John Fisher's British Diplomacy and the Descent into Chaos: The Career of Jack Garnett, 1902–19 could easily, and perhaps more accurately should, have its title inverted. The work is a biographical account of this seemingly insignificant British diplomat and his career at the tail end of the height of British imperial diplomacy. Fisher himself notes that “Garnett's diplomatic career possibly was not of fundamental importance in British diplomatic history,” but despite this, Fisher's work offers us a clear, insightful look into “the administrative edifices that sustained” British imperial diplomacy in the first half of the twentieth century (206).
Fisher follows Garnett from his first foray into British diplomatic circles through his personal “descent into chaos” late in the 1920s while strolling through a well-documented life. Garnett becomes, in Fisher's narrative, a representation of the British Empire throughout the world and at odds with itself. An interesting blend of the romantic, adventure-seeking diplomats akin to Sir Richard Burton or T. E. Lawrence but shaped by the same influences and creating many of the same outcomes as George Orwell, Garnett is drawn into the diplomatic world by the exotic promises of the “Orient” and repelled by the tedium of an aristocratic-like bureaucracy.
Being particularly eager to move throughout the East and offered a starting point in Constantinople in 1903, Garnett falls prey to the same Orientalist ideals of many of his fellow diplomats, and Fisher does little to downplay this vision. Garnett and Fisher note that the spice bazaar “was ‘a museum of strange powders and electuaries,’ full of the aroma of the East. . . . [T]here were sights and sounds and smells to intoxicate those who were attracted to the East” (17). Fisher's prose mirrors Garnett's own sentiments. When Garnett is light and “intoxicated,” so too is Fisher's narration of Garnett's life, but as Garnett becomes increasingly disenchanted, even alienated, from the diplomatic world in which he lives, Fisher's words direct one's thoughts to Orwell's Burmese Days and the disenchantment of the diplomat no longer impressed with the world once so exotic.
During Garnett's posting in Tehran, the seamy side of diplomacy and private lives helped solidify Garnett's increasingly embittered worldview. A question arising from the sexual advances of a superior's wife and the refusal of those advances by a junior diplomat, thus showing “disloyalty” to the superior himself, led to one of Garnett's returns home and a gleeful enjoyment of being “instrumental in the having the Townleys [the superior and his wife in question] recalled” (122). While it is clear that knowing how to play the diplomatic game in both the political and the private spheres was a necessary advantage for advancement in British imperial diplomatic circles, his tendency toward grudge carrying was, as Garnett himself notes, the “black mark [that] proved my eventual diplomatic ruin” (122). The unhappiness that plagued both Garnett's professional life and and his private life, coupled with his tendency to dwell on wrongs (perceived and real), makes Garnett a less sympathetic character.
The striking similarity between George Orwell and Garnett becomes most pronounced at the end of Fisher's work. By 1919 Garnett makes “the sudden transition from diplomat to charity worker [which] seems incongruous,” even though that had been a shadow storyline throughout Garnett's life (192). Fisher notes that “throughout his diplomatic career he maintained an interest in social welfare and educational issues” (192). Garnett “On many occasions . . . expressed a desire to undertake more worthwhile work,” having clearly come to detest “the orgy of self-indulgence which characterized some diplomatic posts” (193). Indeed, it is in the complexity of Garnett's own personality that the value of Fisher's work really shines. Garnett is not the power broker of the treaty table but a plodding diplomat like so many others of the time who is human in his faults and desires.
The real question we are left with at the end of Fisher's work is “Where is the chaos?” The British Empire, we all know, crumbles away over the course of the twentieth century, but was that crumbing chaotic? In the epilogue, Fisher draws together the threads of Garnett's life, diplomacy, and social movements, looking at Garnett's own interest as a shift away from “Old diplomacy,” particularly in his “boredom with its social obligations and with the narrow and self-interested focus of foreign policy” (207). Later work in the East End was, Fisher contends, a direct link to Garnett's notion that British overseas interests should be increasingly turning to a “more tightly knit empire, both formal and informal, sustained by a more efficient, fitter and healthier people” (207). That the British Empire does not become more “tightly knit” but rather unravels considerably by the middle of the century may be a sign of the chaos that Fisher's title suggests, but this does not really define it. Indeed, Garnett's own story ends in a similarly crumbling manner, and in this respect the empire and his life do mirror one another, but dramatic chaos is perhaps simply a rhetorical device or a more cerebral vision of the disorder felt if not experienced.
Garnett's story is an ideal ancillary to fictional works like Burmese Days, but it is also useful as another lens for shaping our understanding of the policymakers of the British Empire. Garnett's life is not offered to us here through rose-colored glasses; it rather gives us a full look into the raw details that guide each person's choices in navigating personal and professional decisions. This account thus vividly aids our understanding of the complexity of the diplomatic service and the policy decisions of the British Empire at the outset of the twentieth century.
