This is an utterly brilliant novel that almost has no business being this good. On the surface it looks to be a sweeping historical epic in the vein of James Michener or MM Kaye, and to some small degree it is. It’s a novel of the closing days of the British Raj, written by a former colonial official. So on the one hand, it’s potentially a kind of wistful nostalgic novel of a lost past. But luckily it’s way more Orwell and Graham Greene than that.
The novel is about…well, it’s about….well what happens….
Well, here’s the thing….to tell you exactly what the novel is about is to ruin one of the most brilliant aspects of it, it’s fractured structure that privileges certain events and voices out of their relationship to power than their relationship to the truth.
The narrator, though we’re not exactly told so, is an observer watching a series of events unfold. He’s privy to various sources of information and is piecing it together, almost as a kind of report. But Scott never has this voice directly state his purpose. So he doesn’t explain, but the clues are there. The novel opens with the scene of a riot focused on the direct experiences of Miss Edwina Crane, an elderly school teacher working in an English language Indian school in Mayapore. She and a recent new Indian hire to the school happen upon a riot in their car and the scene erupts into violence. She also hears about a rape that occurred at the same time.
But then the novel shifts to a different set of events surrounding a local gathering spot for British nationals called the McGregor House. Then it shifts again to tell the background of a young Indian student named Hari Kumar, who you know is implicated in the rape. Then it shifts again to three political and or military observers explaining the cultural and political upheavals of the early 1940s. Lastly, we get the narrative of Daphne Manners, the young British woman referred to in the opening.
All of the works together at cross purposes to both tell the story of the riot and the rape, but also the cultural moments that led to it, but also the whole history of the Raj, and also a lot more.
Scott’s narrative voices are so strong and so clear…..pretty much devoid of problematic faults (he writes the women so well….so well in fact that my girlfriend said: He had so many opportunities to fuck this up, and didn’t).
And he gives his various actors in the novel time to explain their perspective. It’s a dense but not intimidating 460 pages. The language is all straight-forward.
In a lot of ways, my experiences reading this were very similar to reading Sophie’s Choice, where the movie version of both is focused on the plot, that the beautiful style and structure are completely lost. Oh! And there’s three more of them!
Here’s some quotes:
“English is the language of a people ho have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next.”
“Well, life is not just a business of standing on dry land and occasionally getting your feet wet. It is merely an illusion that some of us stand on one bank and some on the opposite. So long as we stand like that we are not living at all, but dreaming. So jump, jump in, and let the shock wake us up. Even if we drown, at least for a moment or two before we die we shall be awake and alive.”
“She had devoted her life, in a practical and unimportant way, trying to prove that fear was evil because it promoted prejudice, that courage was good because it was a sign of selflessness, that ignorance was bad because fear sprang from it, that knowledge was good because the more you knew of the world’s complexity the more clearly you saw the insignificance of the part you played.”
(Photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Scott_(novelist))
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