Algy goes missing while investigating gold smuggling near the Terai, a jungle region between India and Nepal. By the time this is reported to Biggles, he's presumed dead. Biggles immediately takes Bertie with him to go find Algy--one way or another.
This is a very fun book, partly because of the unusual team-up of just Biggles and Bertie. Bertie is sweet, competent, and extremely self-deprecating, which made me wonder if it's his personality or a cultural norm for behavior if you're a Lord and with people who aren't, so you don't seem like you're LORDing it over them. There's a good mystery, a ton of India-Nepal border atmosphere, and lots of nice opportunities for Biggles to be comfortable in a place he knows well.
It is also astonishingly not very racist! That is, there is some of-the-time language, but there's a lot of Indian and Nepali characters, and they're all portrayed as just people: some heroic, some criminal, some ordinary. I particularly enjoyed the young aspiring pilot who tags along on their adventures and a matter-of-factly heroic Gurkha.
India here is very clearly not the India of The Boy Biggles. Time has moved on and language has changed - something acknowledged in the book itself.
Biggles and his crew are also noticeably older than they are in some of the earlier books. They don't age in real time, but they do age; in some of the later books, including this one, they're clearly middle-aged. One of the most striking scenes is when Biggles gets in a dogfight and realizes that it's been years since he's been in one. The other pilot has absolutely no chance against him because Biggles is an actual aerial combat veteran and his opponent seems to be just a guy doing crimes. Biggles tries to warn him, but of course that's not something you can really convey from an airplane...
I feel that it is not a spoiler to say that Algy is not in fact dead. But given that he's presumed dead for a lot of the book, I wished the characters were slightly less stiff upper lip about it. The first chapter in particular needed more quiet freaking out of the sort everyone else did when Biggles went missing in Biggles Fails To Return. I felt a bit angst-deprived, and also post-rescue comfort-deprived.
As a result, there are several Terai-based fics I would like to recommend:
Sunflowers, by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sholio. Very touching post-rescue missing scene which also deals with the passage of time.
Fracture Reduction, byblackbentley. "Okay. You're fine. Good for you. But have you ever considered what this has been like for me?" Ginger asked. (Spoiler: Algy is not fine.)
Good Neighbors, bysholio. After the events of the book, Algy gets a visitor while the others are away.
This is a very fun book, partly because of the unusual team-up of just Biggles and Bertie. Bertie is sweet, competent, and extremely self-deprecating, which made me wonder if it's his personality or a cultural norm for behavior if you're a Lord and with people who aren't, so you don't seem like you're LORDing it over them. There's a good mystery, a ton of India-Nepal border atmosphere, and lots of nice opportunities for Biggles to be comfortable in a place he knows well.
It is also astonishingly not very racist! That is, there is some of-the-time language, but there's a lot of Indian and Nepali characters, and they're all portrayed as just people: some heroic, some criminal, some ordinary. I particularly enjoyed the young aspiring pilot who tags along on their adventures and a matter-of-factly heroic Gurkha.
India here is very clearly not the India of The Boy Biggles. Time has moved on and language has changed - something acknowledged in the book itself.
Biggles and his crew are also noticeably older than they are in some of the earlier books. They don't age in real time, but they do age; in some of the later books, including this one, they're clearly middle-aged. One of the most striking scenes is when Biggles gets in a dogfight and realizes that it's been years since he's been in one. The other pilot has absolutely no chance against him because Biggles is an actual aerial combat veteran and his opponent seems to be just a guy doing crimes. Biggles tries to warn him, but of course that's not something you can really convey from an airplane...
I feel that it is not a spoiler to say that Algy is not in fact dead. But given that he's presumed dead for a lot of the book, I wished the characters were slightly less stiff upper lip about it. The first chapter in particular needed more quiet freaking out of the sort everyone else did when Biggles went missing in Biggles Fails To Return. I felt a bit angst-deprived, and also post-rescue comfort-deprived.
As a result, there are several Terai-based fics I would like to recommend:
Sunflowers, by
sholio. Very touching post-rescue missing scene which also deals with the passage of time. Fracture Reduction, by
blackbentley. "Okay. You're fine. Good for you. But have you ever considered what this has been like for me?" Ginger asked. (Spoiler: Algy is not fine.) Good Neighbors, by
sholio. After the events of the book, Algy gets a visitor while the others are away.
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This is something I wondered about Bertie, too. I can see him developing this level of putting himself down and dodging conflict as a way of (over?) compensating for knowing he has more social capital than the people he's around and could easily be seen as stuck-up or just throwing his weight around. I could also see him developing this at least partly as a bullied child's defense mechanism. He's painfully apologetic about being a burden when he's hurt, too. (I need to write Bertie more, if I can figure out how to get better at writing him; he's clearly got an entire library full of issues.)
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