It’s in part a record of a journey in the Levant, but Kinglake is more interested in his own response to his experiences than in the experience itself. More exactly, he is interested in the responses of the narrator he has constructed who is not absolutely to be identified with the author. Raban thinks this narrator has the ‘sensibility of someone who is a close blood-relative of Flashman’, but he is perhaps better regarded as one of the last of the Regency dandies, rather like the young Disraeli. His tone is always cool and superior. Nothing is permitted to impress him, not even outbreaks of plague.

There is charm too. Take, for instance, his account of Osman Effendi whom he knew in Cairo. His history was ‘a curious one’ and his name misleading, for ‘he was a Scotchman born’. He was taken prisoner and ‘according to Mahometan custom, the alternative of Death or the Koran was offered to him; he did not choose Death’. Later he ‘gave a sincere pledge of his sincere alienation from Christianity by keeping a couple of wives’. Nevertheless his nationality was ‘inextinguishable’ — ‘in vain had he suffered captivity, conversion, circumcision’. ‘The joy of his heart’ was in his bookshelves, and the books were ‘thoroughbred Scotch — the Edinburgh this, the Edinburgh that — and above all, I recollect that he prided himself upon the Edinburgh Cabinet Library’.At the end of the next paragraph we are casually told, ‘He died’.

Not a book for every day — but then how few are. A book redolent of a sense of European superiority, natural doubtless for an early 19th-century product of Eton and Trinity, Cambridge, but which — we must all surely agree now — is grotesque, baseless, and confoundedly improper; a callous book that finds in poverty, ignorance and suffering, material for the exercise of wit; shocking really. It must be evidence of a deplorable character that I find it so enjoyable.

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