In [b:The Day of the Scorpion|1000718|The Day of the Scorpion|Paul Scott|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328872722s/1000718.jpg|705593], Paul Scott has followed up the first volume of The Raj Quartet, [b:The Jewel in the Crown|146746|The Jewel in the Crown (The Raj Quartet, #1)|Paul Scott|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328872722s/146746.jpg|2103139], with the same power and historical insight that makes his novels both captivating and informative. While we meet some new players in the drama, The Laytons, an English family caught in the changing attitudes and sensibilities of the Raj, we are also given an update on familiar characters. In the midst of a national upheaval, we come to know what has happened to Hari Kumar and Ronald Merrick since we saw them last.

It is significant that Scott is not only telling us the story of these two men, but that he manages at the same time to tell us the story of the entire nation of India. There is not a hovel or a mansion that he does not expose and no person or class is exempt from his piercing examination. He has an art for seeing into the hearts of people and sometimes even into their souls.

The British ruled India for some 200 years, which helps to explain why withdrawing and turning the country over to the Indians themselves was extremely difficult. Some families were invested to the point of feeling that India was more their country than England was. What hampered the procedure even more was the pervasive feeling among the British that the Indians were inferior and incapable of ruling the country competently. LIke surrendering your child to a nanny you are unsure of.

One of the Indian characters says: They are consciously or subconsciously aware of weakening their position by friendliness, so this friendliness always has to be on their own guarded terms. If we unwittingly think of it as mutual and go too far they are doubly incensed, first as individuals who feel they have been taken what they call advantage of, secondly as members of a class they fear they may have betrayed by their own thoughtless stupidity. And to a great extent, he is right. This leaves an Indian, even a well-respected one, in a no-win situation, or at the least a situation difficult to navigate.

In the hands of a less masterful storyteller, this might have been a dry tale because there is so much of historic fact about it, but Paul Scott ismasterful and the human element is the one that most consumes you. I feel so much the heartbreak and the injustice of Hari’s treatment, and what that kind of injustice must do to a man. I sense the evil spirit in Merrick that makes him hate others, even as I understand that some of what he hates is himself. It is his inequality that he resents, but if you remove the restrictions on the Indians and allow them to be equal, then a man like Merrick might find himself on the bottom rung.

He said you couldn't buck this issue, that relationships between people were based on contempt, not love, and that contempt was the prime human emotion because no human being was ever going to believe all human beings were born equal. If there was an emotion almost as strong as contempt it was envy.

What saves Hari Kumar, and what might be the thing that saves us all, is his realization that he has a choice. He can refuse to believe in Merrick’s version of who he is, and in doing so, he can define his own soul, he can protect the thing that no man can take away from another, the thing that makes them individual. When another man has control of your very life, what more could you have than this?

"There wasn't a single other person who was responsible for anything I did or said or thought. I wasn't to be categorized or defined by type, colour, race, capacity, intellect, condition, beliefs, instincts, manner or behavior. Whatever kind of poor job I was in my own eyes I was Hari Kumar--"

Finally, in the words of Sarah Layton when thinking about Merrick:

You reveal something that is sad about us, as if out here we had built a mansion without doors and windows, with no way in and no way out. All India lies on our doorstep and cannot enter to warm us or be warmed. We live in holes and crevices of the crumbling stone, no longer sheltered by the carapace of our history which is leaving us behind.

And there lies the situation in a nutshell. There are no built-in exits. The Raj is crumbling and what will follow is not in the control of any one of these groups. I love that choice of words--”something that is sad”, not evil but sad, and ”the carapace”--for indeed it is a shell that is being broken and an animal will emerge, and that animal might be a scorpion that, if legend is believed, can sting itself to death.

( )

"Independence is not something you can divide into phases. It exists or does not exist."

This is the second novel in the author's Raj quartet which maps the decline of the British Raj in India. The aftermath of the assault of Daphne Manners is still playing out but the action has moved to the the town of Ranpur where a wedding is to take place.

A groom and his best man are travelling to the ceremony when a rock is hurled at their limousine. A window is shattered and the groom, Teddie, suffers a small cut on his cheek. The service is slightly delayed but otherwise goes ahead without further incident. But what prompted this act of violence?
Could it be because the limousine belongs to the Nawab, the ruler of the state, and perpetrator making a statement against his rule? Or could it be because the occupants were English and the thrower a Nationalist? Or could it be that the best man happens to be Ronald Merrick, the police superintendent at the heart of the incident involving Daphne Manners and the chief suspect, Hari Kumar? An incident which is still an open wound between Indians and English and was central to the previous novel, The Jewel in the Crown.

Merrick has by now left the Police and is now an officer in the Army whilst Hari Kumar is languishing in jail despite the fact that there has never been a trial. Merrick was not Teddie’s first choice as best man, rather a last minute substitute, and Teddie has no idea of Merrick’s past.

The middle books in a series are always hard, however there is still plenty to admire here. Along with a change of location, with the exception of Merrick and Hari Kumar there is a whole set of new characters which allows the author to give some details as to the fate of the two characters who were prominent in the first novel without it feeling like a continuation of that particular story, rather the wider repercussions that it caused.

