The Towers of Silence This is the fourth and shortest of the four main volumes of the Raj Quartet. I plan on reading and reviewing the final work, which is a connected, but not direct volume, which is also short. This novels spends the bulk of its time focusing on the Laytons and their various connections. The Laytons are a blend of educators and military officials and the plot of the novel centers around the love affair of Teddy Bingham ( a military officer) and […]
If there are things you don’t know, you call the gap in your knowledge a mystery and fill it in with a wholly emotional answer
I am bummed because there’s apparently only one picture of Paul Scotte available online. I keep finding a lot of pictures associated with him…especially a picture of Galway Kinnell…but also like Paul Ryan. Anyway, this is the second novel in the Raj Quartet. And I am curious to know how far ahead he planned these novels, because this is both the continuation of the story, but also not. And in some ways it’s a deconstruction of how novels continue on stories. So the first novel […]
Rumours began with the whispered gossip of native servants and spread quickly to the rest of the population
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 […]