[In the following review, Engel criticizes Playing the Game, noting that Buruma is “far more of a journalist than he is a writer of imaginative fiction.”]

Consider this: a Rajput princeling, deprived of his rightful inheritance by palace intrigues, emerges into fin-de-siècle English society as the most graceful and exciting cricketer of his time. The stuff of fiction, perhaps? Except that the story is true, or trueish. Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji of Cambridge University, Sussex and England (later His Highness Shri Sir Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji, Jam Sahib of Nawanagar) really existed (1872-1933), unless, as Sir Neville Cardus surmised, “he was perhaps a dream, all dreamed on some midsummer's night long ago.”

Ranji was a late Victorian exotic, as English as Graeme Hick but far more fascinating. By every account (although there is, alas, no videotape to let us judge) he was one of the greatest and most imaginative stroke-players cricket has ever seen: possibly the inventor, certainly the pioneer of the leg glance; friend and contemporary of the late-Renaissance man C B Fry, both in cricket and later at the League of Nations; and a chap who slid with apparent ease between Home Counties country houses and his own backward, 13-gun state. He is a mysterious figure from that most mysterious of ages: the day before yesterday.

The peculiarities of his life have exerted an undying hold on modern writers. This is the third book in the past eight years. After Alan Ross's broad-sweep literary biography, Ranji: Prince of Cricketers (Collins, 1983) came the far more investigative Ranji: A Genius Rich and Strange by Simon Wilde (Kingswood Press, 1990). Now Ian Buruma has reworked the story as fiction [in Playing the Game].

Buruma is a rather good journalist who has written with distinction on Asia. He has produced a first novel with many incisive passages: a Flaubert's Parrot of a book, according to the blurb, which interposes a thinly disguised narrator's quest through India to find Ranji with a long autobiographical letter to Fry. There might be almost as many interpretations of Ranji as of Hamlet. Buruma's prince is an outsider to be compared to Disraeli and Oscar Wilde: dandyish, humorous, sensitive, simpático, put-upon and ultimately embittered. Very possibly, he was.

Unfortunately, Buruma is far more of a journalist than he is a writer of imaginative fiction. His made-up characters are too readily identifiable; and when his world departs from known truth, he is irritating rather than illuminating. When he has Gandhi bowling to Ranji in a school match, to no real dramatic purpose, the only recourse is to reach for the biographies and find out whether it might have happened. If it did, it is a Buruma exclusive.

But there is something far worse. The author has suffered the greatest journalistic setback of all: he has been scooped. Simon Wilde, dealing with the facts, happens to have come up with a far better story. It was well-known that, while the succession to Nawanagar was in dispute, he was short of cash. Wilde, after painstaking use of primary sources unusual in such a traditionally slapdash genre as cricketing biography has portrayed a very different man: conniving, dishonourable and perhaps downright dishonest

His most fascinating discovery, at which he only hints, was that Ranji and A. C. MacLaren, captain of Lancashire and England, were up to something that was absolutely not Playing The Game: “It seems clear that sometimes they were not averse to conducting themselves in the fashion of E. W. Hornung's fictional character Raffles, the cricketing burglar.“

Now there is a novel waiting to be written. Until someone writes it, cricketing fiction will remain a sadly depressed area. The only time I have found it carried off successfully is in J. L. Carr's A Season in Sinji, a book which is about life, rather than just cricket. Like the game itself.