Anyone for peace and love?
Conversations between Henry, Sita, and Tigger, and their experiences in India and the princess’s (fictional) Himalayan country Solung, reflect tumultuous changes of the time that reverberate to this day: the fertile but uneasy mingling of cultures and identities; the crisis in belief; the aftershocks of two world wars; and the seismic effects of education, welfare support and easy contraception on the foundations of traditional human partnerships.
Tigger calls it the age of Tantra. Not the Tantra of pretty pictures and exotic sex but its shocking tradition of breaking taboos, which like the shrinking world forces people to reappraise everything they were brought up to believe. His beloved Sita had a brush with it and came away wounded – and changed.
Skip the serious bits, and the book reads like an old-fashioned adventure story for people of all ages. It’s the way revered Indian sagas like the Mahabharata work when retold in comic books and TV soaps. One chapter spells out the parallel with a modern take on the Bhagavad Gita, the Mahabharata’s celebrated pre-battle debate between Krishna and the warrior Arjuna. To fight or not to fight?
But that’s just Henry ranting again as he does throughout the book, spacing out and trying to make God respectable. Listen to his songs and read the lyrics by following the links on this page, and you’ll get the flavour. Tigger and Dougal will do the fighting, together with their friends Charlie and local hero Ganesh, against a man who saved Tigger’s life. It’s war as show business, Spitfires versus Messerschmitts with the fate of Sita’s country at stake. That fate also rests on Sita, torn between her love for Tigger and her duty to wed a king. You can read all about it.
TIGGER AND THE TANTRIC PRINCESS is most easily available from Amazon, priced £11.99, or £5.99 for the ebook. Bookshops are likely to have to order it. HENRY THE HIPPY’S SONGS OF PEACE AND WAR can be streamed or bought from major music sites. You may face ads if you stream from one to which you do not subscribe.
"Biggles made war seem like school games. He psyched a whole generation of boys into becoming cannon fodder."
My book Tigger and the Tantric Princess has finally been released onto an unsuspecting world. It’s been a long time in the making but it could hardly be more topical at a time when unspeakable horrors in Israel/Palestine have overshadowed even the terrible Ukrainian war in news bulletins. Equally gruesome conflicts across the world get scant attention. War, and the threat of it, is normality.
Which might prompt you to ask whether humankind can carry on like this. Will war go on for ever? What about peace and love? Questions with all the wisdom of a child. Tigger and the Tantric Princess addresses them (and many others) by returning to 1972, when the Vietnam war was in its dying days, terrorism in Northern Ireland was working up to peak idiocy, and the flower children of the sixties were growing old enough to shrug it all off like adults. In India, where the story is largely set, wandering Western hippies were still having their heydey.
It’s a loose pastiche of a Biggles book, complete with illustrations like the originals. You learn, if you don’t already know, that Biggles was the fighter-pilot hero of scores of books beloved by boys, and not a few girls, living in the shadow of the two world wars. Like the heroes of other British adventure stories going back into Victorian times, he was presented as a role model for kids who could expect to be called on to fight for country and empire.
Or as the hippy bard Henry puts it, with typical hyperbole, when he first meets the Tigger and Princess Sita of the book’s title: “Biggles made war seem like school games. He psyched a whole generation of boys into becoming cannon fodder.”
To Tigger, a jobbing pilot, it seems like he has walked into a Biggles book. Just a week before he had agreed to join his boss Dougal on a mission to a remote Himalayan kingdom to rescue Sita. Dougal flew Spitfires against Nazi Messerschmitts in World War Two, though looking at layabouts like Henry as representative of the heirs to victory, he wonders why he bothered. Films have been made about his adventures, pitching him as a real-life Biggles. And Tigger, fleeing with Sita from murderous revolutionaries, has jumped into the makings of a real-life war.
My book Tigger and the Tantric Princess has finally been released onto an unsuspecting world. It’s been a long time in the making but it could hardly be more topical at a time when unspeakable horrors in Israel/Palestine have overshadowed even the terrible Ukrainian war in news bulletins. Equally gruesome conflicts across the world get scant attention. War, and the threat of it, is normality.
Which might prompt you to ask whether humankind can carry on like this. Will war go on for ever? What about peace and love? Questions with all the wisdom of a child. Tigger and the Tantric Princess addresses them (and many others) by returning to 1972, when the Vietnam war was in its dying days, terrorism in Northern Ireland was working up to peak idiocy, and the flower children of the sixties were growing old enough to shrug it all off like adults. In India, where the story is largely set, wandering Western hippies were still having their heydey.
It’s a loose pastiche of a Biggles book, complete with illustrations like the originals. You learn, if you don’t already know, that Biggles was the fighter-pilot hero of scores of books beloved by boys, and not a few girls, living in the shadow of the two world wars. Like the heroes of other British adventure stories going back into Victorian times, he was presented as a role model for kids who could expect to be called on to fight for country and empire.
Or as the hippy bard Henry puts it, with typical hyperbole, when he first meets the Tigger and Princess Sita of the book’s title: “Biggles made war seem like school games. He psyched a whole generation of boys into becoming cannon fodder.”
To Tigger, a jobbing pilot, it seems like he has walked into a Biggles book. Just a week before he had agreed to join his boss Dougal on a mission to a remote Himalayan kingdom to rescue Sita. Dougal flew Spitfires against Nazi Messerschmitts in World War Two, though looking at layabouts like Henry as representative of the heirs to victory, he wonders why he bothered. Films have been made about his adventures, pitching him as a real-life Biggles. And Tigger, fleeing with Sita from murderous revolutionaries, has jumped into the makings of a real-life war.
Conversations between Henry, Sita, and Tigger, and their experiences in India and the princess’s (fictional) Himalayan country Solung, reflect tumultuous changes of the time that reverberate to this day: the fertile but uneasy mingling of cultures and identities; the crisis in belief; the aftershocks of two world wars; and the seismic effects of education, welfare support and easy contraception on the foundations of traditional human partnerships.
Tigger calls it the age of Tantra. Not the Tantra of pretty pictures and exotic sex but its shocking tradition of breaking taboos, which like the shrinking world forces people to reappraise everything they were brought up to believe. His beloved Sita had a brush with it and came away wounded – and changed.
Skip the serious bits, and the book reads like an old-fashioned adventure story for people of all ages. It’s the way revered Indian sagas like the Mahabharata work when retold in comic books and TV soaps. One chapter spells out the parallel with a modern take on the Bhagavad Gita, the Mahabharata’s celebrated pre-battle debate between Krishna and the warrior Arjuna. To fight or not to fight?
But that’s just Henry ranting again as he does throughout the book, spacing out and trying to make God respectable. Listen to his songs, read the lyrics and this blurb about them, and you’ll get the flavour. Tigger and Dougal will do the fighting, together with their friends Charlie and local hero Ganesh, against a man who saved Tigger’s life. It’s war as show business, Spitfires versus Messerschmitts with the fate of Sita’s country at stake. That fate also rests on Sita, torn between her love for Tigger and her duty to wed a king. You can read all about it.
Tigger and the Tantric Princess is currently available only from Amazon, priced £11.99, or £5.99 for the ebook.