Sunday, September 1, 2002		Books

Celebration of the world’s wilder places & people
Deepika Gurdev

A Mad World, My Masters
by John Simpson Pan Macmillan: . Pages 436. $20 (Singapore)

WHEN I come across a book this splendid, I don't stay up all night, turn page after page in breathless anticipation of reaching the very end. Strangely enough, I spend the next month or sometimes even two poring over every little bit of information that may or may not have been gleaned off the pages.

Some of my impressions about John Simpson's A Mad World, My Masters are a bit coloured because I went on to the sequel before embarking on his earlier work Strange Places, Questionable People. All those who have read the first one, highlight some of the repetitive events that figure in A Mad World.

Now, what makes this book immensely appealing is its frank forthrightness and brutal honesty. That's precisely why when the author makes a clean breast of his mistakes and human failings, which range from being slapped by former UN Chief Kurt Waldheim and Harold Wilson, making a grand entrance with his pants virtually ripped apart in a stadium full of people with the Queen of England as the Guest of Honour, he comes across as the kind of person even the Mujahideen can talk to.

The errors of his life are as diverse as his television stories. He speaks at length about getting the wrong interview for a story out of Africa, missing a major riot coverage in Santiago, Chile, all because his camera person Bob Prabhu wanted to get the perfect fish fix at a suburban restaurant he's heard of. What's even funnier is that when Simpson scripts a story to wire pictures, his editors think of sending it for some top awards.

As he admits:"Working for television has its own difficulties, its own demands, which are quite unlike those of any other medium. And it generates its own anecdotes, which are also sui generis. The mistakes of television news are particular to television; so is the kind of embarrassment it gives rise to."

It’s this candour from BBC's top foreign correspondent that makes his persona of an author even more charming than his screen one. John Simpson has been at the epicentre of many of the world's flashpoints for more than 30 years. Afghanistan, Belgrade, Hong Kong, Baghdad; you name it, he's been there. And what's more, he hasn't just met the great and the good, such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, he's met the top bogey men, too. But none of it has fortunately gone to his head.

He's had the world's prime terror suspect, Osama bin Laden offering $500 to Afghan guerrillas for his head. Of course, what pained him was not the fact that Osama wanted him dead, rather that his life’s was just worth 500 dollars.

The stories he tells, span a wide range:Comic, tragic, horrific, reflective, lyrical and at times even spooky.

He's interviewed the flatulent Colonel Gadhafi who hilariously keeps breaking wind during the interview. For those of you who find it unbelievable, well there are pictures in the book that bear testimony to that.

His extraordinary experiences include stories about a television camera that killed people. And his personal tribute to legendary journalist Martha Gellhorn is vivid and touching enough to make me put her at the top of my reading list.

Then there is the Serbian warlord Arkan. Simpson cleverly squeezes an interview out of him by referring to a rival TV station "as the McDonald's of broadcasting." Needless to say, that was quite enough to have Arkan rushing to the BBC stage.

Of course, he also gets up close and personal with America's enemy number one Saddam Hussein before being thrown out of the country in more important times.

And he's one of the first people in the entire world to usher in the new millennium on Millennium Island, which the Kiribati Government claimed, just squeezed inside the international dateline.

Small wonder, then, that Simpson is brimming over with stories and great ones at that. He clearly disregards chronology and sticks to some plain old-fashioned story-telling, with sections on villains, spies, icons et al. But nothing escapes his sharp journalistic eye.

So when he went to interview the allegedly man-eating Emperor Bokassa in Paris, he manages to sneak a look inside his giant deep freeze to see if there were any human body parts. But all he finds is stuff normal human beings eat.

Even though the novel races seamlessly from anecdote to anecdote, the underlying message is that of a global malaise.

Simpson has been to places in the world I for one will never go to, he has met people I wish I could always understand—he succeeds in bringing these people and places to life, humouring you where appropriate but never taking the moral high ground in the name of political correctness or fame.

And that's just one of the many reasons that makes this hugely successful volume of writing a celebration of some of the world's wilder places and people.