Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

Bah Humbug!
Phoenixine Seventy-Seven, February 1996
For once the What I read on my Holidays title is true since this report is about the books I read over
Christmas / New Year when I was on holiday and had little else to do except read.
Thirty years ago, in my teens, I fell in love with the books of Sir Henry Rider Haggard (the author of She
and King Solomon's Mines etc). I read a trilogy of his -- they had the same publishing phenomena at
the turn of the century as they have today -- and I was hooked. The books were just magnificent and I
devoured them. Then I had to take them back to the library and I was desolate. I desperately wanted to
own them!
In the years that have elapsed since then I have several times spotted two of the books in second hand
bookshops, but never all three together. I wanted all three, so I resisted buying. Then just before
Christmas a second hand book dealer found them for me. All three at once. He wrote me a letter -- did I
still want them?
Y E S ! !
I didn't really have to reply to his letter. I'm sure he heard my shriek of glee.
The first thing I did over Christmas was re-read those most magical books.
They are Marie, Child of Storm and Finished. All concern the adventures of Allan Quartermain (who
was also the hero of King Solomon's Mines and several other Haggard books). They feature quite
prominently a Zulu witch doctor called Zikali, otherwise known as Opener-of-the-Roads and sometimes
the "Thing that should never have been born". Zikali is the master mind behind a devious plot. Because
of a great wrong done to him by Chaka, the Zulu king, Zikali plans to overthrow the whole royal house
of the Zulu nation and grind it into dust. The novels concern his manoeuvrings against Dingaan and
Panda (Chaka's brothers) and Cetewayo the son of Panda. (The fall of Chaka himself is detailed in Nada
the Lily -- a book which is not strictly part of the series since it does not involve Allan Quartermain).
They were even more wonderful than I remembered. They are by turns romantic, bloody, magical and
mysterious. They have triumphs and tragedies, great loves and great deaths. They are everything a
good adventure book should be. Graham Greene said:
Rider Haggard was perhaps the greatest of all the writers who enchanted us when we were
young. Enchantment was just what he exercised; he fixed pictures in our minds that thirty years
have been unable to wear away.
Greene said that thirty years on from his first reading, and now I am thirty years on from my first
reading and he is perfectly correct.
After the sheer nostalgic wallowing of those three books, whatever I read next would have to be a little
bit of a come down. And it was -- but I suspect it would have been anyway. The book was Magic by
Isaac Asimov. It proclaims itself to be "The Final Fantasy Collection"; putting together all the previously
unpublished stories (and some articles) that can be classified as having something to do with fantasy.
It is a weak collection with far too much editorial hyperbole. The introduction states:
And like the great Victorians, Asimov worked at his writing desk until the day he died.
This is a lie. Asimov's final illness weakened him too much and though doubtless he would have liked to
have died in harness, as it were, he was simply unable to keep working towards the end. There are
reports that this saddened him greatly.
There are several new Azazel stories in the book (they are trite and less Wodehousian than the ones