The Raj Quartet, Volume 3: The Towers of Silence (Volume 3) (Phoenix Fiction)

The four volumes of the Raj Quartet overlap and complement one another, while at the same time forwarding the main storyline of the slow twilight of the British ascendancy in India, always with the rape of a white girl by Indian men as the central lodestone everpresent in the background, the nightmare which is seldom mentioned but which none can drive from their minds. Events occur, are discussed, witnessed as newspaper reports, court documents, interviews, vague recollections from years later, or perceived directly by the main characters. Then the next volume will take two or three steps back into previous events, and these same events will be perceived from another angle, perhaps only as a vague report heard far away across the Indian plain, or witnessed directly by another character, or discussed in detail long after their occurrence over drinks on a verandah. This may at times seem like rehashing, indeed as one reads the four volumes one will be subjected to the account of the rape in the Bibighar Gardens many times over; but what will also become apparent is that additional details, sometimes minor variations in interpretation and sometimes crucial facts, are being added slowly to the events discussed, as though the window to the past were being progressively wiped cleaner and cleaner with successive strokes of Scott's pen. In this way he draws the picture of the last days of the Raj not in a conventional linear fashion, but recursively, and from multiple angles. One gets the clear impression of life in India during the first half of the 20th century as similar in nature: Fragmented, multifaceted, largely dependent upon perspective and experience and never perceived whole or all at once.
Book 3 is the shortest of the four volumes, and may almost be termed a "chamber novel," focusing as it does on the peripheral character of Barbie Batchelor, a retired missionary and lodger at the Laytons' ancestral home. Barbie is an instantly recognizable character: The kind of person who always lurks about the edges of society, awkward, embarrassing, barely tolerated by her peers. Book 3 covers much of the same time period as Book 2, this time from Barbie's point of view and also from that of Teddie Bingham, Susan Layton's husband. Teddie meets Ronald Merrick while on duty and more of Merrick's character and history is filled in. Book 3 then moves beyond the point at which Book 2 ended and continues Barbie's story, her eventual ouster from the Layton's home and slow descent into illness and madness.

Each volume of Scott's The Raj Quartet has its own beauty and power. This volume could perhaps be said to view of India from the English point of view... although that viewpoint is, like India itself, always shifting, sometimes hallucinatory. The character I love most in this volume is the missionary, who comes to live in Rose Cottage... she is a link between the first volume, and the symbolic picture "The Jewel in the Crown", and the post-war India to come. To say what happens to her would give away the story... suffice to say that Scott's powers of characterization are as brilliant as ever. If you have read the first 2 volumes, you are already hooked, and will hardly need this review to read on!
The Raj Quartet is one of the finest works of literature I have read. Don't miss it.

A key to unlocking The Towers of Silence, Paul Scott's third installment of the Raj Quartet, is none other than the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who assayed that the individual is the portal to history.

That is unless the reader would rather choose entry through the towers of silence used by the Parsees (a Zoroastrian community that fled Muslim conquering of Persia) during their funeral rights to lay their deceased out for the vultures to feast on.

Either way, the infinite land of Scott's work serves as the silent backdrop from which violent events arise.

So, for the sake of our sanity, let's not enter through the towers of silence. Gruesomeness aside, the individual offers a more accessible portal. But all ends up receding into the same silence from whence it came anyway in the world Scott paints.

As was the case in the second volume Day of the Scorpion, the women continue to dominate center stage, especially the visionary Barbara Batchelor, Barbie to her friends, and to Scott. Barbie is a missionary on the periphery of Raj society. She is taken in by Mabel Muir, herself an outsider who senses well ahead of her fellow Brits the ebb of the Raj's tide.

And, Mabel runs counter to the herd. When unarmed civilians are slaughtered at Amristar by troops led by Brigadier Reginald Dyer, the Raj community rallies around their general and sets up a defense fund. But Mabel makes a sizable contribution to the fund the Indians set up for families of the victims.

It is largely through the individual characters of Barbie and Mabel - both alluded to as towers of silence, by the bye - that Scott examines the Raj during the end of World War II as fundamental shifts shake things up in the emerging Indian nation. But other characters also serve as portals into history.

