The note on the fly-leaf tells us this is the first full-length biography of Cyril Lionel Robert (CLR) James, cricketer, cricket writer, political thinker and Marxist philosopher, who is rightly ranked among the West Indies' most renowned sons.
But with every respect to the author, it is to be hoped it will be followed by rather more readable works on James and his life and times, for this book fails to excite, never mind hold the interest.
Instead, Farrukh Dhondy has produced a narrative which is pedestrian at best and at worst monotonous and boring.
Any reader who has not already heard of James (whose life and views are well chronicled in most major cricket anthologies, apart from his own writing) will be obliged to work hard at this book; by contrast, in his 1988 work A History of Cricket, Benny Green quotes one paragraph which graphically illustrates the often enigmatic figure that was James:
"Before long (wrote James of his early life in the West Indies) I acquired a discipline for which the only name is Puritan. I never cheated. I never appealed for a decision unless I thought the batsman was out. I never argued with the umpire, I never jeered at a defeated opponent, I never gave a friend a vote or a place which by a stretch of the imagination could be seen as belonging to an enemy or a stranger.
"My defeats and disappointments I took as stoically as I could. If I caught myself complaining or making excuses I pulled up. If afterwards I remembered doing it I took an inward decision to try not to do it again.
"From the eight years of school life this code became the moral framework of my existence. It has never left me. I learnt it as a boy. I obeyed it as a man, and now I can no longer laugh at it. I failed to live up to it at times, but when I did I knew, and that is what matters. I had a code, and I cared, I couldn't care more. "
Which just goes to show that you can be a Marxist leftie and still "Play up! Play up! and Play the game!", as Sir Henry Newbolt put it.
Certainly, James had a varied and full life.
Having been brought to England in the early 1930s by the great West Indian cricketer Learie Constantine (then a professional in the Lancashire League) James soon became deputy to Neville Cardus, filling in as cricket correspondent on the then Manchester Guardian when Cardus was otherwise engaged.
This in turn led to cricket writing for the Glasgow Herald and thus financially secure, James was enabled to get on with his political writing and aims, among such early goals being independence for the West Indies.
Though never deviating from his socialist ideals, James was not caught up in support for the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and its allies worldwide.
In fact, in his later years, while still adhering to the heritage of Marx and Lenin, he predicted the fall of Soviet Russia as well as the change which would transform apartheid South Africa.
But his vision (according to Farrukh Dhondy) that the United States was the "obvious crucible for the real birth in the future of a Marxist or socialist society" seems, at best, wishful thinking.
Dhondy's book is workmanlike and well researched, yet fails to fire the imagination of the reader. A bit like a cricket match washed out by rain.
Karl Johnston is a freelance journalist and is cricket correspondent of The Irish Times
