Alexandria

Riveting True Adventure

Deserter Charles Masson learns of the lost city of Alexandria Beneath the Mountains and embarks on a quest across nineteenth-century India and Afghanistan in search of treasure, archaeology and derring-do.

Alexandria is an extraordinary tale worthy of Rudyard Kipling or H Rider Haggard. At its heart is a mystery as much about Masson the master of disguise, as about Alexander the Great’s lost city. This non-fiction is peopled by braggarts, warlords, thieves, kings, confidence-tricksters, spies and holy men.

Richardson proves himself a masterful storyteller and researcher of the history, land and cultures on which the incredible character of Masson left his mark. The author enriches the narrative with journal extracts and local proverbs. His love of the subject shines through every paragraph, and fully captivates the reader.

My thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for the ARC.

A fascinating, rip-roaring page-turner from start to finish.

I found it better to read this book in small bits, to really soak up the flavour. There is a huge sense of fun, of humour, entwined with the story of James Lewis, a deserter who was determined to find his Holy Grail, Alexandria. Renaming himself Charles Masson, he has the most incredible journeys, lands in apparently impossible situations and somehow comes through smiling.
Thanks to NetGalley for an amazing book to read and review. I waant to research Masson's life for myslef now.

If, like me, you were or are fascinated by the Great Game then this is definitely worth reading. It sits very happily beside Kim, Peter Hopkirk's books, Frank Burnaby and the many others of men's adventures in amongst the Himalayas in the 18th and 19th centuries.I was pretty certain I knew the name Charles Masson so when I started reading this I had no idea of his real identity. James Lewis, private of the East India Company simply couldn't bear being a soldier any longer so he walked out his barracks and became an outlaw. So he changed his name and followed his dream of trying to find one of Alexander's great cities. Poor and friendless for many years he travelled and scrabbled until he arrived at the great plain of Bagram - and that was his discovery at last. Through obsessive perseverance he uncovered such wonderful artefacts such as the Bimaran golden casket with its image of Buddha - the first known in the world. Charles Masson as James Lewis found fame and renown through his finds but he died penniless and forgotten overtaken by the political intriguing of the times of the Great Game as well as the theft of his papers. A beautifully written book and completely fascinating, the research must have taken years and I will read this over again because I loved it.

A rip-roaring rambunctious adventure of James Lewis, British deserter who went on a near suicidal search for one of the cities named Alexandria.

The book recalls a world where you could bluff your way through cultures with a little local knowledge, and a blustery confidence; Charles Massoon (the name James adopts) has so many adventures the tales almost appear in half light; you intellectually squint at them, marvelling at whether they are really true. They could not be so easily these days.

It's rare to find a book that so unashamedly yomps from one exciting moment to another: the book Thuggee which was set in the same period in India comes close but becomes boring with repitition, Alexandria, as a page turner, does not.

Charles Masson was unknown to me, until I read this book. This is a tale of social mobility and was extraordinary in this day and time period, when he found treasure, ie the golden casket, got a rich man to finance his excavations and lived a life undreamed of by the working class child he once was, with many hardships, that would have been the undoing of a less intelligent and determined man. He quickly learned to tell stories, and what is more he was believed. A rip roaring tale, that takes place mainly in India and Afghanistan.

This surprisingly delightful book provides sideways take on the Great Game, as played out in Afghanistan in the 1830s. Such early Anglo-Afghan encounters have long been a source of fascination - they are central to the first Flashman novel from as far back as 1968. Fans of Ben MacIntyre’s Josiah the Great will recognise many of the characters and the events. From long over-looked archival sources Richardson assembles the story of the archaeologist and unwilling spy, ‘Charles Masson’ (a pseudonym that James Lewis adopted when he deserted from the East India Company army).

There are a few notices of Masson in John Keay’s India Discovered, and it seems that the British Museum is beginning to reassemble Masson’s finds and appreciate his scholarly contribution. Richardson has done a lot of archival research to assemble this story, but he keeps all that for the footnotes; in the text he writes like a (good) novelist, enjoying his creative powers, and the book deserves to become a popular success.

In many ways reads like a picaresque novel with the hapless Masson lurching from the frying pan to the fire (and back), all the while driven by his sheer love of Afghanistan and its past. He is trying to discover and make sense of lost civilizations, as a war begins to rage around him. Like Flashman Masson is not pleased to be in the thick of the military action; like Josiah Harlan he is a man driven by a passion that gets him into trouble. Great stuff!