The Keepers of the People

FILIBUSTER

In the nineteenth century a filibuster was not a parliamentary delay but a private adventurer who invaded a foreign country with an armed band on his own account — the word belonged to William Walker in Nicaragua and to the Jameson Raid of 1895, which was two years old when Jepson wrote. It is the exact charge against Prince Melinsky, who proposes to take a brigade of Cossacks over the Oxus and make himself an emperor, and Althea levels it at him: "Filibustering is bad enough; but this is carrying filibustering too far!" (II.xiii).

The word matters because Jepson does not let his hero escape it. When Lord Lisdor pleads for the prisoners, Prince Ralph answers "With filibusters?" — and the Princess Agnes, who is right perhaps four times in the novel, is right here: "Filibusters! And what are you? Have you not made incursions into the land of all the peoples for hundreds of miles round, carrying off their goods and their women, whatever took your fancy!" Prince Ralph's reply is two words: "I was a raider." He does not deny it and the book does not soften it. The difference between the Prince and the filibuster, in Jepson's scheme, is not the violence but what the violence is for.

FAIRYLAND

Althea's word, and the novel's most sustained irony. She is thirteen, starved of company, living on library books, and when Ralph Falcon offers to take her away to Fairyland she answers that she is too old to believe in those kind of things. She wakes on a marble seat in a garden under a fountain and cries, "It is Fairyland! Really and truly Fairyland!"

It is. That is the point. Varandaleel really does have a fairy prince, a golden palace, an ivory couch, tigers in a garden, silent servants and a child who is called the Golden Lily by a people who believe she is a daughter of a god, and Jepson delivers every item of it without irony. Fairyland is also the place where a girl learns to shoot, to throw a knife, to watch a flogging without flinching, to suggest a painless method of killing six hundred men, and to put a pistol to the breast of the woman she loves best in the world. The word is never withdrawn. Althea uses it again near the end, without bitterness. Jepson's claim is that the two descriptions are of the same place, and the reader's difficulty with the book is, in the end, a difficulty with that claim.