A Rum Affair
   Karl Sabbagh
  1999 Farrar, Straus & Giroux NY USA
   ISBN: 0374252823


The mysterious Isle of Rum off the west coast of Scotland is the site of British botanist, John Heslop Harrison's discoveries of rare plant species which helped make him the outstanding scientist of his time. Many botanists, suspicious of the evidence, were unable prove anything as all investigations were buried deep in a university library.

Karl Sabbagh, an alumnus of King's College, Cambridge, saw an obituary for the senior classics tutor named John Raven who he vaguely remembered from his student years. Part of that obituary peaked Karl Sabbagh's interest:

“In 1954 he[John Raven] was at the centre of a curious episode. A reputable biologist had recorded finding, mainly on the Isle of Rhum,* several plants not previously found in Britain. The botanical world was surprised, not to say suspicious. John went to investigate. His report was deposited in Trinity College Library and has never been published...” *“Rhum” was the spelling used up to the 1970s.

For nearly two decades this elliptical story stuck in this author's mind until he ate lunch with a prominent botanist who reluctantly told him that the allegations of fraud investigated by Raven concerned a Professor John Heslop Harrison of Newcastle University. Now, having a name naturally acted as an enticement & off this author set on a tortuous, often thwarted yet wholly absorbing investigation of his own.

A Rum Affair is not simply an investigation about one particular gentleman in one particular field of science, it is about the history of amateur scientists, the times in which they lived & the clashes of egos in the arcane corridors of British universities during the 100 years in which Charles Darwin's theories shocked the world & scientific hoaxes were the talk of the town.

As Karl Sabbagh comments: “I have read a lot of scientific literature, although to call it literature in the usual sense of the word is to give it more credit than it deserves. Most scientific papers serve very specific purposes, and providing enjoyment to the reader is usually not one of them.”

Be prepared for a read of like humor. Set a match to the fire, put the kettle on & the cat out, brew a pot & settle back into your highback chair because A Rum Affair will take you to one of the most bleak, monotonous places on earth where a handful of mysterious & rare plants were “discovered” in the 1940s & were never seen again.

In a world where specialised terminology of science must merge effortlessly with the reality of messy mountains & earth, bogs & weather, Karl Sabbagh lits out on the trail of the morphology & placement of individual plants & their overall scheme in botanical classification. Then you meet George Bullough who actually owned the Island of Rum & you come across one astonishingly eccentric Briton! This is heady stuff! Liable to get a chuckle or two from even the most dour reader & what a twisted tail of enmity, suspicion & competition, in such a placid field of study!

A Rum Affair is for everyone who loves a good yarn about the humans who trample upon the natural world & the lengths to which they'll go to become immortals in their field! Fascinating!

More from Karl Sabbagh: The Living Body (with Christiaan Barnard); Skyscraper: The Making of a Building; Magic or Medicine?: An Investigation of Healing and Healers (with Robert Buckman); 21st-Century Jet: The Making and Marketing of the Boeing 777 & Power Into Art: Creating Tate Gallery Modern, Bankside.
(01/21/01)

Rebecca