Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton
By Phoebe-Lou Adams
JULY 1990 ISSUE
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byEdward Rice.Scribner’s, $35.00. Any novelist who invented a character like Burton would be accused of piling the impossible on the improbable, yet the man really lived, from 1821 to 1890. He is probably chiefly remembered for his translation of the Arabian Nights, which was one of his later enterprises. His father wanted Burton to become a clergyman. He in fact became an officer in the army of the East India Company, an undercover agent, an extraordinary linguist, a self-taught anthropologist, a collector and disseminator of Eastern erotica, a persistent traveler, a prolific author (more than forty books plus miscellaneous pieces), a convert to Islam, a pilgrim to Mecca at the risk of his life, an explorer in Africa and South America, a sporadic drunk, and a man with a habit of annoying the British authorities by telling them truths that they did not wish to hear. Just how many of Burton’s exotic peregrinations and months-long disappearances were part of the “Great Game“ is an unanswerable question. His biographer suspects that many of his proceedings were at least partly secret-service work, but if so, he was poorly rewarded. He was too brilliant, too energetic, and too much a loner to fit comfortably into the Victorian system. He made waves, and solidly bourgeois boat owners, while willing to use that talent on occasion, saw no reason to pay a man for doing what he clearly liked to do. Mr. Rice has amassed an enormous amount of information on Burton and on the politics and history of the places where he operated, producing a biography full of action, intrigue, and the unorthodox opinions of its subject. A book of this quality deserves better proofreading than Mr. Rice’s has received.