As with the first novel there isn't a lot of action but where there is some it is quite explosive. However, this book is is at its best during some long conversations between the disparate characters. In these conversations we see the clash of personalities, classes and social status, race and political persuasions but for me the most interesting conversation is about whether or not colonisers and the colonised can ever really learn be friends or merely learn not to hate one another. Even today, in a world where terrorist incidents happen with depressing regularity, this seems to be a relevant question.

This book isn't as overtly about a commentary about colonialism and racism and the first, instead it looks in particular on the effect colonialism has on the colonisers. Therefore I have to admit that I didn't enjoy this book quite as much as I did book 1 but it is still an interesting and thought provoking read which successfully achieves what a middle-book needs to do, make the reader eager for the next, so on to The Towers of Silence. ( )

(15) I am again fascinated by Scott's writing of the tail end of the British raj during WW2. Does this pick up where the first in the Quartet left off? Well, yes and no. We do meet Hari Kumar again, but he is not quite the focus. He instead -like all the characters - has come to symbolize something about the relationship between the British and the English. As do the next British family, the Laytons, whom we are introduced to in this book. The daughters Sarah and Susan are brought back to India, the land they were born, after going 'home' to England to be schooled. The India they return to is not quite the one they left. They return in the aftermath of the arrests on prominent members of the All India Congress party, and the Bibighar affair. I think Sarah especially senses Daphne Manners 'ghost' in her own dealings with India and its people.

It turns out Merrick has been shuttled off into the army after the mopping up of the Bibighar affair - even the British smell a rat. He becomes now entangled in the Laytons' lives and becomes by happenstance the best man at Susan's wedding. The plot from here is stunted and bizarre in a way I am now finding is characteristic of Scott. You can't always be sure exactly what he is talking about truth be told - the novel is heavy with allegory and often goes deep into the existential minds of his characters. It can be easy to put down at times. But at other times - it is breath-taking. The scene with Sarah and the officer listening to Indian music in Calcutta epitomizes this duality perfectly.

Anyway, I think I am officially obsessed. I watched the first few episodes of the mini-series 'The Jewel in the Crown' after I finished the first book and it completed atmospherically for me this poignant, languid, alcoholic, steamy, heavy story that I both can and cannot put down. Rather magical. ( )

The opening of this novel could do with a bit of trimming. It's a little diffuse. I'm not saying cut it all out. It's beautifully written. Scott writes a high-capacity, multi-claused sentence that picks you up and takes you somewhere else. And there's a fair bit of set-up. And obviously we need to be introduced to the protagonist, Sarah Layton, who carries the novel so well. But I got the impression the author was drifting and had taken his eye off the story.

But about the two hundred page mark Paul Scott spins round with his eyes aflame and punches you twice really hard in the face with these two intense interrogation scenes. Thereafter the novel does improve, or perhaps I was simply engaged for the first time. There's no doubt that it does suffer in comparison with The Jewel in the Crown being so rich and intense. ( )

”Sarah was conscious of belonging to a class engaged in small, continual acts whose purpose was survival through partial sharing in an evolution which, of all the family, only Aunt Lydia back in Bayswater had anticipated and closely witnessed the process of. It was a survival of exiles. Their enemy was light, not dark, the light of their own kind, of their own people at home from whom they had been too long cut off so that, returning there briefly, a deep and holy silence wrapped them and caused them to observe what was real as miniature….My history (Sarah thought, drinking her sweet gimlet, then drawing on her bitter cigarette), my history, rendered down to a colonnaded front, an architectural perfection of form and balance in the set and size of a window, and to a smoky resentment in my blood, a foolish contrivance for happiness in my heart against the evidence that tells me I never have been happy and can’t be while I live here. It’s time we were gone. Gone. Every last wise, stupid, cruel, fond or foolish one of us.” (Page 405)

For me there is so much satisfaction in sinking into a thick book written in exquisite prose that you just don’t see that often today. I scanned a review where the reader was put off by Scott’s long sentences. I love them. This kind of book takes time to read and appreciate and I love that about it.

This second volume of The Raj Quartet continues the story of the demise of British control of India, moving the story ahead to 1942-1944. D-Day has happened and everyone feels the European war will be over soon to be followed shortly by the Pacific war. The Laytons are a British family, new to the narrative, a longtime Military family who have traveled back and forth for brief visits to their homeland. Sarah is their oldest daughter and the only one who seems to have identified the need for the British to leave India.

Returning characters include Hari Kumar, who was accused of rape in the previous volume and Ronald Merrick, the police officer who lead the investigation. Hari has been jailed for political activities since they could not prove the rape charges. But he is being considered for release and the long section of the book devoted to his treatment by Merrick and other officials is brutal in its detail. Merrick is now an army officer and involved in a roadside assault. And also making an appearance is Lady Manners, aunt of the rape victim, but she is an enigma. The citizens know she’s there but no one has actually seen her.

I have to believe that Sarah, Merrick and Hari will be continuing characters in the next volume. I hope I can hold off until May to read it. This is a remarkable series. ( )