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Paul Scott


A Division of the Spoils

Category: Fiction | Published: 1975 | Review Added: 09-06-2024 | Updated: 28-07-2024

Rating: 5 - A personal favourite

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

If you have watched the television series of The Jewel in the Crown, you will know that Paul's Scott's "Raj Quartet" ends on a dramatic note. In August 1947, with India preparing for the exit of the British government and the subcontinent's division into two new states, violence erupts between Hindus and Moslems across the territory. Amidst the isolated scenes of chaos, seven of the novels' characters make a train journey to the town of Ranpur. Five of them are Britons, two Indians. Though unnerved by the mounting atmosphere of danger, they do not anticipate imminent embroilment in it.

Aficionados of the television series will know that other strands of the tetralogy's intricate narrative also await gripping conclusions, and therefore they will embark upon this final book of the series anticipating an increase in pace from the low-key The Towers of Silence. They will not be disappointed, even if the reading is sometimes too sobering to be called an unadulterated pleasure.

The novel starts with the introduction of a new character, Guy Perron, whose thoughts and experiences will form the backbone of its story. Perron is an upper-class history graduate who enters India in the middle of the Second World War as a sergeant in British military intelligence. His special academic interest is India in the mid-Nineteeth Century - the period before the formal assumption of British control under the Raj. Perron has cannily avoided receiving a commission so that he can, he hopes, be an unburdened observer of the subcontinent during the war, and of its expected transition to independence afterwards.

Perron enters the novel having served in India for two uneventful years. The war is in its final stages, but Perron's spell of comfortable detachment is about to end. He is assigned to the care of a disenchanted and highly strung intelligence officer, Captain Purvis, who sends Perron to a party to listen out for loose talk about a secret British operation. Upon returning to Purvis's flat afterwards, Perron finds his colleague unconscious in the bath, having slit his wrists. Perron attends to the crisis with a weary but capable sang-froid that emerges as one of his defining traits. The scene prefigures his activity at the end of the novel, when once again he will be attempting to save lives with his clothes soaked in blood.

At the party, Perron has the misfortune of catching the attention of Ronald Merrick, the army Major whose machinations lay behind many events of the previous three novels. Merrick uses his senior rank to force Perron to work for him. His sole motive for this manoeuvre seems to be get one over on the upper classes by making the life of the high-born Perron a misery. As Perron says later in the novel,

It's part of the technique of the self-made man. Merrick looks round, his eye lights on someone and he says, Right, I want him. Why else do you think I'm here. I'm a chosen one. I expect Coomer was.

Coomer is Hari Kumar, the man wrongly accused of rape and sedition in The Jewel in the Crown.

Perron's relationship with Merrick is grimly comical. Perron achieves small victories over his tormentor when opportunities arise. At the same time as hating each other, the men hold each other in grudging respect: Merrick for Perron's willingness to stand up to him, Perron for Merrick's skill at twisting events to his advantage.

His subordination to Merrick leads Perron to Pankot, the British hill station that featured prominently in the earlier books. Here, Perron finds some social compensation for his frustrations. He becomes friends with Sarah Layton, the main protagonist of the second novel The Day of the Scorpion. They are strongly attracted to each other both emotionally and physically, but unlike in the television series, they do not become lovers. The circumstances and inhibitions that prevent this make their relationship all the more interesting. In the television series there is little hint of Sarah's competing attraction to Captain Rowan, a decent, self-doubting official with whom she has much in common. Rowan, in turn, has his eye on Sarah. But circumstances force him to sacrifice desire to what he feels is his moral duty.

Rowan is a central character in A Division of the Spoils, unlike in the television series. He is in Pankot at the same time as Perron, and the two know each other from school. The burdens upon both of them - and perhaps, paradoxically, their attraction to the same woman - cement a warm friendship that brings some further light into Perron's beleaguered existence.

In another strand, the former Congress politician and political prisoner Mohammed Ali Kasim meets his elder son Sayed. Sayed, a soldier, was captured in Burma by the Japanese, who persuaded him to turn coat and join the Indian National Army. The INA was a ramshackle and nominally independent organisation that was in reality open to exploitation by all Britain's enemies. Kasim is bitterly disappointed in his son, and refuses to compromise his political integrity by engineering a pardon for him. The conversation between father and son is one of the many moving dialogues in the novel.

The greatest hero in the Kasim family is neither Mohammed nor Sayed, but the retiring younger son Ahmed. Despite being more interested in poetry and training hawks than in politics, he comes to understand that history finally affects everybody, whether they want to be involved or not.

There are further - bizarre and characteristically unforeseeable - developments in the story of Ronald Merrick: the Raj Quartet's most ambiguous character. Perron encapsulates him thus:

He was the kind of man who worked for preference within a very narrow margin of safety where his own reputation was concerned. He courted disaster. Deep down, I think, he had a death wish. It came out in this way, pushing his credibility to the limit; sometimes beyond it.

A Division of the Spoils, like the previous three novels, has some flaws. There is a lot of political exposition crowbarred into conversations that, while fascinating for its content, sounds articificial in the context. Perron, who narrates some of the story in the first person, describes events at which he was not present in unconvincing detail. Scott probably wanted to remind the reader what had happened in the earlier novels, but his method is contrived.

Despite these infelicities, if any one of this superb sequence of novels deserves a five-star rating, it is this one. It is the longest, but also the most exciting - and that without abandoning any of the psychological and historical depth that characterises the whole series. The previous three novels recounted the same events from different characters' perspectives, but A Division of the Spoils drives the narrative threads forward to logical, moving, and fully satisfying conclusions.

The final chapter reunites many of the main characters two years after the end of the war, in the summer before the messy handover of power from Britain to the new republics of India and Pakistan. The ending is worthy of the whole story's ambition. The climactic scenes move and haunt the reader, not only because of their intrinsic drama, but also because Scott has the gift of making us feel close to his characters. Even Tolstoy - brilliant but detached - did not always manage that. There is an understated humanity to the tetralogy that complements its analytical depth to make it, in my opinion, one of the greatest literary achievements in the English language - let alone one of the greatest by a writer whom most readers have never heard of.

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