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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In A. E. W. Mason's intriguing novel, "The Broken Road," readers are immersed in a complex narrative interweaving themes of adventure, identity, and the search for purpose. Stylistically rich and nuanced, the novel employs vivid imagery and intricate character development, showcasing Mason's ability to capture the essence of early 20th-century life. Set against the backdrop of diverse landscapes, from the English countryside to the bustling streets of London, the book intricately explores the psychological and emotional struggles of its protagonists, rendered with a depth that resonates with contemporary readers. Mason, a British author and playwright from the early 1900s, drew upon his own experiences and travels to craft this compelling tale. His background in literature and the arts, coupled with his time spent in the military during World War I, provided him with a unique perspective on the human condition, enriching his narrative. "The Broken Road" reflects Mason's fascination with the intersection of personal destiny and societal expectations, making it a profound exploration of the human experience. This thought-provoking novel is highly recommended for readers seeking a blend of adventure and introspection. Mason's engaging prose and richly developed themes invite readers on a journey through personal triumphs and challenges, ensuring that "The Broken Road" remains both relevant and evocative for generations to come. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Broken Road
Table of Contents
Introduction
Where ambition meets the edge of the unknown, every step forward tests the bonds that hold people together. A. E. W. Mason’s The Broken Road invites readers into a realm where landscapes are as demanding as the choices its characters must make. Without announcing its secrets outright, the novel establishes a climate of risk, promise, and moral tension. Travel, duty, and the allure of new horizons run alongside doubts, debts, and divided loyalties. From the first pages, one senses that progress will carry a cost, and that the path ahead—whether geographical or personal—will be as fractured as it is compelling.
The Broken Road is a novel by A. E. W. Mason, first published in the early twentieth century, and it belongs to the era’s robust tradition of adventure fiction. While the book’s action unfolds across remote frontiers and high ground, its concerns are equally social and psychological. The setting evokes outposts, passes, and borderlands characteristic of imperial contact zones, rendered with attention to atmosphere and tension rather than mere spectacle. In this context, Mason, a British novelist active across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, uses the trappings of exploration and administration to frame a story about character, choice, and consequence.
Without venturing into spoilers, the premise turns on a project and a journey that attempt to bridge distances—literal, political, and personal. Plans are drawn, paths are surveyed, and alliances are tested as the narrative traces the effort to connect what has long been kept apart. The title’s image of a broken road functions as an emblem for incomplete designs and interrupted intentions: progress is envisioned, but obstacles, both natural and human, refuse to be simple. Readers encounter meetings between travelers and residents, officials and outsiders, each bringing differing expectations to the same terrain, and discover a tale poised between movement and impasse.
At its heart, the novel probes the ethics of duty and ambition: who bears responsibility for progress, and at what human price. It weighs loyalty to friends against loyalty to institutions, suggesting how easily principles can be strained by pride, fear, or the urge to prove oneself. Questions of identity—education, upbringing, and belonging—surface as characters navigate competing codes of honor. Equally present is the theme of communication: misread signals, partial understandings, and the difficulty of speaking across cultures. The landscape amplifies these moral questions, turning every pass and precipice into a mirror for internal precipices that demand courage as much as skill.
Mason’s storytelling works through steady, crafted momentum rather than relentless spectacle. Scenes build with measured suspense, and the prose favors clarity, restraint, and occasional lyricism when it turns to wind, rock, and sky. Dialogue carries much of the drama, revealing temperament and intention while leaving room for what goes unsaid. The narrative voice remains observant and composed, attentive to nuances of gesture and silence, so that small decisions resonate as strongly as acts of daring. This balance—between action and reflection, plan and improvisation—gives the book a classical poise, encouraging readers to value discernment as much as daring.
