Scan barcode
A review by fionnualalirsdottir
The Village in the Jungle by Leonard Woolf
There’s been a ferocious heat-wave where I live, with temperatures reaching degrees unheard of for decades. In a kind of sympathetic mirroring of such torrid days, my reading path took me from one blistering hot village in a jungle to another, from George Orwell’s Kyautada to Leonard Woolf’s Beddagama - in the heart of Ceylon, now Srilanka.
Both books were written in the early decades of the twentieth century and both are based on experiences gained by the authors while working as government agents in colonial outposts. Both authors show an awareness, unusual for the time, of the problems of British Imperialism. But the two books couldn’t be more different in how the themes are dealt with. Most people are familiar with Orwell’s [b:Burmese Days|1072932|Burmese Days|George Orwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1360566162l/1072932._SY75_.jpg|1171545], set around the lives of a tiny white community in Kyautada in Burma and written in the tradition of Forster’s [b:A Passage to India|45195|A Passage to India|E.M. Forster|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421883612l/45195._SY75_.jpg|4574850], or Conrad’s [b:Heart of Darkness|117837|Heart of Darkness|Joseph Conrad|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1317686353l/117837._SY75_.jpg|2877220], that is, almost entirely from the perspective of the coloniser.
Fewer readers have heard of Woolf’s tale of Sinhalese village life, told entirely from the point of view of the local villagers, and in a voice that sounds more like oral history than a written account by an outsider. [b:The Village in the Jungle|50204|The Village in the Jungle|Leonard Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347510886l/50204._SY75_.jpg|49051] is a particularly poetic telling, full of careful but beautiful word choices and a nice emphasis on the rhythm of the sentences. Many Sinhalese words are used, the author feeling no need to translate them, and those, along with the local names for the people and the places, add to the beauty and authenticity of the reading experience.
The book begins with a tribute to the jungle, to its animal life and its deities, the jungle as a place to be respected and feared:
All jungles are evil, but no jungle is more evil than that which lay about the village of Beddagama. If you climb one of the bare rocks that jut out of it, you will see the jungle stretched out below you for mile upon mile on all sides. It looks like a bare sea, over which the pitiless hot wind perpetually sends waves unbroken, except where the bare rocks, rising above it, show like dark smudges against the grey-green leaves...It was a strange world, a world of bare and brutal facts, of superstition, of grotesque imagination; a world of trees and the perpetual twilight of their shade; a world of hunger and fear and devils, where a man was helpless before the unseen and unintelligible powers surrounding him.
And so the scene is set, and the reader anticipates danger from the jungle, but before very long, it is people, and not only the village people themselves but those who come from outside, who prove to be the real danger.
The book raises a lot of questions about the laws of human society and the contrast with the laws of the jungle. It also questions whether a people can always live in their own place, never stepping outside of it, resistant to all change.
Woolf doesn’t offer any opinions, keeping to the facts of his story so that we, the readers, are forced to analyse the happenings of the tale for ourselves and to draw our own conclusions if we can. The skill he shows in creating a story that could pass for a genuine folktale is very admirable; I don’t know of any writer who has managed that feat before or since.
Leonard Woolf was married to Virginia Woolf, to whom he dedicated this story of jungle life: I’ve given you all the little that I’ve to give; you’ve given me all, that for me is all there is. So now I just give back what you have given - if there is anything to give in this.
According to Christopher Ondaatje, who wrote the afterword to this edition, Woolf, after writing this book and a small volume of short stories, gave up the idea of pursuing a career as a fiction writer, preferring to write more lucrative political and journalistic pamphlets which he published in the Hogarth Press, founded with his wife in 1917, as well as a five-part biography which he wrote in the sixties. Ondaatje concludes the afterword in this way: His own writings were inevitable overshadowed by the writer acknowledged to have been one of the two great modern innovators of the novel in English.
Ah, Joyce. My books often nod to each other from across the room.
Both books were written in the early decades of the twentieth century and both are based on experiences gained by the authors while working as government agents in colonial outposts. Both authors show an awareness, unusual for the time, of the problems of British Imperialism. But the two books couldn’t be more different in how the themes are dealt with. Most people are familiar with Orwell’s [b:Burmese Days|1072932|Burmese Days|George Orwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1360566162l/1072932._SY75_.jpg|1171545], set around the lives of a tiny white community in Kyautada in Burma and written in the tradition of Forster’s [b:A Passage to India|45195|A Passage to India|E.M. Forster|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1421883612l/45195._SY75_.jpg|4574850], or Conrad’s [b:Heart of Darkness|117837|Heart of Darkness|Joseph Conrad|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1317686353l/117837._SY75_.jpg|2877220], that is, almost entirely from the perspective of the coloniser.
Fewer readers have heard of Woolf’s tale of Sinhalese village life, told entirely from the point of view of the local villagers, and in a voice that sounds more like oral history than a written account by an outsider. [b:The Village in the Jungle|50204|The Village in the Jungle|Leonard Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347510886l/50204._SY75_.jpg|49051] is a particularly poetic telling, full of careful but beautiful word choices and a nice emphasis on the rhythm of the sentences. Many Sinhalese words are used, the author feeling no need to translate them, and those, along with the local names for the people and the places, add to the beauty and authenticity of the reading experience.
The book begins with a tribute to the jungle, to its animal life and its deities, the jungle as a place to be respected and feared:
All jungles are evil, but no jungle is more evil than that which lay about the village of Beddagama. If you climb one of the bare rocks that jut out of it, you will see the jungle stretched out below you for mile upon mile on all sides. It looks like a bare sea, over which the pitiless hot wind perpetually sends waves unbroken, except where the bare rocks, rising above it, show like dark smudges against the grey-green leaves...It was a strange world, a world of bare and brutal facts, of superstition, of grotesque imagination; a world of trees and the perpetual twilight of their shade; a world of hunger and fear and devils, where a man was helpless before the unseen and unintelligible powers surrounding him.
And so the scene is set, and the reader anticipates danger from the jungle, but before very long, it is people, and not only the village people themselves but those who come from outside, who prove to be the real danger.
The book raises a lot of questions about the laws of human society and the contrast with the laws of the jungle. It also questions whether a people can always live in their own place, never stepping outside of it, resistant to all change.
Woolf doesn’t offer any opinions, keeping to the facts of his story so that we, the readers, are forced to analyse the happenings of the tale for ourselves and to draw our own conclusions if we can. The skill he shows in creating a story that could pass for a genuine folktale is very admirable; I don’t know of any writer who has managed that feat before or since.
Leonard Woolf was married to Virginia Woolf, to whom he dedicated this story of jungle life: I’ve given you all the little that I’ve to give; you’ve given me all, that for me is all there is. So now I just give back what you have given - if there is anything to give in this.
According to Christopher Ondaatje, who wrote the afterword to this edition, Woolf, after writing this book and a small volume of short stories, gave up the idea of pursuing a career as a fiction writer, preferring to write more lucrative political and journalistic pamphlets which he published in the Hogarth Press, founded with his wife in 1917, as well as a five-part biography which he wrote in the sixties. Ondaatje concludes the afterword in this way: His own writings were inevitable overshadowed by the writer acknowledged to have been one of the two great modern innovators of the novel in English.
Ah, Joyce. My books often nod to each other from across the room.