The genre of the Quest can be traced back to Homer, via Tony Hawks, Gerald Durrell, Robert Byron and Arthurian legend, among many, many others.
(Tony Hawks’ quest was Playing the Moldovans at Tennis, published in 2007.) A Quest book should be a quirky search in which the telling is more important than the outcome and I’ve just started a cracker. James Lees-Milne, reviewing it in the Spectator, predicted it would “become a minor classic”. A good quest involves travel-writing of a high order, comedy and usually a good dollop of history served up digestibly.
I had lunch in China in the early 1980s. I like that sentence. I was on one of two trips to Hong Kong to visit my cousins. I revelled in their colonial life style: a big flat up on the cloudy Peak, cars, boats, servants … heady stuff for a poor commodity broker in his 20s. The lunch was an organised day trip across the border into rural China, to what is now Shenzhen, a city with a population of 12.5 million.
Tony Scotland went to China for rather longer in 1981, accompanying the BBC Symphony Orchestra while working for Radio 3. He went back in 1991 as a writer on a quest and the result is The Empty Throne, The Quest for an Imperial Heir in the People’s Republic of China. Lees-Milne got it right; it’s a minor masterpiece that brings cheer in these times when only virtual travel is practicable. He writes of the changes in the decade between ‘81 and ‘91 but now that reads like history. I went back in 2013 and saw a different country. One thing hadn’t changed – the complications of buying a train ticket. Tony, in 1991, needed all the assistance of his charming, bungling interpreter, Loud Report. In 2013, Ian and I had similar problems although the train from Beijing to Shanghai was speedy and comfy, neither of which were on offer in 1991.
I am only on page forty, so maybe there will be a reveal as to why Tony took on this quest but I’m happy to accompany him and Loud Report as they search for the heir to the Dragon Throne. They are an irresistible pair in the tradition of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; Phileas Fogg and Passepartout; Holmes and Watson; Bertie and Jeeves. An added bonus is a Foreward by Patrick Leigh Fermor, that most reluctant of writers, unless it was a letter to an aristocratic friend.
