Ruffian Dick: A Novel of Sir Richard Francis Burton
Famously, Sir Richard Francis Burton’s staid widow burned all his papers upon his death; she knew what the famous not-so-Victorian explorer, early anthropologist, amazing linguist, translator of scandalous eastern erotica and rogue was capable of. This novel imagines the discovery in our own day of scorched pages of a journal discovered in the ruins of the British Consulate in Trieste, where Burton served as ambassador. I question the use of Carbon-14 dating in an object so recent; that may be an addition of the second author, Enright, who has taken over the manuscript Kennedy, a life-long archeologist, left incomplete upon his death.
In any case, the journal proves to be the infamous gentleman’s account, spared from the holocaust, beginning during his thwarted search for the source of the Nile. An African seer instructs Burton that he must go to a wild and untamed land for his next adventure, and so he does – to the US in its infancy in search of that notorious practitioner of exotic sexuality, Brigham Young. Episodic with sometimes unclear disappearances of characters and frustratingly brief encounters, Burton’s adventures show the seamiest side of the frontier, from voodoo queens and yellow fever epidemics to man’s inhumanity to man, slave owners white and black, natives and settlers. Ancient Old World cultures known to Burton previously at least had rules. Those who came to claim the “virgin” land were those who wanted to escape rules and did so with abandon.
