BIOGRAPHY

the spectacle of someone getting on too fast and displaying professional confidence without paying for it the hard way set the derision mechanism in motion. Praise for his ventures became increasingly grudging, and comment on his personal life and fondness for employing old chums increasingly snide. When he took leave of Shakespeare for some less than triumphant work in Hollywood, his English critics seized their chance to put the boot in. Not so his American critics, who saw Branagh not as an overreaching upstart but as a man of talent getting on with his career. The picture of Branagh that emerges from this book is of a working-class Belfast boy who arrived on the scene fully formed as an actor and unshakeably confident of his mission to popularise Shakespeare; a confidence he promptly demonstrated by running an unsubsidised theatre company at a profit, and grasping the art of filmmaking at the first attempt. Not all his subsequent work has measured up to his opening standard, but he has never been seriously thrown off course and has already filmed more Shakespeare than any previous director, while remaining a freelance actor who will give himself body and soul to other people’s projects. White has talked to Branagh’s past colleagues, from whom the overwhelming opinion is that he is a nice chap, a magnificent leader, and an artist-entrepreneur who has opened many new eyes to Shakespeare and given fruitful employment to many actors. The most revealing comment on the Anglo-American issue comes from Christopher Godwin: ‘He has a lot of qualities that the British hate in Americans – his naked ambition, his relentless chirpiness, his optimism. And people in Britain hate him even more because he found commercial and critical success in Hollywood with Shakespeare.’ Even allowing for the partialities of the acting profession, you close this book feeling that White has upheld his case and that it is our undeserved good luck that its subject is still around. If the biographer’s role were simply that of a character witness, then White could be said to have done the job. If it is to tell the story of a particular individual’s development, then he has left it unfinished. The raw materials are there, and if you join the dots what stands out is the theme of leadership. Branagh figures simultaneously as a man of innate authority and a specialist in leadership roles. The pattern runs through his career from the filming of Henry Vto his 2002 television appearance in Charles Sturridge’s Shackleton, where, besides playing the explorer, he also responded to the hazardous Arctic conditions by becoming a morale-boosting leader to the whole production team. The other side of the heroic coin is Branagh’s poor showing as a villain. White quotes him on Iago (driven by the sense of rejection), and Richard III (driven by the longing ‘to be like everyone else’), suggesting that he sees negative characters as decent people undone by one of life’s dirty deals. Evil as

such is not on the agenda. Perhaps Branagh got under the skin of Heydrich in the television film Conspiracy in 2001, but from what I recall of his Richard III at Sheffield later that year, it lacked all sense of danger. No doubt there are better ways of joining the dots, but they barely join at all in White’s narrative, which fanfares Branagh in to an endless chord of C major and amounts less to a story than to a chronological sequence of rigidly formulated production notes (first plans, fundraising, rehearsal, press response, box-office take), punctuated with progress reports on the career so far. On film, White is well informed and clearly writing from personal observation. On the theatre there is no telling whether he has seen the shows or not; also he has placed himself in the awkward position of characterising the English critics as biased while relying on them to describe what it was like on the night. Frequent allusions to ‘booming’ and ‘gushing’, and sentences like ‘the pundits of the Press were no less enthused’, do nothing to get him out of this trap. The reader’s trust in his theatrical know-how is further undermined by the reference to Ian McDiarmid as someone who would ‘help to run’ the Almeida, and to Love’s Labour’s Lost as an ‘obscure’ comedy whose minor-key ending ‘can sound a jarring note’. But there I go, falling into the English disease. Mr White, you have written an honest book about a good man. Welcome to the club.

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006 FOREIGN PARTS

R AYMOND S EITZ

A PRESIDENTIAL TREK

T HE R IVEROF D OUBT : I NTOTHE U NKNOWN A MAZON

★By Candice Millard (Little, Brown 430pp £18.99)

O N 27 F EBRUARY , 1914, former president Theodore Roosevelt and a party of twenty-one set off in canoes from the headwaters of the Rio da Duvida – the River of Doubt – in the jungles of the great Amazon Basin. The waters of the river twist and tumble northwards from the Brazilian Highlands along a course which eventually pours into the western branch of the Aripuanã, and then on to the mighty Amazon itself. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Amazon Basin was the largest swath of terra incognitaon the planet. Africa by comparison was an open book. The richness and diversity of Amazonian flora and fauna had barely been revealed, and Indian tribes in the dark interior of the jungles were Stone Age cultures scratching out a harsh life in virtual isolation. The ‘doubt’ about the Rio da Duvida was where it flowed and whether it existed at all. No one had ever travelled its course from one end to the other. It’s not the sort of thing that former American presidents usually do. But Roosevelt was an exception to almost every rule. The naturalist John Burroughs once commented that when Roosevelt came into a room, ‘it was as if a strong wind had blown the door open’. His forceful, ‘bully’ personality, his energetic and determined character, his boundless curiosity and his restless energy regularly sought adventure as a testing outlet. And it was the pattern of his life that he coped with bouts of disappointment or sorrow by stretching his physical endurance to the limit. In 1914, Roosevelt was indeed disappointed. A year and a half earlier he had lost his bid for the presidency, having left it only four years earlier. In the process, he had bolted from the Republican Party, formed his own Progressive Party, and skewed the election by splitting the conservative vote. The result was to open the door of the White House to the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson. Many Republicans saw Roosevelt as a wrecker, and in 1914 the indomitable Rough Rider was a wounded man. Another adventure was in order. When Roosevelt and his entourage of friends, associ

Holiday planning

ates and scientists arrived in Brazil, he had only the vaguest notion of where an expedition might take him, and he had paid scant attention to the preparations (when dockworkers had finished unloading the supplies, one of them commented, ‘Nothing lacking but the piano’). The American Museum of Natural History had endorsed his journey and funded some of it, but the exact destination remained undecided. It was another extraordinary character who excited Roosevelt’s imagination by proposing an exploration of the River of Doubt. This was the diminutive Brazilian colonel, Cândido Rondon. Rondon had traversed more of the Amazon Basin than anyone had even dreamed. A stern disciplinarian and resolute leader who personally exceeded all he asked of his men, Rondon was in charge of building Brazil’s ‘Strategic Telegraph’ across the vast country (when completed, this colossal project was immediately overtaken by wireless communication). In the process he had filled in many cartographical blanks and come to know the jungle intimately. He was also Brazil’s first great advocate for the protection of his country’s Indian population. His men operated under his strict dictum: ‘Die if you must, but never kill.’ Concerned for the ex-president’s welfare, the Brazilian authorities assigned Rondon to accompany Roosevelt, and together the two men became joint leaders of the expedition. As soon as their trek started across the Brazilian Highlands, it became obvious that the procession was much too unwieldy. Mules and oxen died in their dozens, and the party gradually sloughed off provisions, equipment – including, to their later regret, the sturdy lightweight Canadian canoes – and people. By the time they reached the Duvida’s headwaters, the Roosevelt-Rondon subordinates had been cut back to Roosevelt’s son Kermit, Rondon’s adjutant Lt Lyra, the American ornithologist George Cherrie, a Brazilian doctor named Cajazeira and sixteen camaradas– leather-tough porters and paddlers. From the beginning the journey downriver proved arduous, hazardous and downright hair-raising. The seven native dugouts weighed more than a ton each and barely rose above the water line. Worse, the river threw up one set of roiling rapids after another, and some form of portage through the fetid jungle was necessary almost every day. Three boats were lost against the rocks and provisions quickly ran low. One camaradadrowned in the tumultuous waters. In the entire month of March, the party covered a mere sixty-eight miles. Other threats abounded: venomous snakes, poisonous

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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