Review by New York Times Review
Seventy years ago, a British government reeling from the costs of world war granted independence to India. The decision was made hastily and with a shocking lack of care for the people whose lives it affected and, in many cases, ended. The British partitioned the country at the moment they relinquished it, birthing Pakistan, and setting off population transfers and ethnic cleansing that left more than one million people dead. It was a fitting end: Far from pursuing a "civilizing mission," the British Empire had exploited India, enforcing a policy of "divide and rule" and entrenching HinduMuslim tensions. It is unsurprising that most of the brilliant histories and fictionalizations of the last years of the Indian struggle for independence were written by Indians and Pakistanis. The achievement of the novelist Paul Scott, the author of "The Raj Quartet," was to tell this story largely from the British point of view, and to do so not merely without illusions, but with astonishing acuity and grace. "In Ranpur, and in places like Ranpur, the British came to an end of themselves as they were," he wrote in the second volume. The clarity of such formulations did not prevent him from being criticized by writers, including Salman Rushdie, for focusing on the British rather than their victims. But this is to miss the point: No one better captured the psychology of imperialists - in all their delusion and naiveté and cruelty. Paul Scott was born in London in 1920 and joined the Indian Army in 1943. He wrote several uneven novels about British colonialism before embarking on the Quartet: "The Jewel in the Crown" was published in 1966, followed by "The Day of the Scorpion" (1968), "The Towers of Silence" (1971) and "A Division of the Spoils" (1974). Scott died in 1977, shortly after winning the Booker Prize for "Staying On," his novel that covers some of the same themes with some of the same characters. The central event of the story, which begins in 1942, is the rape of an Englishwoman, Daphne Manners. The blame is placed on her Indian boyfriend, Hari Kumar. But this crime, which allows Scott to explore issues of race and class and gender, is only one of many narrative strands, which together comprise an entire society of Brits in India. Part of what makes Scott's work so formidable is his particular style. Large chunks of the four volumes read like plain history, describing actual incidents. It's true that characters often express their points of view, and can sometimes serve as a mouthpiece for the author, but the politics of the book are never simplistic. Nor did Scott's anti-imperialism ever keep him from wrestling with the speed of the British departure ("the creation of Pakistan is our crowning failure," one character angrily declares) and the consequences of Gandhi's philosophical and political interventions. Scott followed E. M. Forster - whose "A Passage to India" he both greatly admired and critically examined - in his willingness to display the illusions of even his relatively open-minded characters. But of course the imperial project involved even darker shadings. A British brigadier is given the name Reid because it was almost an inversion of the spelling of Dyer, who led the real-life Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which British troops fired on a crowd of Indians, killing hundreds. Scott loathed men like Reid who could only see India as somewhere "curious and beautiful," and needing to be controlled. It is through the character of Ronald Merrick that we get the truest sense of British behavior in India, and the psychology behind it. An officer bitterly resentful of the educated Kumar, Merrick is "a man, moreover, who lacked entirely that liberal instinct which is so dear to historians that they lay it out like a guideline through the unmapped forests of prejudice and self-interest as though this line, and not the forest, is our history." Here we see Scott's skill in peering inward while simultaneously stepping back; it is this talent, more than any other, that defines these novels. Hilary Spuriing, Scott's superb biographer, wrote that he was so "baffled and appalled by the arrogant complacency of the British in India that he would in the end spend the greater part of his adult life unraveling its implications." Rushdie's complaint that the books were "ultra-parochially British" is true, but not in the sense he intended. The parochialism of many of the characters is precisely what makes them so fascinating. Merrick may tell himself that he has a "duty" to the "lesser breeds" he rules over, but deep down we know him to believe "in only two basic human emotions: contempt and envy." Understanding the forces of reaction remains crucial today: Witness the tabloid explosion in support of Brexit, chock-full of post-imperial images of Britain resuming world dominance without the supposed shackles of Europe. Misguided proposals for Making the United Kingdom Great Again should be opposed, but their mental and material roots - the regnant forces of reaction - need to be understood. Scott's remarkable work is both an illuminating window on a momentous chapter of history and a guide to our present troubles. Paul Scott captured the psychology of imperialists in all their naiveté and cruelty.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 10, 2017]
Review by Library Journal Review
Finally, the audio generation has access to a magnificent edition of Forster's (Where Angels Fear To Tread, Audio Reviews, LJ 5/1/93) most popular novel, a book that is also regarded as his masterpiece. Adela Quested arrives in colonial India to marry Ronny Heaslop, a narrow-minded bureaucrat who despises Indians. She teams up with Ron's mother, Mrs. Moor, and Dr. Aziz, a charming native, to see the "real" India, but an incident exposes sharp tensions in the imperialist system. Forster is highly sensitive to the differences among Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. Despite the serious topic and the author's pessimism about bridging cultures, A Passage to India is a comic, even witty, novel. Moreover, reader Sam Dastor has given us a tour de force in his mastery of the various accents and his true dramatic flair. Adults both young and old will find much pleasure in this English classic.-James L. Dudley, Copiague, N.Y.(c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-By E.M. Forster. Narrated by Flo Gibson. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
