The Man Who Would Be King, and not the Kipling version – a Review

I’ve really enjoyed Ben Macintyre’s biography of Josiah Harlan, the Pennsylvania Quaker-cum-Afghan prince. The book’s title, The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan, makes it clear that the book’s subject, the larger-than-life self-styled Prince of Ghor, was the basis of Kipling’s short story, later made into a film by the late, great John Huston, starring Michael Caine and Sean Connery. I imagine that for native English speakers, even if you haven’t read the short story or seen the movie, the phrase Man who would be king still rings out as something you should recognize. I hadn’t heard of the film until reading this book, yet the title was still very familiar to me. It has the same Victorian tang as the once and future king, the Camelot retelling of T. H. White. Meaning, it’s right up my alley!

So, as for the book, it was an incredibly enjoyable read, more than I expected. Ben Macintyre’s primary sources are Harlan’s personal diary and letters, which he blissfully and comically translates into our non-euphemistic modern English. Most memorable are the passages where Macintyre states his own admiration for Harlan’s mastery of the rosy prose of the Victorian era, calling to attention Harlan’s describing those who gather human waste by night-time [for fuel]

” “…the night soil accumulated by vagrant speculators in their suburban perambulations.” (Harlan was a master of euphemism, but “suburban night soil speculator” is among his best.)”

I’ll leave it to you to discover the meat of this wonderful novel for yourself, which I endorse as strongly as any book I’ve ever liked. To pique your interest, here’s a bulleted list of things to look forward to:

• Learn the dirty secrets of Alexander “Bokhara” Burns
• Learn a little about how the Americans of the 19th century viewed the Great Game and its players
• See what happens when a scorned 22-year-old turns his back on his one-time lover and his own native country out of righteous anger
• Find out just how easy it is to become a surgeon in the British army
• Learn the simplest, and most unsanitary, way to treat cataracts
• Read about Dash the wonder dog
• Learn how the American flag was raised and saluted on the heights of the Hindu Kush by an Afghan prince astride an elephant
• Compare the myth and the fact – and try to figure out just how Kipling turned this fair-minded Quaker into the Masonic mercenaries so perfectly portrayed by Connery and Caine

It was a fast read, enjoyable, and full of Victorian swash-buckling, political intrigue, and romantic heroic swaggering from the perspective of a straight-laced Quaker who looked at all the people with an equanimity not often seen by the international traveler.

Next week I’ll be reviewing an oldie-but-goodie, Geoffrey Moorhouse’s The Other Side: A Journey Through Soviet Central Asia. It’s from the glory years of perestroika, just months before the whole shebang came-a-tumbling down like the ‘famous, fabled walls of Jericho.’ See you then!

This post was written by...

Michael Hancock-Parmer – author of 153 posts on Registan.net.

PhD student in Central Eurasian Studies and Russian History at Indiana University