Biografi might have almost destroyed its author but it made Jones as a writer. Albania taught him how the novel could not only contain facts without being constrained by them, but it could invent details that would come to have the authority of facts. This is, for instance, how The Book of Fame, Jones’s novel based on the triumphant 1905 All Blacks rugby tour of Britain, works. The Book of Fame, a novel based on the idea of travel, makes liberal use of clippings, sports reports, team lists, diaries, shipping notes and the like.
A parallel dynamic creates the sombre truths of Mister Pip. Jones’s lost world of Bougainville begins in his Albania, a place of misapprehended stories, mistaken identities, and of invented people coming to life. Petar Shapallo—a fictional character with the job of pretending to be someone else—is the progenitor of Mr Watts, whose tragic destiny is to be confused with another fictional character, Pip from Great Expectations. Pip, in turn, seems more real to Matilda than her own mother.
The Book of Fame and Mister Pip are novels. We believe their worlds are real because we know they are made up. Perhaps we should do Biografi the same honour, and read it as a novel in the form of a travel book, a book including verifiable facts but with an appeal to the higher truth of fiction, which tells us not only how things are but how they might be too, if only we could imagine them.
Michael Heyward is the Publisher at The Text Publishing Company.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The letter offering Lord Inchcape the Albanian throne (pp 94–5) is reproduced from The men who would be King: a look at royalty in exile, by Nicholas Shakespeare, 1984.
Rose Wilder Lane’s description of Tirana (p. 25) is drawn from Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane: forty years of friendship letters 1921–1960, edited by William Holtz, 1991.
Other works consulted include:
Julian Amery, Sons of the eagle: a study in guerrilla war, 1948
Jon Halliday (ed.), The artful Albanian: the memoirs of Enver Hoxha, 1986.
Bernd Jurgen Fischer, King Zog and the struggle for stability in Albania, 1984.
Harry Hamm, Albania—China’s beachhead in Europe, 1963.
Gwen Robyns, Geraldine of the Albanians: the authorised biography, 1987.
Joseph Swire, Albania: the rise of a kingdom, 1929; and King Zog’s Albania, 1931.
Lloyd Jones, Biografi
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