The Drunkenness of things being various

In last December's lists of eminent people's favourite books of the year this unusually titled tome was mentioned by Terry Eagleton and Bernard Crick. It is a remarkable compilation, at once entertaining and instructive, piquant and wise. It's also an inspired work, and the nature of the inspiration is evident in the four lines of resonant whimsy from Louis MacNeice that provide the epigraph:

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.

To be transported by such inebriation is to see the human world as a colourful bazaar, peopled not by the average citizens beloved of the Bureau of Statistics, but by the three strange species mentioned in the title.

Gods, however, is used in a gender-neutral sense, and include, as Calder enumerates in his introduction, "ferocious yet maternal Kali" alongside "the generous Ganesh", "the trickster Anancy" (a West African/Caribbean Spider-God) and "the immensely versatile Ogun" (a Yoruba deity, "the personal god of Wole Soyinka"). They "provide an overlapping conception of potentialities", and "while superhuman, are, in their myriad emanations, very human."

The second term of the series covers us all, every Tom, Dick and Harry, every King, Queen and Knave, for "Since races do not exist--though racism, damnably, does--mongrelism is our common lot…whether we want to accept it or not, we are all mongrels." The term that rounds off the series is used in the sense of daemons, who inspire geniuses like Wittgenstein, the entry on whom centres on the famous poker with which he is supposed to have threatened Karl Popper.

Calder proclaims a "definite ethical purpose" behind his portraits "of oddballs, tinks, heidbangers, saints, keelies, nutters, philosophers, freaks and other personages, whether real, imaginary, legendary or mythical". His aim is "to help undermine notions of 'normality' which have contributed over the last couple of hundred years to appalling horrors." Since this might look like going over the top, Calder's elaboration is apropos. "The idea of a 'career' has been ideologically hegemonic in the west over that period," he claims. Careerism is now seen as normative, and its concomitant is denigration of the quirky, the whimsical, the outre, even though these may eventually be seen ---generally after the death of the person manifesting them--- as symptoms of genius. In its military manifestations careerism fosters war ("The military career requires war for fulfilment") and facilitates the development of ever more destructive weapons.

For a non-careerist and yet fulfilling and exciting life, Calder had his father as an exemplar. Son of Dundee jute workers, Peter Ritchie Calder became a resourceful Fleet Street journalist; science writer; UN emissary; professor of international relations at Edinburgh University, which awarded him an honorary MA to "make him legitimate", for he had no degree; life peer, as Lord Ritchie-Calder of Balmashannar; advisor on science to the Encyclopedia Britannica; co-founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Like father, like son: after studying at Cambridge (BA) and Sussex (D.Phil), Angus Calder reviewed books for the New Statesman, taught in several African universities and then in the Open University in Scotland, from where he took early retirement to lead a precarious existence as a full-time writer. As an undergraduate he had won a prestigious poetry prize, but then hardly wrote any more poems till a late flowering that has resulted in four distinctive collections. The People's War, his populist account of the Second World War, is a classic of sorts, and the massive Revolutionary Empire: the Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the Fifteemth Century to the 1780s, has been described by Edward Said as a 'gripping narrative." There are a number of other books on history and literary criticism. A lifelong enthusiast for Third World writing, he co-edited the Journal of Commonwealth Literature for some years.

Erudition combines with stylistic brio to make the present work on of Calder's best to date. It opens with an irrepressible and truly subaltern character, Sheik Adam, sent from Bombay to the Mauritius as convict labour. He escaped numerous times and lived on robbery, ingeniously carried out by poisoning victims with datura infused into cakes; and was eventually transported to Van Diemen's Land, where he took the name John Adams to marry a Liverpudlian prostitute convicted of attempted murder. Among other subcontinentals in the book is Mirza Sheikh I'tesamuddin, of whom Calder came to know from The Wonders of Vilayet (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press), my English version of the Mirza's 18th century travel memoir about Europe.

Who else is in the book? Just naming them would fill half a page, but anyone would find a number of well-known personages standing shoulder to shoulder with fascinating unknowns--under the egalitarianism of the alphabetical order. I can't comment on the scholarship in any extensive way but the absence in the entry and the bibliographical note on Billy the Kid of any mention of Borges' "The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan" is regrettable. The book in which it is to be found, "A Universal History of Infamy", also happens to be a classic of the genre of brief lives, which was introduced into English literature in the 17th century by John Aubrey and to which Calder's book is a delightful addition.

Kaiser Huq teaches English at Dhaka University.