Readers today may find in The Broken Road a lens for examining the promises and perils of expansion—whether technological, political, or personal. Its attention to infrastructure as symbol and to borderlands as testing grounds echoes current debates about connectivity, sovereignty, and stewardship. The story invites reflection on how goodwill can falter under pressure, how trust is built or broken, and how sympathy can counter the abstractions of policy. Even as the novel speaks from an early twentieth-century milieu, it raises durable questions about responsibility across difference, the uses of power, and the fragile routes by which people attempt to meet halfway.
Approached on its own terms, the novel offers an immersive period adventure shaped by moral inquiry and by the stubborn realities of terrain. Expect a narrative that welcomes patient attention: the satisfactions arrive through accumulation—glances, hesitations, a footfall on loose stone—until the stakes reveal themselves. Those drawn to landscape-driven fiction, to stories about the costs of ambition, and to examinations of cross-cultural encounter will find much to engage them here. The Broken Road remains compelling because it refuses easy triumph, preferring to follow the hard path by which ideals are tested and, sometimes, remade under pressure.
Synopsis
The Broken Road by A. E. W. Mason is a novel set on the North-West Frontier of British India, where a planned mountain road promises to link the empire with the remote state of Chiltistan. The book opens with an earlier generation’s attempt to drive a route through glaciers and gorges, an undertaking halted by politics and peril. From that effort grows a legacy: the road is more than stonework; it is a policy, a promise, and a test of will. This unfinished task frames the destinies of those who inherit its risks, drawing them toward a landscape where geography and loyalty are equally treacherous.
Richard “Dick” Linforth grows up in the shadow of that vision. His family ties him to the project and to the idea that the road must one day be completed. Trained for service and survey, he studies the techniques and endurance required to map the last miles to Chiltistan. Meanwhile, the British administration debates how far to press the frontier without provoking a storm. The road, visible on maps as a broken line, is both a practical need and a political statement. As Dick matures, his purpose is clear: to test the heights again and fasten the loose ends of policy and path.
Across the world, Shere Ali, heir to Chiltistan, is sent to England to be educated among those who plan roads and empires. He befriends Dick and moves through drawing rooms where courtesy and curiosity mingle with condescension. English life dazzles and isolates him in equal measure. In this setting he meets Violet Oliver, a poised and sympathetic Englishwoman, whose charm deepens his longing for acceptance. The relationship nourishes his hopes but exposes cultural limits he cannot ignore. While Dick pursues training with steady focus, Shere Ali’s studies become a mirror of divided identity, reflecting a homeland he barely recognizes and a society that never fully admits him.
When the scene shifts to India, the road’s prospects are again weighed against the temper of the hills. Dick joins frontier service, surveying ravines and ledges where one misstep can erase months of work. He learns the language of the valleys and the need for patience with chiefs and mullahs who guard their passes as fiercely as their traditions. Shere Ali returns to Chiltistan, greeted not by unity but by suspicion. His English polish marks him as both asset and stranger. In cantonments and a northern hill station, officials and visitors orbit the same question: can the road be pushed farther without breaking what it seeks to bind?
Violet Oliver travels to the hills and meets the frontier world at closer quarters. Her presence brings together the strands binding Dick and Shere Ali, and their meetings reveal competing readings of honor, gratitude, and promise. Misunderstandings intensify as public conduct and private feeling collide. The administration must balance hospitality with caution; personal motives must be measured against official duties. In that uncertainty, the road becomes a barometer of trust. Its embankments and culverts speak of order, yet every mile built carries implications for Chiltistan’s autonomy. The story traces these converging paths without adjudicating them, holding the focus on choices as they accumulate.
Tensions rise along the frontier. Agitators exploit religious and tribal loyalties, while rumor magnifies distance into danger. For the British, the partially built road is a vulnerable asset; for Chiltistan, it symbolizes intrusion even when offered as benefit. Dick’s surveys take him to snowfields where map lines must be carved from cornices and shale. Shere Ali, pressed by rival factions and his own pride, finds his allegiances tested in public and private. As the pressure mounts, a political calculation hardens into a personal trial. Each man moves toward the mountains with a separate aim, yet both are drawn by the same unfinished promise.
