Probably best known today as the source material for the famous musical The King and I, Anna and the King of Siam would I suppose belong to the genre of historical fiction, as Anna Leonowens was an actual person who was employed at the court of the King of Siam in the 1860s, and the novel was largely based on her memoirs of that experience. The book was surprising to me, in a positive sense, in a number of ways. Though I had always seen it on the list and knew it was coming I had not paid close attention to it. It was published much later, for example, than I imagined it was. While I knew it was set roughly around the time that it is, I had thought the publication dated from the late Victorian era to 1910 or so at the latest. This is probably on account of the musical; I tend not to think of musicals in general as based on particularly fresh material. though most of the Rogers and Hammerstein shows were actually based on sources, or events, that were only a few years old. I also, again probably because of the musical, which I in fact have never seen, as well as its inclusion in the family-friendly IWE list and the circumstance of its general lack of consideration as serious literature, imagined the book as more oriented towards children, or at least adolescents, with considerable sugar-coating or romantic treatment of its subject, but in fact the routinely sadistic abuses and executions that are inflicted on members of the royal harem and other slaves are depicted quite graphically, to the point really that you find yourself asking, "Why is this English woman staying here and continuing to work in this environment anyway?" The book is genuinely interesting, for the most part--it may be slightly too long in the sense that a couple of episodes perhaps could have been left out. It is in the main episodic, without a tight thread of a central plot or action driving the characters forward and together, which style I don't mind, only that some episodes are more compelling than others. Many of the minor characters, both Siamese and European, will crop up again in a later episode a hundred pages or more after they had previously appeared, and whether this is due to advancing age and declining memory or not I have trouble remembering them when they reappear. I could use one of those lists of characters that often appear after the table of contents in Dickens or Tolstoy novels, in which books, ironically perhaps, I never have trouble keeping the characters straight or remembering who they are.
Not knowing anything about Siam in this time period, even its relation to European colonial aggression, I thought Landon did a good job in sketching a general outline of this through the character of the king's correspondence with Western governments, the introduction to the very small expatriate communities centered around the British and American and French consulates, and the handful of highlighted instances and crises of mainly French agitation against Siamese territory. It attests to some skill in the author that after witnessing King Mongkut having people burned to death and tortured and thrown into dark dungeons for interminable periods of time for trifles mostly related to a lapse of absolute self-effacement in deference to his Majesty that this reader was able to feel sympathy for him when the French representatives are applying pressure to him to accede to various outrageous demands. I am reminded, as I often am in old books written by English speakers, of the brusque arrogance of the French ruling classes in the days when that country was a world power. Of course the French have retained a reputation for hauteur and snootiness into our own time, but it lacks something of the force, as well as the seething visciousness, that this characteristic is depicted as possessing in these old books. I have no doubt that the British in their heyday were no less obnoxious and condescending after their own fashion, though the effect on reading about it is usually not so pronounced, even in the most nationalistic of the Irish writers; and on the whole they don't seem to have inspired quite the thorough degree of visceral hatred in the people they have formerly abused or made to feel inferior as the French (this is not to say that a visceral hatred does not exist, I merely postulate that it does not attain the same intensity as that directed towards the French).
Given that this book is 1) written by a woman; 2) is about a woman, and one who actually existed and was independent and seems to have been possessed of considerable pluck; 3) takes place in a non-Western country and seems to attempt to give an accurate presentation of the nature of life there; and 4) has at the very least some claim to literary distinction as much I think as other books that are considered to be important, my impression is that it is not widely read or remembered today. Is it somehow too racially offensive or insensitive or otherwise politically problematic? Landon, presumably writing through, or guided by the spirit of Anna Leonowens, was at least on the right side of history in thoroughly denouncing slavery and European colonialism, though by the end of World War II when the book was published these views were not terribly out of the mainstream. The Siamese or Thai people are treated I think with seriousness, though the repressive, authoritarian society that predominated in the palace does not show the country in a flattering light; I have no reason however to suspect it was not broadly accurate. Students of White Privilege would have a field day with Anna Leonowens, as she wields this status or aura throughout her stay in Thailand like one of the European gunboat cannons that so terrifies King Mongkut. All of the Siamese people have to spend half their lives in various forms of simpering prostration and submission to the wills of whoever ranks above them and can be tortured or killed on a whim, but Anna is perfectly confident to walk into this brutal environment and declare that none of these customs apply to her (which, as it turns out, is largely correct). Anna also has in her a considerable amount in her of the now notorious but at that time largely unconscious White Woman Savior complex when placed among people whose culture and enlightenment have not yet attained to the level favored by the European upper middle classes. Much is made in the book of her determination, through her teaching the future princes and other ministers of the Siamese state, to impress upon them certain European humanistic ideals the lack of which were especially offensive to her in the Siamese court, which had the result, according to the book, that when her pupil Prince Chulalangkorn ascended the throne, he abolished slavery and the more outrageous customs of prostration throughout his domains, this being credited to the influence of Anna. So this might be too much European righteousness for modern readers to take.
