of Ethiopia. He also had a quite exceptional ear and ended up fluent in a dozen languages including Geez and Amharic. There is not a hint of cultural or racial superiority in his journals, while his adventures in Ethiopia, as related by Bredin, have the grip of a thriller. He totally immersed himself in the life, dress, language and culture of the Imperial court at Gondar and in Queen Esther finally met his equal.
Even his vices, a furious jealousy of his 17th century predecessor, the Portugese Jeronimo Lobo and a lack of gratitude to his Italian assistant, Luigi Balugani, are those that are customarily shared by great travellers. Bredin is quite clearly enough of a traveller to sympathise with Bruce. Their shared experience of Ethiopian civil wars, royal exhumations, the lost Ark of the Covenant and a tej-induced hangover brings an invigorating vivacity to the text. If it is impossible to either quite love or loathe James Bruce, he indisputably joins the pantheon of heroic British explorers
““The Pale Abyssinian” leaves the moral character of James Bruce in tatters. He has however brought the ruddy, oversexed, 6 foot 4 inch Scotsman, vibrantly to life. ”