A high-country expedition becomes the novel’s pivot. Dick leads a small party to trace a practicable line through a notorious defile, trusting rope, ice-axe, and the goodwill of guides. The narrative tightens: gorges funnel wind, cornices break, and the void waits beneath narrow tracks. Signals are misread, help arrives late or not at all, and the weather turns from ally to judge. In this arena, Shere Ali acts decisively, aligning himself in a way that clarifies his position to friend and foe. The broken road now mirrors broken confidences, and the engineering problem acquires a human cost that no gradient can smooth.
The climax gathers in the heights, where the geography of the pass and the geography of loyalty intersect. A confrontation—born of long acquaintance and sharpened by recent affronts—forces choices that cannot be deferred. What began as policy becomes personal; what seemed a survey becomes a reckoning. The novel preserves the suspense of outcomes while making clear that whatever happens will shape Chiltistan’s future and the empire’s frontier posture. The road’s gaps are measured not only in yards but in trust. Decisions taken in snow and shadow throw consequences far down the valleys, across cantonments, and into drawing rooms once thought safely removed.
The resolution, withheld here to preserve discovery, affirms the book’s central idea: connections are costly, and broken bonds leave marks that outlast any milestone. The road’s destiny is set on a new footing, neither triumph nor collapse without remainder. Mason’s narrative underscores the limits of benevolent designs when they meet pride, faith, and memory, and it presents friendship as vulnerable to forces larger than itself. The Broken Road thus conveys a measured message: that the work of linking worlds is arduous, that identities divided by distance resist easy alignment, and that policies, however well mapped, must travel the fragile ground of human hearts.
Historical Context
Set largely on the North-West Frontier of British India in the late Victorian and early Edwardian years, the book unfolds in a high-mountain world of precipitous valleys and strategic passes linking the Indian plains to Central Asia. Mason’s fictional Chiltistan closely resembles Chitral–Gilgit country in the Hindu Kush and Karakoram, where tribal polities, princely households, and British political agents coexisted uneasily. The terrain—glaciers, snowbound cols such as Lowari or Shandur, and torrent-fed rivers—made roads feats of power as well as engineering. Scenes in England, with public-school and metropolitan milieus, frame the imperial metropole that dispatched officers, surveyors, and ideas to this militarized periphery during the 1890s–1900s.
The Great Game—Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia from the 1830s to 1907—provides the geopolitical climate. Russia’s southward advance seized Tashkent (1865), Samarkand (1868), Khiva (1873), and Kokand (annexed 1876), reaching Merv (1884) and provoking the Panjdeh crisis (1885) on Afghanistan’s frontier. Britain countered with the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1880) and a network of agencies in Gilgit and elsewhere, followed by boundary-making in the Pamirs and creation of the Wakhan Corridor (1895) as a buffer. The Anglo-Russian Convention (1907) then formalized spheres in Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet. The novel’s “Road” embodies this rivalry: a strategic artery imagined to project British reach to the very rim of Central Asia.
The 1895 Siege and Relief of Chitral most palpably shaped the world that Mason fictionalizes. After the death of the Mehtar of Chitral (Aman ul-Mulk, 1892), succession turmoil culminated in a siege of the British-led garrison at Chitral Fort in March–April 1895. Two relief columns were mounted: Major-General Sir Robert Low’s force pushed north from the Peshawar plain through the Malakand and Dir, while a smaller column under Colonel James Kelly marched in winter conditions from the Gilgit side over the Shandur Pass. Their convergent operations, fought across avalanche-prone heights and narrow defiles, dramatized the strategic importance—and fragility—of communication lines into the Hindu Kush. In the aftermath, British authorities consolidated control by improving tracks into engineered cart-roads where possible, stationing troops, and extending telegraph links to secure administration and deter external intrigue. The Chitral Scouts (raised in the early 1900s) and other Frontier Corps units were tasked with local security along this network. The very notion of a continuous, permanent road to the trans-Himalayan rim—difficult, expensive, and symbolically assertive—grew from these campaigns. Mason translates that historical impulse into the novel’s central project: a heroic but morally fraught enterprise to drive a road to the borderland kingdom of Chiltistan. The logistical dilemmas, seasonal barriers, and negotiations with hill chiefs in the story mirror the actual problems encountered by engineers and political agents. Equally, the political stakes in the narrative—concern that a rival power might exploit a rupture in frontier order—echo British fears exposed by the Chitral crisis. The siege thus functions as both historical precedent and imaginative template for understanding why the “Road” mattered to imperial planners and why it could also become a locus of resistance.
