As with so many of the best books, you are slightly perplexed when you begin to read Gunpowder Gardens. You open it expecting something run-of-the-mill, and as a result are not quite sure what's going on. Then suddenly you get onto the author's wavelength, and are soon flicking the pages over in delighted enthusiasm.
To think that this man has also written books on the US dollar (Greenback), on the Ottoman Empire (Lords of the Horizon), and on a walk from London to Istanbul! What pleasures would lie in store, if only you had the time.
The British writers he most resembles are Patrick Leigh Fermor (partly because he too wrote a famous book on a walk from London to southeast Europe, A Time of Gifts) and Jan Morris. But he's better than the first -- more idiosyncratic and quirky -- and almost as good as the second. What's certain is that anything Goodwin puts his name to will be worth reading.
Yet both the China and India travel sections of the book are rather protracted, bridges between the stylistic intensities of the Whampoa and London chapters. Goodwin is wonderful on the latter, as he is on the British and tea generally.
Tea was actually introduced into England 10 years after coffee, and throughout the 18th century was drunk weak and green. The strong, dark Indian tea was at first mixed with this, then marketed and drunk on its own.
With this, English tea-time -- "One lump or two?" -- was born, invented apparently by Anna, Duchess of Bedford who wanted an excuse for entertaining again in the dull vale between the social heights of lunch and dinner.
Before long the anglophile Henry James was to declare tea-time "an eternity of pleasure." Today, even the rule-bound British trade-unionist still demands his statutory tea-break. And during the World War II Blitz on London, the author asserts, a mug of hot, sweet tea in the air-raid shelters was proof that civilized values would prevail, come what may.
This is a successful book because it knows its limitations. Its author understands both how to ride on a rough bus in rural China, and how to use a top-quality reference library. He combines history and personal experience, and has an eye both for the amusing anecdote and the illuminating fact. In short, this book is well-paced, eye-catchingly amusing, engagingly written, and in every way a pleasure to read.
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