Review by New York Times Review
IN 1896, a 32-year-old adventurer named Jean-Baptiste Marchand embarked on an ill-conceived expedition to claim the Upper Nile for France. Nicknamed John the Baptist for his visionary intensity, Marchand sailed a steamer up a tributary of the Congo River into the African interior, grinding to a halt where the river ran out on a plateau 130 miles from the Nile. Marchand's porters sawed the steamer into sections, laid wooden tracks through the jungle and carried the boat and their gear-including 90,000 rounds of ammunition and hundreds of kegs of fine French wine-for months across the divide. By the time they reached the Nile, the British Army had slaughtered thousands of Sudanese soldiers at the battle of Omdurman and solidified its control over the river's upper reaches. All of Marchand's efforts had been for naught. Robert Twigger's "Red Nile: A Biography of the World's Greatest River" abounds in such tales of grand dreams and thwarted ambitions. An Oxford-educated poet who studied martial arts with the Tokyo riot police and traveled through the Rocky Mountains in a birch-bark canoe, Twigger (who now lives in Dorset) spent seven years in the Cairo neighborhood of Maadi, an ideal perch from which to observe the Nile's turbulent flow. He has written a lively, if sometimes long-winded, pastiche of history and travelogue that weaves thumbnail sketches of the pharaohs, explorers, conquerors, engineers and schemers who tried, with varying degrees of success, to impose their will on the Nile, adding descriptions of his own travels on the river. Along the way, he offers disquisitions on cobras, crocodiles, bilharzia, Victorianera sex tours, cannibals, the Rosetta stone and the construction of the Suez Canal. "The Nile," Twigger writes, "connects everything to everything." Twigger takes his title from a five-mile stretch of the river near Khartoum, where the Blue Nile, originating in the mountains of Ethiopia, spills into the White Nile, flowing out of Lake Victoria. The churned-up sediment turns the waters here a bloody red, an apt metaphor, in Twigger's telling, for the river's long history of murder and mayhem. Ancient Egyptian mythology set the tone for the next 5,000 years, centering on the betrayal and killing of the god Osiris by his jealous "bad boy" brother, Set, who drowned him in the Nile in a stone sarcophagus and chopped his body into 14 pieces. Twigger revisits the violent story of the Exodus, drawing on contemporary scientific explanations for the 10 plagues: a foul-smelling "red tide" of algae might have turned the Nile the color of blood, while a khamsin, or dust storm, could well have brought darkness on Egypt for three days. He also recounts the mystery of the "Red Pharaoh," Seqenenre, whose mummy, discovered in the 19th century, bore deep head wounds but was otherwise uninjured. A modern forensic investigation found compelling evidence that enemy troops captured and executed him, contradicting conventional wisdom that pharaohs kept far from the front lines. The lurid tale of Cleopatra's suicide in Alexandria, via a cobra smuggled into her chamber at the bottom of a basket of figs, segues into stories of assassinations, massacres and murders carried out by Arabs, Ottomans and Mamluks. "Blood flowed freely-not only in the ditches of the Citadel, but on the banks of the Nile, in Egypt and Sudan," Twigger writes of the murderous reign of Muhammad Ali Pasha, a onetime Ottoman bureaucrat who ordered the destruction of the pyramids so the blocks could be used to dam the Nile. (Obviously, the command was ignored.) It's not surprising that Agatha Christie found inspiration for one of her most popular detective novels, "Death on the Nile," on a cruise up the river. "The Nile," Twigger concludes, "is the river of death." It's also the river of sex. Beginning with the mythic rape of Horus by Set-"possibly the first literary representation of anal sex"-the gods of the ancient river kingdom indulged every carnal urge, including pedophilia. Their libidinous impulses rubbed off on their human subjects. Cairo became the Arab world's city of sin, a setting for "The Thousand and One Nights" and a pleasure ground for the French troops who descended on Egypt after the Napoleonic conquest. Twigger details Napoleon's long seduction of Pauline Fourès, the wife of a social-climbing officer in the French Army in Egypt, who eventually succumbed to the general's charms, divorced her hapless husband and "blossomed as a mistress" of a Cairo salon: "Her picnics at the pyramids, site of Napoleon's great victory the previous year over the Mamluk army, were the gayest and most eagerly attended gatherings." The randy young novelist Gustave Flaubert set forth on a cruise to Aswan from Cairo, quickly losing interest in the antiquities and dallying upriver with a belly-dancing courtesan from Damascus named Kuchuk Hanem. She was "a tall, splendid creature," Flaubert declared. "Her eyes are dark and enormous, her eyebrows black, her nostrils open and wide, her shoulders heavy, full apple-shaped breasts." Flaubert named Madame Bovary after Monsieur Bouvaret, the louche owner of Cairo's Hôtel du Nil, where he and his traveling companion, Maxime du Camp, stayed for two months while frequenting the brothels of the city. Twigger's own travels on and along the Nile are of a tamer sort. He fraternizes with fire-breathing urchins on the back streets of Cairo, inflates a rubber raft and rows it with a friend among islands in the city rarely visited by tourists. "We declined all invitations to land and rowed on past an enormous two-masted dhow...whose sides were overflowing with freshly cut reeds," he writes of his intimate encounter with a river that most experience at a