Biography:Here is fun for appreciation with special gusto by readers who regard royal dynasties as absurd anachronisms.
Philip Eade, a former London barrister and newspaper obituarist, a witty stylist, has made his first book a richly entertaining history of Sarawak, when that slice of Borneo between the China Sea and jungle was a private English fiefdom.
A Sultan of Brunei ceded Sarawak to James Brooke, whom Eade describes as "swashbuckling", in 1841, and the Brooke family ruled the toy raj for three generations, until 1946, with benign rapacity. They were as kind to the Malays, Chinese and headhunting Dyak tribesmen as if they were peasants on a feudal estate, and skimmed enough off the top of the national income to support their own aristocratic way of life. There were long holidays in England and winters in the Oriental sunshine.
Eade has astutely chosen to focus this story of regal luxury and decadence on the family's most bizarrely self-indulgent member, a daughter of the second Viscount Esher, Sylvia Brooke, the last ranee. Her highness was emotionally as high as a kite.
Her husband, Sir Vyner Brooke, the third and last rajah, did his best to maintain a semblance of royalty. When he appeared on foot in public, the official executioner sheltered him beneath a yellow umbrella, a traditional symbol of Sarawak sovereignty. The police brass band hailed him with the Sarawak national anthem, composed by his mother. His family had their own flag, currency and postage stamps.
When residing in Kuching, the capital, he walked daily from his miniature palace across the Sarawak River to the Courthouse, where he could exert the power of life and death over his 500,000 subjects. He humanely preferred not to impose capital sentences; he retained murderers to cultivate his garden. Occasionally he ordered his small army to undertake punitive expeditions against the Dyaks in the jungle, when their practice of cutting off rivals' heads and keeping them as souvenirs seemed excessive. Tribal chieftains, merchants and the general populace respected and liked him. When he progressed up and down the river in the royal barge, men, women and children lined the banks, loyally waving their handkerchiefs.
In spite of the rajah's public efforts to honour regal protocol, however, his family became a scandalous caricature of royalty. The Brookes' privileges degenerated into licentiousness. Sylvia tolerated her husband's flagrant promiscuity, and encouraged their daughters, the three princesses, to follow suit. Sylvia was friendly with local prostitutes.
Lord Esher, one of King Edward's most influential courtiers, deplored Sylvia's louche behaviour, in Sarawak and England. London's tabloid press lampooned the ranee and princesses as characters in "comic opera," "a music hall joke". "Dignity," Lord Esher told a friend, "does not enter her scheme of life." Stirling Boyd, the Chief Justice of Sarawak, wrote in a letter that "the amount of smut in her highness's conversation is unbelievable."
Eade's account shows that Sylvia was very foolish but not unintelligent. Among her literary friends were JM Barrie, George Bernard Shaw and Somerset Maugham. She herself published 11 books, including novels and an autobiography, Queen of the Headhunters, which was a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic - a title that Eade has been unable to improve on.
He relates details of Sylvia's family squabbles in vain attempts to check their kingdom's decline and fall, and skilfully incorporates Sylvia's melodrama in the historical context of the end of white colonial influence in the Far East. The Brookes stayed in England during the second World War, when Sarawak was occupied by the Japanese. There is grisly humour in Eade's account of headhunting there at that time. The Dyaks collected 1,500 Japanese heads. They kept the glasses on the head of Japan's local director of education, removing them daily only to wipe them.
After the war, the Brooke dynasty was restored but never quite recovered. The family ceded Sarawak to Britain, for a large fee, and Britain eventually ceded the territory to independent Malaysia.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic
Biography: Sylvia, Queen of the Headhunters By Philip Eade Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 362pp. £20