Barbie and her visions are shaped by Emerson's essays, including: "'There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.'" Her dreams - some of which accurately anticipate events and understand unexplained occurrences - conjure "the figure of an unknown Indian: dead in one aspect, alive in another. And after a while it occurred to her that the unknown Indian was what her life in India had been about."

The fact is that much of her life has been frittered away on failed attempts to teach children in a missionary school that is adrift in India, neither sanctioned by the Raj, nor embraced by Indians. And this failure runs parallel to much of the Raj's tenure in the subcontinent.

The difference is that Barbie has the courage to explore the failings of the Raj, something that never occurs to mainstream Raj society whose energies are devoted to maintaining the myth of the Raj. In the words of one of the military matrons, "There would be no chain of trust if there were no chain of command." Mabel, on the other hand, already knows.

This review, as any review of the Raj quartet is bound to be, is just a sliver of the pie. The characters are the action as they evolve and mutate, pinging off one another and reacting.

Mildred, Mabel's daughter in law, deserves a brief mention. She is the third of the many triangles signaling a "danger zone" among shifting characters. She herself, like all the characters, has a quality that alienates her from others, yet she is very much a player in the Raj's Pankot society.

The characters also are bestowed a mix of qualities that not only make them difficult to pin down for those who inclined to pass judgment, but also make for interesting exchanges with others. This is especially true for the villain/hero Reginald Merrick, a police official whose qualities simultaneously border on the psychopathic and all that is virtuous about the Raj.

On the one hand, he is accused of torturing Indian suspects brought in for questioning, or suspected of wrongdoing, in his eyes. At the same time, he is lauded for keeping a lid on things in a way that is judged fair, even by those who are in a position to criticize him.

In September 1939, when the war had just begun, Miss Batchelor
retired from her post as superintendent of the Protestant mission
schools in the city of Ranpur. Her elevation to superintendent
had come towards the end of her career in the early part of 1938.
At the time she knew it was a sop but tackled the job with her
characteristic application to every trivial detail, which meant
that her successor, a Miss Jolley, would have her work cut out
untangling some of the confusion Miss Batchelor usually managed
to leave behind, like clues to the direction taken by the cheery
and indefatigable leader of a paper chase whose ultimate
destination was not clear to anybody, including herself.

Thus Paul Scott opens the third volume of his magisterial RAJ QUARTET, with a loquacious, well-meaning, but ineffective retired school teacher with nowhere to go. In reviewing the first volume of the Quartet, THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN, I remarked on what I called Scott's liminal viewpoint, his tendency to tell the story of the last days of British rule in India through people who are relatively peripheral to it. This volume takes this almost to extremes, in focusing on a character with no power whatsoever. Barbie Batchelor is not a new arrival; we have met her already in the second volume, THE DAY OF THE SCORPION, and know that she takes a room in Rose Cottage, the house of the elderly Mabel Layton in the fictional hill town of Pankot. Indeed, with very few exceptions, all the action in THE TOWERS OF SILENCE has already been told in THE DAY OF THE SCORPION. It makes for a very peculiar book indeed, and not an entirely satisfying one.

Reading it was a strangely unsettling experience for me. A friend and I are spreading the four volumes over the course of a year, and it has actually been about four months since I read THE DAY OF THE SCORPION. Last year, however, I watched the brilliant Granada TV series again, so much of the story and many of the characters are burned into my mind. Reading the third volume now, I had a disturbing sense of déjà vu, not knowing whether something was familiar because I had read it before in a previous volume, or merely because I had seen the series. I now realize that almost all the familiarity came from having read it in previous volumes, and would apply to those who had not seen the television version at all.

Such action as there is centers around the Laytons, one of the most influential families in Pankot. Colonel Layton, Mabel's son, has been captured in battle and is in prison camp in Germany. His second wife, Mildred, now rules the roost in Pankot, and her daughters, the pretty Susan and the thoughtful Sarah, are the center of attention from the many young officers stationed in the town. Mildred feels she should be able to move her entire family into Rose Cottage, which her husband will inherit anyway, but Mabel dislikes her and offers the room to Miss Batchelor in part to keep her out. And indeed Mildred, a vindictive alcoholic snob, is surely one of the most unpleasant characters in literature, let alone in the Quartet. The volume will recap many of the events of its predecessor: Mabel Layton's death; Susan Layton's wedding and widowhood, and the birth of her baby; Sarah Layton's visit to Calcutta; and the complications of the Japanese tactic of recruiting captured Indian soldiers into the Indian National Army (INA) to fight against the British in the name of eventual independence. The only things that are really new in it are the events toward the end of the war, and the conclusion of Barbie's story. So two questions arise: what does Scott achieve in this volume if it mainly reexamines old events, and why does he choose to do it through Barbie?

