Book Reviews - Review 426

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

Though considerably shorter than the preceding "Raj Quartet" novels, this third installment took me much longer to get through. Paul Scott's psychological penetration and attention to cultural, social and historical detail are as sharp as ever. But the pace here is slower, dramatic episodes are few, and the central character leads a largely event-free life in which I struggled for long stretches to find much interest.

This character is Barbara ("Barbie") Batchelor, a recently retired missionary teacher in northern India. She answers an advertisement for a lodger by Mabel Layton, an elderly widow living in the British hill station of Pankot. The two women get on well enough, and Barbie moves into Mabel's house, pleasantly situated above a temperate valley. Mabel is a reserved but undemanding companion, and Barbie finds the situation largely to her liking. She has never really found contentment, and no longer expects it; but "there was a sense of tranquillity here, of serenity, which someone like herself might enter and be touched by, lightly if not deeply."

Mabel's health begins to fail, and Barbie takes on the role of her carer. To what extent Mabel appreciates her efforts is not clear. Mabel has retreated from the world, sensing that the days of the Raj are numbered. For this reason, her compatriots in the town regard her with slight unease:

Barbie's overriding wish in life is to be useful and appreciated, but it has been largely unfulfilled. Upon joining a Christian mission as a young woman, she was disappointed that it had given up much hope of spreading the Word, and was content to see Indian children made competent and loyal British subjects. Barbie's attempts at conversion were comically ineffectual. One of her pupils drew Jesus with a blue face, because she had seen Krishna's face portrayed that colour. Barbie's typically impulsive response was to withhold blue crayons from the class, with the result that "the children had no way of colouring the sky." In the same way, Barbie's religion is, metaphorically, without "sky" - earthbound, unintegrated and constrained.

Constraint lies at the root of Barbie's loneliness. Scott makes clear, through discreet narrative and descriptive details, that she is a lesbian. Too naive, and too afraid of the religious implications to confront her inclinations, Barbie avoids self-analysis by compulsive talking and unproductive activity. Her solicitude towards others has a slightly parasitic quality - she indulges it in a quest for the acceptance that she cannot grant herself. Mabel does not give Barbie much back in the way of obvious affection, but being passive and infirm, at least she needs her. That is as much as Barbie asks for.

The shallow peace of Barbie's residence in Pankot is finally broken when Mabel dies. Mabel's stepdaughter-in-law, the spiteful and alcoholic Mildred Layton, inherits the house. Mildred has always disliked Barbie and, projecting her own selfish instincts onto her, becomes convinced that Barbie has her eye on the place. She ejects the incumbent unceremoniously - being sure to insinuate that if she were to remain there as the family's guest, she would threaten her daughters' virtue. (Sarah and Susan Layton were two of the protagonists of the previous novel, The Day of the Scorpion.)

During the course of the novel, Barbie finds her faith undermined, most crushingly when she hears of the death of her friend and fellow-missionary, Edwina Crane. Edwina declared in her suicide note, "There is no God." But Barbie is a child at heart, and unable to face such a possibility consciously. So her subconscious mind takes over, and her story ends more ambivalently than Edwina's.

While The Towers of Silence is very much Barbie's story, an interlude early in the novel shifts the focus to Teddie Bingham, the ill-fated husband of Susan Layton. Teddie's story was delineated in The Day of the Scorpion, but here it is told from Teddie's own point of view. Teddie is a well-meaning but dimwitted patriot who dies unnecessarily while trying to live up to his principles in battle. Like Barbie, he lacks the imagination to confront his own unhappiness. He presents the painful spectacle of a man with no real potential to fulfil - a comic figure destined to a tragic fate. Oddly enough, Teddie's meeting with the fascinating Captain Merrick (see The Jewel in the Crown and The Day of the Scorpion) sows the seeds in him of self-awareness. It's one of Merrick's paradoxical characteristics that his dark and penetrating mind, along with his ambiguous candour, illuminates others to themselves.

As will be evident from what I've written, The Towers of Silence is a subtle, intricate work. My reservations about it are down to its focus on a single character, Barbie Batchelor, whom I found, to put it plainly, rather insipid. While we don't dislike her, we don't really respect her either. In the first two novels, Hari Kumar and Sarah Layton fully engaged the reader's sympathy, but our feeling for Barbie is confined by a central flaw - a lack of intellectual courage - with which she never does battle.

There is a limit to how much prose can be dedicated to a dull character without becoming dull itself. In the middle of the novel, Scott often seems to lose interest in his own creation, compensating with long-winded description and precious syntax that suggest a shift of attention away from the subject to the process of writing. There is something of later Henry James about it.

All this said: if you've committed yourself to reading the entire Raj Quartet (as I seem to have done), plough on with The Towers of Silence. It certainly contains much brilliant writing, and as much as in the earlier novels, the characterisation, the detail of a world's realisation, and the integrity of the narrative are astonishing achievements.