respectful distance. "It looked like an enormous floating haystack." He recounts his journey to the sacred spring of Gish Abay near Lake Tana in Ethiopia, the source of the Blue Nile. Joining white-and-green-robed pilgrims at the baptismal pool, he strips off his clothes and plunges into the frigid waters: "I had the feeling I was suddenly tiny, floating on the amniotic fluid of the Nile, a child about to be reborn." Twigger's encyclopedic approach grows numbing at times, and his decision to tell the Nile's story in piecemeal fashion-whipsawing from mummies in Luxor to an Italian duke in Ethiopia to a brief history of the Mountains of the Moon-can be confusing. He also has a tendency to pump up the drama with windy phrasing that recalls the mannered writing of Sir Richard Burton and other Victorian-era explorers: "In this biography of the Red Nile we must not shrink from revealing all," he proclaims, before embarking on a discourse on the sex life of the ancients. "This is a book of bloody encounters, so perforce we must tell the tale," is his preface to a story of Nile-side battle. But these are minor annoyances in a book that, like the Nile itself, teems with life. Twigger's "biography" ends with a look at the links between the Nile and modern Egypt's pharaohs. Gamal Abdel Nasser's monumental scheme to build the Aswan Dam above the Nile's second cataract gave Egypt control over its own water supply and economic destiny, even as it turned Nubia into a lake and inundated the homes of tens of thousands of people. Anwar Sadat, the Nile Delta-born peasant's son, "was a thwarted actor who had posed on the world stage as a ruler of the Red Nile," Twigger observes. "He would die as one, shot down by his own men, who believed he had led them too far away from the traditional virtues of an imaginarily idyllic Nile existence." Sadat's successor, Hosni Mubarak, fell in February 2011-by which time the economic boost provided by the Aswan Dam had long been undermined by corruption and incompetence. "Egyptians," Twigger writes, "had never risen against their own leader before." But the revolution devolved into chaos and violence. As Twigger's frightening account of those days makes clear, the "Red Nile" had once again lived up to its reputation. JOSHUA HAMMER is the author of three nonfiction books. His next, "The Rescue: One Man's Race Against Al Qaeda to Save the Treasures of Timbuktu," will be published in January 2016.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 30, 2014]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The longest river in the world, the Nile, is utterly predictable, according to British journalist and novelist Twigger ( Dr. Ragab's Universal Language ): For all its floods and famines and small tantrums, this is a river you can rely on. Twigger, in turgid, silty prose reminiscent of the river's flow, winds his way from the Lower Nile to its sources: the White Nile, which rises from a still-undetermined source in Rwanda, and the Blue Nile, which rises near Lake Tana in Ethiopia. Yet, the story of the Nile is the story of its inhabitants, and Twigger offers tales of the men, women, and animals that helped create the legendary character of the Nile. He skims along the river, delivering stories set on its fertile banks: the death of philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria at the hands of Peter the Bigot; Shajarat al-Durr, the first and only Sultana of Egypt; Ibn al-Nafis, the physician who discovered, perhaps in the ebb and flow of the Nile, a model for human circulation 400 years before William Harvey; Napoleon's defeat of the Egyptians at Cairo; Gustave Flaubert's sexual enchantment with Egypt; and the building of the Aswan Dam. Twigger's history intrigues, but like his subject, regularly overflows. Maps & illus. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A rich tapestry of Nile lore and legend, stretching from theancients to the fall of the latest tyrant.British author Twigger (Dr. Ragab's Universal Language,2009, etc.) lived in Cairo for seven years before fleeing the revolution in2011. Here, the author compiles a vast compendium of drama and history aroundthe attempts to control the Nile. Somewhat chronological but hardly linear,Twigger's labor of love meanders, much like its subject. History itself beganthere, in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, from which emerged not one butthree Niles: The Blue Nile rises in Ethiopia; the White in central Africa; andthe mighty Red flowing from Lake Victoria (fed by the Kagera River coming downfrom the so-called Mountains of the Moon, which Twigger maintains is the Nile'strue source) to the Mediterranean Delta. Why is it red? That is the color ofthe silt, as well as the rare algal bloom known to turn the surface red andkill the fish, which might explain Egypt's first plague: the "river of blood"Moses created when he struck the surface as dictated by God. Nonetheless, redis the color of blood, life, violence, passion and revolution, and the Niledelivers each in turn. The earliest inhabitants of the areas around the riverwere hunter-gatherers who followed the river as the game roamed and probablygave their things away as they moved rather than hoarding what they could notcarry. Especially fascinating is the lore surrounding the powerful anddangerous animals that haunt the river and were depicted by ancients as demigods:baboons, hippos and crocodiles. Indeed, the Nile gave birth not only to madkings and caliphs, from Cleopatra to Hakim, Napoleon to Lord Kitchener, but thetheory of blood circulation, understood by Ibn al-Nafis 400 years beforeWilliam Harvey.A painstaking work of research and careful observation. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