Although Barbie is the main character, she remains essentially peripheral to Pankot society, and it is the structure of that society that is the main theme of this volume—a collective rather than individual focus. But this is more than a narrative device. The title of the first volume, THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN, refers to a painting of Queen Victoria reviewing a march past of her Indian subjects. It epitomizes a Hindi term known as "Man-Bap," or "mother-father." The Queen is both the mother and father of the Indian people, the parent to whom they owe obedience and will in turn feed and protect them. The man-bap principle then extends all the way down the hierarchical chain, and is the secret of the loyalty felt by Indian troops to their British officers. Hence the horror of Indians joining with the INA to fight against their military "parents." Hence, too, the hierarchical structure of the entire British colony, where wives take precedence over others by virtue of their husbands' rank, and even marriage is a matter of finding a girl whose father is of an appropriate seniority in a prestige regiment.

I have read many English novels dealing with class, but seldom anything so quietly vitriolic as the picture here. Mildred and most of the women around her despise Barbie because she is "not out of the top drawer." As soon as Mabel dies, Mildred does all she can to belittle her and oust her. Finding that Mabel has left her a small annuity, she is convinced that Barbie herself must have angled for it (not true), "because its a typically lower-middle-class idea of upper-class security and respectability." But this is not a surprise from the woman who constantly refers to Captain Samuels, the psychiatrist treating her own daughter, as "that trick-cyclist Jew boy." The more I learned about Mildred, the more I wanted to watch her come-uppance, but if Scott intends to give her one, he is saving it until the final volume.

I have been reading an interesting monograph by John Lennard called READING PAUL SCOTT. His section on Barbie Batchelor comes in a chapter titled "There's Nothing I Can Do," exploring what he calls "personal nullity" or the inability to influence events. This is obviously the case with Barbie. By showing her as increasingly visionary or delusional (one is never sure which), he makes her an apt commentator on a political and moral crisis that she can intuit but not entirely understand. And by making her a devout Christian, he is also—shockingly—able to make her an ultimate commentator on the uselessness of Christian belief, at least as applied to the problems of India.

Lennard also makes the point that, as one of the only two lower-middle-class characters of significance, she stands as the female counterpoint to Ronald Merrick, the other. Lennard has two sections on Merrick: "Merrick as Antagonist" focuses on his role as the police officer who framed the suspects in the original rape case; "Merrick as Protagonist," however, looks at his more sympathetic side, and suggests that the character may have been the alter-ego of the author himself. Merrick makes only a few appearances in this volume (one as the almost unbelievably well-informed intelligence officer who delivers a necessary briefing on the INA), but the final one, with Barbie Batchelor in the uprooted garden at Rose Cottage, is extraordinarily touching. Barbie is almost the only one who sees this other side of Merrick, and her kindness to him is in many ways the culminating act of her life.

The only other person who sees something good in Merrick (and even that is shaded) is Sarah Layton. She is also the one woman in Pankot, after Mabel's death, to have any time for Barbie. With one significant exception, nothing new happens to Sarah in this volume, and her role is a small one. Nonetheless, she suffuses the volume with her thoughtfulness and kindness; if her mother is the book's least likeable character, she herself is the nicest. [And in this case, my memory of the extraordinary performance by Geraldine James on television does no harm whatsoever.] I see that Lennard lists Sarah as the fourth of the characters exemplifying personal nullity (the other two are Edwina Crane and Daphne Manners). I guess I shall have to wait until the final volume to see what he means by that. Meanwhile, I shall end with Barbie Batchelor's extraordinary insight into the younger woman's problem, which might also stand as the theme of the entire series. It is a beautiful testament to the friendship between a very young woman and a rather old one, the two loveliest characters in the book, and arguably the most perceptive:

Looking at Sarah, Barbie felt she understood a little of the sense
the girl might have of having no clearly defined world to inhabit,
but one poised between the old for which she had been prepared, but
which seemed to be dying, and the new for which she had not been
prepared at all. Young, fresh, and intelligent, all the patterns to
which she had been trained to conform were fading, and she was
already conscious just from chance or casual encounter of the gulf
between herself and the person she would have been if she had never
come back to India: the kind of person she 'really was.'

