Book Reviews - Review 425

*** NOTE: This review contains spoilers ***

This is the second of Paul Scott's "Raj Quartet", an expansive portrayal of the lives of Britons in India during the Second World War, and the concomitant, disorderly break-up of the British Empire.

I hadn't planned to read the Raj novels back-to-back, but having enjoyed The Jewel in the Crown, I sought out more of the same. In some ways, The Day of the Scorpion improves on its predecessor. While the first novel was composed mostly of first-person accounts that jumped around in time, and sometimes felt contrived, this is a conventional realist novel. It is related in the third person, and describes events chronologically. It also has fewer passages of the overwrought descriptive prose that were a minor weakness of the earlier book.

The main narrative begins thus:

This is a great opening sentence - informative, immediate and suspenseful. Who exactly is Mohammed Ali Kasim? Why is he being arrested? Kasim submits with dignity to his arrest, because, it turns out, he has been expecting it. He resigned his ministerial office in 1939 in protest at the Congress Party's domination by Hindu ideologues, but he refuses to renounce his allegiance to the party, with its central ambition of Indian independence.

Kasim is imprisoned, to re-emerge later, and the story moves to a new locus: a lakeside houseboat occupied by a certain Lady Manners and her new-born grand-niece. The baby is that of Daphne Manners, one of the central characters of The Jewel in the Crown, who died in childbirth. The child may be that of Daphne's lover, the unhappy, British-educated Hari Kumar. But the father could equally be one of the Indian thugs who raped her immediately after she and Kumar made love.

Living on the next boat to Lady Manners are the women of an English army family, the Laytons, who are conventional and complacent, with the exception of Sarah, the serious and dutiful elder daughter. Sarah is another in the Raj Quartet's ranks of misfits. While her relatives shun Lady Manners with her half-caste charge, Sarah pays her a visit by way of apology, just before the Laytons leave to spend the hot season in the hills.

Sarah is the heroine of the novel, a still point of common sense encircled by dramas and tragedies afflicting those around her. These are brought on by her associates' poor judgment, character weaknesses, and simple bad luck. Self-doubting but stoic, Sarah accepts her role as the pillar of support who has to hold things together in defiance of the centrifugal forces threatening old emotional and social certainties.

Sarah pictures the British in India as stuck "on an island on which she sometimes felt herself the only one alive who still wanted to be rescued." While those around her cling to the past, she is trying to find a foothold in the future, without knowing exactly where to look for it. What sustains her is a strong sense of who she is - the paradoxical corollary of her sceptical, analytical nature. It makes her feel misunderstood, but it grants her a precious adaptability. When her younger sister Susan, superficially more self-confident than she is, tells her that she feels empty and alone, Sarah reflects:

I like this kind of pithy but expansive psychological analysis; it reminds me of George Eliot and Joseph Conrad. The theme of individuality is central to the novel. As much as in Sarah, it is embodied in Hari Kumar, who in The Jewel in the Crown was arrested for alleged participation in the rape of Daphne Manners, and then detained, tortured and imprisoned under quite different - and equally false - charges of sedition. A compelling chapter in the middle of this novel relates an interview of Kumar by Captain Rowan, a shrewd and inscrutable British officer, and an Indian lawyer. Watching the proceedings from a secret room is Lady Manners - yet another outsider - who has pulled strings to get Kumar's case reviewed.

Kumar describes his arrest, torture and detention at the instigation (and with the participation) of Ronald Merrick, a repressed and prejudiced police chief. These events were presented in broad outline in The Jewel in the Crown, but Kumar now relates them in all their awful detail. His account is nonetheless scrupulously objective: to hate would be to play the game by Merrick's rules. He has accepted suffering and outward humiliation as the costs of keeping his dignity. He grew up in Britain and feels himself British. Exiled in India since his father's death, he is denied the trappings of his identity by both the Indians and the British; but he is determined that his identity itself should remain intact. He is unlucky, in a way that Sarah Layton is not; but they have a psychological kinship, at the root of which is moral courage.

Ronald Merrick gets much more attention in this book than in The Jewel in the Crown. In long conversations with Sarah Layton and Count Bronowsky (the Russian advisor to a Moslem Nawab), he partially - and not always deliberately - reveals the motives behind his hostile view of the world. A lower-middle-class man, he has risen to relative prominence, first in the police, and then in the army, through ambition and intelligence. But he knows that the upper classes who rule India will never accept him as one of their own. Why does this matter to him, more than to others of his social station? Because he is an orphan and - as we here get the first, subtle inklings - a homosexual. He is doubly lonely, and misdiagnoses the roots of his loneliness, because the truth would be too hard for him to accept. His subconscious awareness of this truth comes out in a comment he makes to Sarah: the people who protest Kumar's innocence "want it to prey on my mind until I'm as convinced as they are that I made a terrible mistake, the kind of mistake I shan't be able to live with because it'll be impossible to correct it."

Thus we learn that Merrick has a conscience. His cruelty to Kumar is an outcome of self-delusion - he projects his self-hatred onto the Indians, and he has taken a particular dislike to this Indian who, through his privileged upbringing, belongs to the English class above him and won't (as Merrick sees it) let him forget it.

For the reader, perceiving the sadness that lies beneath Merrick's severe exterior makes his behaviour, in some measure, forgivable. Scott does not ask us to like Merrick, but he forces us to understand him. And as with Merrick, so with most of the other characters: Scott does not pass judgment, but neither does he disingenuously present their bad sides as good.

And there are so many characters in this novel, both major and minor; all of them fascinating, consistent, and thought through in minutest biographical detail. Bronowsky, the wily and charming Russian, befriended an authoritarian, dissolute Indian Nawab when the latter was at a low ebb in Europe following a personal scandal. Bronowsky offered his services to the Nawab as a proto-PR-man, brought him back to India, and successfully reinvented him as a model of tolerant, forward-thinking magnanimity. Bronowsky reaps material rewards for his strange genius; but his chief satisfaction is seeing his scheme succeed. Bronowsky is, it turns out, a homosexual attracted only to heterosexuals. He sublimates his yearnings through the platonic intimacy that his role as advisor to the Nawab, and other upper-class Indian Moslems, gives him. A lesser author would have made Bronowsky a cartoon villain, but in Scott's hands he is magnetically likeable, not least because, while he schemes, he never lies or betrays. He plays on others' complacent assumptions, and understands how permeable is the interface between image and reality.

I find that I haven't even touched on the central drama of the book: the marriage of Sarah Layton's sister Susan to the dull but well-intentioned army officer Teddie Bingham, and the tragedy that ensues. In this strand, Ronald Merrick plays a major role, and during its course exhibits a virtue that one wouldn't necessarily have credited him with - physical courage. It rings true when it emerges: nothing is black and white in this novel.

The final major episode is the seduction of Sarah Layton by Captain James Clark, an unscrupulous rake whom her Aunt Fenny entrusts to look after her for an evening on the town in Calcutta. With a predator's instincts, Clark intuits deep reservoirs of desire and curiosity under Sarah's serious exterior, and deploys all his strategic resources, alongside a hypnotic charisma, in manoeuvring her into a situation from which she will not want to escape - even though, in principle, she can. Particularly subtle is the implication that Fenny's idea for Clark to "take care of" Sarah had a double motive. Fenny enjoyed a fancy-free youth, and, lacking imagination, she sees, reflected in her niece, her own younger self. But she is not totally wrong in this perception. Sarah cannot spend all her life "not knowing", and she ends the novel a woman, no longer merely an elder sister and a daughter.