Books: Monumental errors

Should you believe everything you read in history books? Let the buyer beware

SO MUCH for the power of the press. A few months back, and not for the first time, I seethed in these pages over the propensity of mainstream publishers to bankroll occult fantasies. The lost secrets of the pyramids, drowned continents, the stone traces of an Elder Race: the whole shebang of New Age history now has the British book trade in its grip.

So what happens? I go on seething, sorry that I failed to exempt the pukka Thames & Hudson ancient-history list from my curse. And Graham Hancock, who resurrected this hoary genre in 1995 with his Fingerprints of the Gods, goes on to conquer TV too.

Hancock's mystic travelogue, Heaven's Mirror: quest for the lost civilisation, will begin on Channel 4 on Monday; the book of the series comes from Michael Joseph (pounds 20). This rehash of his doctrine argues that the sacred sites of ancient Egypt, Cambodia, Mesoamerica and the Pacific form part of the "vast apparatus of an archaic spiritual system", swept away as the Ice Age closed.

So far, so very familiar. My case rests, as well: first, that the rare slots such beguiling fancies hog in publishing (and now TV) schedules will drive out more solid work. Second, these maestros of "alternative" scholarship often fail to engage with their expert critics. Thus Heaven's Mirror recycles the standard Hancock line about the so-called "rain erosion" of the Great Sphinx being evidence of its vast antiquity. But the serious Egyptology journals have left this hypothesis in tatters. Readers and viewers will hear nothing about that.

As for publishers, they now seem loath to take the rap for any doubtful claims in non-fiction works. Instead, they tend to tough it out. Last year, Little, Brown issued the historian David Selbourne's edition of a vivid, late 13th-century Italian manuscript by one "Jacob D'Ancona". The City of Light described in rich, racy detail a Jewish merchant's voyage to China. Travel-writers loved it; but many Sinologists - who had no access to the manuscript - spotted several apparent anachronisms and doubted its authenticity. A couple even labelled it as "fiction".

Now The City of Light appears in Abacus paperback (pounds 9.99). Selbourne has added an Afterword that scorns the "academic incredulity" of his critics and enlists support from an eminent Chinese historian. I asked one leading sceptic, Professor T H Barrett of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London University, if this self-defence persuaded him. He replies that "a catena of improbabilities" remain. "But what most upsets me," Barrett adds, "is the way the publishers, while raking in the money, have not seen fit to arrange any research assistance for Selbourne, whose lack of knowledge of the Chinese sources on the period leaves him literally helpless. Substantial doubts remain, which he is in no position to dispel, while a specialist researcher just might turn up the one thing which would vindicate him".

Barrett is annoyed by Selbourne's assumption "that one European manuscript of doubtful provenance can negate a picture of 13th-century China built up from a large number of Chinese sources. But that aside, he comes across to me very much as a victim...who has made money for others, and yet has been abandoned to his fate at the hands of ravening academics in return".

Authors have cases to make and causes to fight. Fair enough. Surely the buck should stop with the publishers that fund them? Now, it seems, only the other sort of bucks ever stop there.

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