Paul Scott's writing wouldn't pass a modern day English exam. Too many of his sentences are way too long with too many long parenthetical phrases. He spends way too much time on some of his characters, for example, Barbie. Her type played only a small part in the history of Britain leaving India, however, Scott has the reader spending hours on Barbie's story. A not very interesting story at that.

In this third installment of the "Raj Quartet," we witness through the perspective largely of Barbie Batchelor the reaction to the incidents which comprised the core of "The Jewel in the Crown." (I reviewed that in June 2009.) Daphne Manners has died and her mother and her child are off-stage for all but a glimpse or two here; Susan Layton marries Teddie Bingham and we learn more about their courtship and brief marriage. Similarly, we find her sister Sarah becoming friends with Barbie when she moves in Rose Cottage with the Layton step-grandmother-in-law Mabel, in the hill station of Pankot, sister encampment to Ranpur where the unrest over the trial of Hari Kumar and his compatriots accused of raping Daphne had not spread to Pankot.

Instead, we get the slow transfer of rumors and gossip, along with Barbie's prominence in relating what she knows from her fellow missionary, Edwina Crane. Her fate will parallel that of Barbie, perhaps, a decline from confidence in the mission and its evangelical rationale to an encounter with a less comforting, existential resignation to the loneliness of the British who choose to defend the spiritual campaign in India alongside the military and civil functionaries who populate Pankot. Scott gradually draws Barbie's situation parallel to that of the Second World War, and the struggles felt from the battle zone, while they do not reach the hills, echo with the fate of Robert Merrick, who had persecuted Hari and his comrades so relentlessly.

After his tragic attempt to rescue Teddie during the fighting in Burma, Merrick confides in Barbie. His role here is gentler, tempered by his own gallantry, and Scott excels in their conversation as it reveals the unease at the heart of the British civilizing enterprise. The book moves slowly. I think Scott for once overtipped his hand at the coda, in linking too tightly world events to Barbie's decline, but he may have done this to forge an imperial analogy of one Englishwoman's fall to that of the empire and its crown jewel. Most of the narrative stays subtler. Much of it takes place at Rose Cottage, with an almost Jane Austen-like attention to conversational shifts and character revelations barely perceived without intense scrutiny to tone and intent and what's said or unsaid.

Teddie's reaction to Merrick's talk about the Indian National Army which allies against the British with the Japanese reminds me of the book's structure. "Formless, almost shapeless, the beauty consisted in the subtle cohesion of what seemed like disparate parts and in the extraordinary flexibility of each arrangement made to bring them together." (Everyman's Library ed. 2007, p. 126) Scott features no high drama as in "Jewel" or especially its sequel which delved into Captain Merrick's interrogation of Hari, "The Day of the Scorpion" (reviewed July 2009) but we learn how both titular symbols endure here. The picture of Queen Victoria receiving homage of the world's peoples lacks, Barbie notes, an unknown Indian. The scorpion bites itself when surrounded by fire only due to its sensitivity to the heat, the sun, the light.

This book will unsettle you. Four hundred pages show Scott's narrative control, but it's grim much more than droll. It's to be read after the first two, naturally. It advances their timeline forward through the war, but those events remain dim and distant. While Scott characteristically filters the disintegrating coherence of Barbie powerfully, it's not pleasant: "the vision was shut off again by barriers of fleshy faces, arms, bosoms, chins and epaulettes, the bark and chirrup of the human voice manufacturing the words which created the illusion of intelligent existence." (195) Barbie looks at a swain for Sarah and sees "the enthusiastic expression of mediocrity which Barbie had learned to recognize from years of looking in a mirror." Unsparing in its glances at sex, birth, marriage, faith, and death, Scott provides in Barbie a disturbing depiction of the breakdown of belief and of order. (P.S. I also briefly reviewed the Everyman's Library ed. of vols. 1-2 combined in June 2012.)

Excellent writing. I am enjoyin this series very much and look forward to the next book!

good book

PART OF A SERIES

An excellent description of the lives of several of the British Raj, especially of one family, and some of both Brits and Indians.