The Ruby Point

There was an Old Person of Troy

Whose drink was warm brandy and soy

Which he took with a spoon,

By the light of the moon,

In sight of the city of Troy.

*

It may be a long way to Tipperary, but it’s a short way from Limerick to the South Africa of Giles Foden’s second novel, “Ladysmith.” The 19th century is drawing to a dangerous close in Ireland, and Leo Kiernan, a hotblooded Republican with two motherless daughters, is fleeing the famine and sectarian violence. For a while, Leo prospers quietly among his English neighbors in the town of Ladysmith in the mountains above Durban, running a hotel and raising Bella and Jane. Then suddenly his haven of choice becomes a city as safe as ancient Ilium in the days of brave Ulysses. For the Boers are coming. It is 1899 and the downtrodden Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch immigrants who settled the southern end of the continent more than 200 years earlier, are rising up against their British rulers.

Following closely the history of the 118-day siege of the town of Ladysmith, Foden, the author of the award-winning “The Last King of Scotland,’ has fashioned a novel that strives mightily to be the great historical novel of Natal, perhaps even the Zulu “War and Peace” that Saul Bellow has sought so assiduously. Foden, apparently, wrote the book after discovering copies of letters from his great-grandfather, who had been present at the siege. What was more distant he researched in the diaries of journalists and warriors who commemorated at length the struggle of those within and without the town.

The possibilities are promising. And indeed, the prologue of the book, in which the young Leo, working happily in a Dublin brewery, ponders the beauty of his labors, suggests that Foden’s meticulous research can indeed produce poetry. “If you hold the bottle up against the light as you pour it into the glass, you will see what colour Guinness really is. Just where the cheerful liquid flows over the lip of the bottle, you will see a beautiful deep colour glittering like a jewel. It is a moment in time, and it is called the ruby point. The landlord told me that.”

Sad to say, the poetry soon ends. The African sun rising in Chapter One illuminates a different “Ladysmith,” a ponderous bore that makes “The Iliad,” the account of that 10-year siege of the city of Troy, seem as airy and brief as a Wodehouse weekend in the country.

The fault lies not so much in the stories Foden drops on Kiernan, his daughters and the other characters. Although the novel focuses on Bella and the several sorties upon her maidenhead, there is a multicultural thoroughness to Foden’s docudrama that is more appropriate, perhaps, to a bar graph than a novel. So it is that we hear of the Boers as well as the British, the pacifists as well as the warriors. The educated journalists Nevinson and Steevens (who, in his delirium recites the above-cited limerick of Edward Lear) share space with their yellow comrades. Black families and Indian stretcher-bearers and a disappointed Portuguese barber get equal rations of ink if not bread. Even one of the juicier chapters--a nice piece of pornography involving a British soldier and an African girl--is balanced by a bit of homosexual titillation in the chapter following.

Foden’s thesis, one supposes, is that history is the sum total of all our stories, but only a novel can get the balance right. The real failure of “Ladysmith,” however, is a leaden seriousness that smashes characters into pancakes and language into parody. One wonders, only to pick a random rhetorical example from the final sentences of a few chapters, how a writer let pass the kind of dialogue that seems more at home in the strips of Roy Lichtenstein or the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Chapter 9: “ ‘So am I,’ said Nevinson, as the door closed. He went over to the water-jug to pour himself a glass to take upstairs, and found it empty. He held the iron jug in his hand and lifted it, weighing its emptiness, and once more said to himself, so am I.”

Chapter 15: “ ‘The important thing,’ Steevens said in his slow, trenchant voice as they discussed the war, ‘is that we are learning lessons every day from the Boer. We are getting to know his game, and learning to play it ourselves.’ ”

Chapter 20: “The soaked fruit made Nevinson think of wounds: the doctor from Torquay who had suffered on this very stoep. He raised his eyes from the scene, and looked up and down the calm and innocent facade of the hotel, one golden square after another; he looked--and saw in the tableau death, only death.”

Chapter 5: “ ‘I’ll look out for you at the front. What’s your name, by the way?’

“The Indian had taken off his glasses and was cleaning the lenses with a cotton handkerchief.

“ ‘Gandhi,’ he said. ‘Mohandas K. Gandhi.’ ”

Perhaps we are too jaundiced on this side of the pond to swallow this flavor of historical Bovril with straight faces. The National Lampoon and Austin Powers have drawn such florid mustaches onto the stiff upper lips of the old empire builders that we Americans can never again think of Gandhi or Winston Churchill (yes, he too plays a role in Foden’s drama) with the heroic seriousness that our grandparents gave them.

And woe betide any lesser subject who essays the rhetoric of his superiors.

“ ‘I’m with Thucydides, I’m afraid.’ ” Steevens says--and one can only imagine him cocking a Churchillian eyebrow. “ ‘On the Athenian Empire. It may seem wickedness to have won it. . . .’ A shell went off, but he continued speaking, without hesitation or change of tone. ‘ . . . but it is certainly folly to let it go.’ ”

Personally, I’m with Homer and Edward Lear. I’ll take warm brandy and Troy any day.