Gallions Reach

A story about a chap who has to cut and run from his job in some kind of a shipping company in the City of London, who ends up catching a ride on a steamer going to the Far East. The steamer goes down with modest loss of life after a storm in the Indian Ocean. The narrator winds up in Malaya on a hunt for tin in the jungle, from which he switches to trying to escort a famous but elderly ethnographer, on a hunt for the Garden of Eden (as it were), to safety. Ending up back in the Penang Hotel where he catches a ride home. Near 300 pages.

I now know that Penang is now a very busy and prosperous island off the west coast of Malaya, once a rival to Singapore. Also home to several world heritage sites. But no ‘Penang Hotel’ that I can find. Perhaps this hotel was in Singapore.

Having just finished this book, I think of other books about jungles that I have read from about the same time, including one by the present author and another by Lévi-Strauss. Perhaps, the Poles having been dealt with, the jungle was the last frontier – apart from Himalayan mountains.

A book old enough to have mould marks on the paper, that is to say close packed horizontal lines left by the wires of the moulds in which the paper was made. 

I shall now have another go, and see how it bears a second reading.

PS: Tomlinson was roughly contemporary with Galsworthy of Forsyte Saga fame. Younger than Conrad and older than Lawrence. I own a number of his books in consequence of my father’s eldest sister holding him in high regard. A chap whom I notice from time to time. Gallions Reach was his first novel.

References

Reference 1: Gallions Reach: A romance – H M Tomlinson – 1927.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/12/ss-rockingham.html. The first time, I think, that Tomlinson gets an outing in these pages.

Reference 3: https://www.pla.co.uk/assets/325MSC.pdf. Gallions Reach, as surveyed in 2011. The stretch of the Thames running between, say, Woolwich Arsenal and Beckton sewage treatment works.