The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 20 April 2010
by Neil Buckley
Slug and Pat are two young men, veterans of the RAF in World War 2, who are coming home from an adventure (Slug in Yunnan), passing through Calcutta to pick up a surplus airplane they plan to go into business flying around Britain. Thus opens this adventure for younger readers, first published in 1949. The book is among the kind of adventure stories still popular for young readers, stories featuring dashing young heroes, world travel, intrigue and adventure. In the early 20th century, such novels centered on the activities of young American or British adventurers in faraway Asian or African lands. These books also tended to reveal the cultural chauvinism of their time, the assumed superiority of Western culture. James Hilton's Lost Horizon is one of the most famous and wildly fantastic portrayals of Tibetan culture. That book influenced Western assumptions about Tibet and Buddhism for generations. Shangri-la does not exist, and later writers contended with that fact with varying success. Here, Slug and Pat fall into a complex intrigue involving secret items being transported into Tibet by a pair of older adventurers. The book is full of chase scenes, fights and gun battles in the streets of Calcutta, through the air to Darjeeling, across the snowy Himalayas and in the streets of two Tibetan cities. The reader expects our heroes to do a bit of flying, perhaps all the way to Lhasa (as in The Atom Chasers in Tibet) but this is not to be, due to a poorly placed cow. One doesn't want to reaveal too much about the items in question, or their particular value. Suffice to say that this book shows a surprising sensitivity to the idiosyncracies of Tibet's cultural and political structure. Slug and Pat, and Dr. Cameron, with the help of a Calcutta police official named David Lean, all help the Tibetans during a time of crisis in their capitol. The book does have its cultural biases, particularly in its language, but manages to just barely avoid the accusation that only the white men can save an Asian civilization. In the end, the book proves intensely prescient. Events that it describes in fiction are stunningly similar to events that actually transpired in Tibet a full decade later. It presages the intrigues of the Chinese invasion of Tibet, and the revolt in Lhasa in 1959 that resulted in the Dalai Lama's exile. It also recognizes China's long-standing manipulation of Tibetan politics and religious leadership, an intrigue that continues to this day, and which will likely darken the selection of the next Dalai Lama, if there is to be one. So, the book, which starts out as a pulp adventure, ends up being a valuable document of Western awareness of the cultural intrigues going on in the Himalayas in the few years before the Chinese invasion of Tibet.
(With Slug in Yunnan, this book appears to be a part of a series, though little information appears to be available about its author or if other books in the series ever appeared.)