THE READING RHEUM: THE GREEN EYES OF BAST (1920)

 SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I probably read THE GREEN EYES OF BAST some thirty or more years ago, thanks in large part to a series of Pyramid paperback reprints of Sax Rohmer's non-Fu Manchu works. I remember enjoying the novel, but this time around, my main reaction was that Rohmer had a great idea and wasted it in a pedestrian mystery novel.

The viewpoint character of BAST is London journalist Jack Addison, who has had some mostly unspecified experiences in Africa, though not enough to make him one of Rohmer's experts in exotica. He has a professional friendship with Scotland Yard Inspector Gatton, which is the main reason Addison gets in on the ground floor regarding a mysterious murder. This killing has personal ramifications for the reporter, because the victim is a man named Coverly, the cousin of an aristocrat who has become affianced to Addison's true love Isobel. Though Isobel has not yet married her intended, the experienced mystery-reader will anticipate that at some point the competing fiancee will get knocked off, leaving Addison's path to Isobel cleared. But though we don't learn the nature of the murderers for over a hundred pages, Rohmer teases the reader with intimations of a strange female watching Addison at his house. He sees the titular "green eyes" through his kitchen window and finds evidence that some intruder-- apparently female, due to leaving tracks from high-heeled shoes-- vaulted the wall around his house in order to gain access to his grounds.

After that intriguing opening, though, Rohmer fills lots of pages with dull ratiocinative exchanges between Addison and Gatton about the investigation, and those exchanges aren't helped by the dullness of both characters. Addison unknowingly encounters the green-eyed woman a couple of times, but Rohmer doesn't make her a compelling character either. Not until about page 90 does Addison meet the prime mover involved in both the murder and the mystery of the green-eyed female athlete. Doctor Damar Greefe is a Eurasian physician, ostensibly in service to one of the Coverly family, and like many of Rohmer's Oriental masterminds he is brilliant, reserved, and obsessed with an idee fixee.

The great idea Rohmer wastes is based on this folklore-notion that pregnant women can have their offspring affected by seeing certain animals. As the online Brittanica puts it:

An old wives’ tale that exists in several cultures suggests that when a pregnant woman looks at an unpleasant or ugly animal, her baby will take on a resemblance of that animal. 

As Greefe informs Addison and Gatton at the novel's close-- given that even by then they're nowhere near solving any mystery-- he, being a "hybrid" between white and not-white parents, became fascinated with evolutionary hybrids. In Egypt he found evidence of children born with animal-like characteristics, and his rationale, knowing that they were not sired by actual animals as in folklore, was to suppose that such people were "psycho-hybrids." He happens to be on hand when a British matron in Egypt gives birth to one such hybrid, after having met one of the strange wildcats that prowls around the long-deserted Temple of Bast, the Egyptian cat-goddess. Greefe tells the matron and her spouse-- two elder members of the Coverly family-- that the delivery is stillborn, when in fact Greefe absconds with the infant, precisely because she is one of the hybrids he's obsessed with, with cat-like eyes and cat-like reflexes. When the girl has matured, Greefe takes her to London so that he can blackmail her high-society parents. But during that sojourn, the cat-woman-- named Nahemah after a Jewish demon-- sees Addison from afar and falls in love with him. 

There's other stuff about who killed who and for what reason, but it's dull stuff. Nahemah, who being the "monster" behind the scenes ought to be the story's imaginative center, never comes alive. Does she regard Greefe as a father, before he informs her of her parentage? Rohmer tells us that she conceives a hatred for the Coverlys, knowing that she was denied her patrimony, but there are no scenes in which she directly interacts with any of her blood relations. Rohmer treats her as if she's absorbed the purported tendency of Eastern women to fall in love quickly, even though she's entirely English. And at no time does Rohmer give her the tragic air he bestows upon a superior character like Fah Lo Suee.

Greefe is easily the novel's most interesting character. In some ways, he's "Fu Manchu Lite." Greefe comes to London with a mute Negro servant armed with a strangling-cord and sets up a weapon with which he can shoot poison gas shells at anyone who gives him trouble! Yet Greefe, unlike the usual penny ante pulp villains, has a genuine beef with the two cultures that spawned him, both of which have rejected his very existence. In one of the book's better scenes, Addison interviews a London pub-crawler regarding the physician, whom the bigoted local calls "the black doctor." For once, a Rohmer protagonist openly scorns this ugly chauvinism. Yet at the same time, the author is still getting some mileage out of the fear of insidious Orientals invading jolly old England.

I don't have a good chronology for Rohmer's published works, but one point of interest is that BAST was published two years after THE GOLDEN SCORPION. In my review I noted that in 1918 Rohmer loosely tied the villain of that story to Fu Manchu, last seen the previous year, as well as implying that the antagonist of 1915's YELLOW CLAW was also allied to the Si-Fan. But for whatever reason, Rohmer seems to have dropped the Fu Manchu concept for the next nine years. In my GOLDEN SCORPION review I noted that the author sought to distance himself from "Yellow Peril" associations despite his using a Chinese villain. In BAST, Rohmer admits that both "white" and "non-white" societies have usually been unjust to biracials, and clearly Greefe's rejection by both cultures is the foundation of his obsession. Though I'm sure many modern readers would find these observations insufficiently political, I find them relatively enlightened for 1920.

I really wanted BAST to be a myth-novel. But at best, it falls into my category of "near myths," which don't quite manage to take full advantage of their imaginative content.