I found a very nice wartime copy of the book, with its lighter paper and increased words per page per the restrictions of that period, at my nearby used book barn. It has charming illustrations at the beginning of each of the forty chapters, as well as a quaint map of Bangkok in the 1860s. This edition must have been the one that sold the most copies, since I see on the internet that this is the one that most of the people who read the book have.
Example (sort of) of the illustrations in the book. I assume there must be a Blogger app I can put on to post pictures from my phone, since I have a phone now. I need to figure out how to do this so I can just out on my own pictures from now on.
Strictly as a point of curiosity to me, Margaret Landon lived to the age of 90, dying on December 4, 1993 in Alexandria, Virginia (this, incidentally, was the same day that Frank Zappa died). It's curious to me because I would have been a senior at college at that time in Annapolis, only about 40 miles away. This day was a Saturday near the beginning of the Christmas holidays, so it possible that I played a basketball game that afternoon and I almost certainly went to a party that evening. I don't remember exactly what happened on that day but I can surmise that it was probably a pretty good one as far as days in my life go. It's one I would be willing to live over again.
Rex Harrison rocks the role of the king in the 1st film version of Anna.
The Challenge
Among the magic words in the synopsis of Anna and the King of Siam were frequent repetitions of "slave", "ransom" and similarly grim terms, which led to a rather lackluster field for the tournament this time.
1. Exodus: Gods and Kings (movie)........................................................2,837
2. Her (movie)..........................................................................................1,569
3. Anna and the King (movie).....................................................................363
4. Marylu Tyndal--The Ransom..................................................................244
5. Sharon Penman--A King's Ransom.........................................................215
6. Travels of Marco Polo.............................................................................150
7. Shakespeare's Sonnets (Arden Edition, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones).....86
8. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.......................55
9. People's Almanac #2.................................................................................15
10. Edward D. Johnson--The Handbook of Good English............................13
11. Complete Works of Lord Byron...............................................................11
12. Frances Calderon de la Barca--Life in Mexico.........................................8
13. Grand Funk Hits (record).........................................................................6
14. Sword and Sorcery: The Divine and the Defeated...................................5
15. Deidre Knight--Parallel Fire....................................................................5
16. Evelyn Anthony--The Cardinal and the Queen........................................3
Michael Millner's Fever Reading procured no points and thus failed to qualify for the championship. However it did have a naked woman overwrought from her reading on the cover, so it gets an honorable mention here.
1st Round
#16 Anthony over #1 Exodus
#15 Knight over #2 Her
#3 Anna and the King over #14 Sword and Sorcery
Breaking my usual rule about movies not being able to beat books because I am not counting the Sword and Sorcery thing as a real book.
#4 Tyndal over #13 Grand Funk
I don't really like any Grand Funk songs.
#5 Penman over #12 Calderon.
Calderon should have won in a cakewalk over this genre book. but Penman had an upset in reserve.
#6 Polo over #11 Byron.
Complete works of poets don't really fit in with the Challenge in the way that I read these books, in Byron's case especially, as a couple of his longer poems are on the regular list in their own right. The Polo book interests me somewhat.
#10 Johnson over #7 Shakespeare.
I am giving it to Johnson by a hair, as my library does not have the Arden edition of the Shakespeare.
#8 Equiano over #9 People's Almanac #2.
Final 8
#16 Anthony over #3 Anna and the King
#4 Tyndal over #15 Knight.
Neither of these books registers anywhere in the New Hampshire State Library database.
#10 Johnson over #5 Penman.
#8 Equiano over #6 Polo.
The Equiano book, which appears to be a slave narrative, is almost 200 pages shorter than the edition of Polo that is available to me.
Final 4
#16 Anthony over #4 Tyndal
#8 Equiano over #10 Johnson
Championship
#8 Equiano over #16 Anthony.
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