The 1893 Durand Line Agreement between Sir Mortimer Durand and Amir Abdur Rahman Khan demarcated a long frontier from the Hindu Kush toward Baluchistan, formalizing a zone of tribal agencies and buffer territories. The boundary—imperfectly surveyed and often contested on the ground—split kin groups and unsettled established routes. In 1901, Lord Curzon created the North-West Frontier Province by carving frontier districts from the Punjab, placing them under a tailored regime of political agents, militia, and punitive expedition capability. The novel’s Chiltistan echoes this ambiguous sovereignty: British officials negotiate roads and protection in a quasi-independent hill state whose loyalties are courted but never wholly secured.
The 1897 frontier rising—simultaneous outbreaks among the Swat, Mohmand, and Afridi tribes—tested imperial control. The Malakand Field Force under Sir Bindon Blood fought through July–August 1897, while the Khyber Pass closed amid Afridi attacks. The larger Tirah Expedition (1897–1898), led by Sir William Lockhart, traversed difficult highland terrain to chastise the Afridi and Orakzai, suffering heavy logistical strain. These events entrenched a lesson: suddenly mobilized, religiously inspired movements could sever communications in days. Mason’s depiction of rapid, cascading unrest and the vulnerability of a single mountain road to ambush or blockade channels the real tactical anxieties born of 1897.
Frontier strategy oscillated between the Forward Policy—projecting roads, posts, and influence into the hills—and the Close Border Policy—eschewing deep penetration. Under Viceroy Lord Curzon (1899–1905), the state leaned forward: NWFP reorganization (1901), reinforcement of local militias (Khyber Rifles, Chitral Scouts, Kurram Militia), and systematic investment in tracks, bridges, and telegraph. These measures aimed to reduce surprise and quicken troop movements. Mason, who served as Liberal MP for Coventry (1906–1910) while frontier budgets and policy were debated in Westminster, writes a road that is both technology and doctrine—the physical manifestation of a forward posture whose costs in men, money, and legitimacy the story weighs.
The education and political management of Indian elites formed another decisive context. From the Aligarh movement (Aligarh College, 1875) to the rising number of Indian students in Britain by the 1890s–1900s—alongside radical venues such as India House (London, founded 1905)—imperial policy encouraged Western training yet policed its consequences. Indians could enter the Indian Civil Service from the 1860s, but the London-based exam and social barriers limited numbers. On the frontier, princely rulers were bound by treaties and supervised by political agents. The novel’s Shere Ali, educated in England yet alienated upon return, embodies this contradiction: indoctrinated in British ideals, he collides with the racial hierarchies and strategic calculations governing his homeland.
Mason’s narrative functions as a critique of imperial paternalism and strategic technocracy. The road promises order and prosperity but also enacts dispossession, imposing routes that privilege garrisons over villages. Through Shere Ali’s exclusion and the condescension faced by colonial subjects educated to serve an empire that withholds equality, the book exposes the color bar, the fragility of “loyalty,” and the political instrumentalization of friendship. It questions the Forward Policy’s human cost: tribal autonomy narrowed, collective punishment normalized, and consent confused with coerced acquiescence. The “broken road” thus indicts a period when engineering projects and boundary lines aspired to mastery while failing to bridge the moral and social divides they deepened.
