23 JULY 1977, Page 28

Lost jewel

Benny Green

The Raj Quartet Paul Scott (Heinemann E7.50)

It is doubtful if the British will ever quite lay the ghost of empire, even if the day ever dawns when they wish to, which is more doubtful still. Painful as the withdrawal symptoms are, there is only one effective therapy, which is to understand, to understand when and how and why, above all to understand why the imperishable turned out to be so transient. The only trouble with that prescription is that the Indian experience is so vast as to be unknowable. It is impossible to 'understand' the British in India, which is one of the two reasons why the episode will continue to draw the creative writer. The other reason belongs in the realm of the fantastical. It is still hardly credible that any nation ever embarked on so stupefying and grandiose an escapade as the British when they staggered clumsily backwards into the limelight of Indian governance, and, having embarked, actually sucdeeded to so great a degree. Indeed, history offers nothing more baffling than this extraordinary imperial strategy, conceived in a bumbling idealism compromised from its birth by ruthless commercial intent, and executed with a unique blend of audacity and feeblemindedness, of determination and indecision, of gentility and ruthlessness, of rapacious greed and heroic altruism, of Disraelian cynicism and Arthurian sincerity, a monumental contradiction which Santayana was smiling over when he nominated the British as the sweetest of conquerors. And no imperial episode ever inspired more prolific literary outcroppings. It will be a long time before the dispossessed tire of reading about their lost inheritance, and my guess is that over the next fifty years they will be offered much piffle in the process. From time to time, however, they will strike lucky. They will get a Paul Scott.

His quartet covering the last five years of British rule, from the Japanese invasion to Independence Day, is a masterpiece, a truth already long accepted by those who read the four books as they appeared, from 1966 to 1975, The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence and A Division of the Spoils. But the publication of all four in a single volume is very much more than a publisher's ploy for gathering fresh juice from a squeezed orange, because only when the four books are taken in conjunction and seen as part of a whole, is the intricacy of their groundplan fully revealed. Great events in the first volume are gradually diminished by time and subsequent events, until in the last book their reverberations have faded to a distant echo almost

imperceptible and for that very reason more affecting than ever. The fact that each part of the quartet has been designed so that it can stand alone says much for Scott's skill as a storyteller and delineator of character; but each novel, burgeoning within the atmosphere of its own independent life, leaves a few questions floating tantalisingly on the air. A few still remain even at the very end, simply because life, and the best art, is like that. There are no full explanations; it is impossible wholly to 'understand'. But Scott, even as he implicitly makes the point, takes us deep into that astonishing Mogul dream in which the British indulged for three centuries, at just the point of the rude awakening.

In the very crudest terms, the quartet is about a sexual assault, the rape of a daughter of the Raj. But it is also about the inevitability of the British departure, the tragedy 9f partition, the public school system, racial prejudice, power politics, judicial procedure, sexual passion and the indifferent forces of history, all of whose energies are implicated in the rape to produce a complexity of cause and event as hypnotic, and as logic-defying as daily existence itself. Had there not been nationalistic simmerings at the time. of the arrests after the rape, would the charges and the sentences have been different? Would there indeea have been a rape at all? Who was motivated by what? Where does patriotism putresce into chauvinism? And which man truly knows the nature of his own compulsions to the point where he can explain himself, either to himself or to others? In order to weave this complex web, Scott has to create a very large cast of principals, every one of whom can stand equally well as a person and as an imperial archetype.

The quartet has been structured with architectonic finesse; the work itself is divided into four parts; each part is subdivided into four or more sections, and each section, resembling a novella in its completeness, features a central narrator whose identity changes with the speculative nature of the action; sometimes it is one character, sometimes another; sometimes he is Scott himself, returning to the arena twenty years after, raking over the swiftly vanishing evidence in an attempt to solve a mystery which has no solution. Each section focuses on one protagonist or group of protagonists, and it is with this form that Scott is able to bring into play his remarkable knack of penetrating the dialectical defences of his characters. A large proportion of them are women, Miss Crane, for instance, the devoted pedagogue who dies by means ironically native; Lady Chatterjee, an exquisitely rendered portrait of what happens when one culture aspires to the nuances of another; the Layton sisters, drifting like cockleshells on the heavy seas of the Raj matrimonial market; Miss Batchelor, fondly recollecting the music-hall ditties of childhood spent in a street symbolically called Lucknow Road, Camberwell.

But the two central characters are opposed so diametrically as to smack of allegorical intent. Harry Coomer, who suffers the agonising metamorphosis into Hari Kumar when his father's business fails, finding himself snatched from the cradle of an English public school and flung into the whirlpool of workaday Indian life; Ronald Merrick, his deadly enemy, the policemanturned-soldier, elementary schoolboyturned-grandee, the type of administrator who has always left the natives asking for less. Although Merrick features the more prominently, it is Kumar who pervades the text even in his own absence, setting the insoluble problem of what to do with the man who, by being tossed between two antipathetic cultures, becomes acceptable to neither.

In general the prose is decorous rather than ambitious, almost as though for long stretches someone is giving evidence at the bar of history; when on rare occasions Scott . takes a chance with an aromatic word or simile, a mumchance, a desuetude, it can come as a shock. A few images are unforgettable, the stuffed tiger 'prowling in a nightmare of immobility on a wooden plinth', and this of a Nawab who, because he poses no threat to the ruling power, has been allowed 'to blossom as it were like a small and insignificant rose in the desert of dead Mogul ambitions'. This is an India in which Kipling has already receded into the history books; when one of the functionaries at the club denigrates him, 'the Minister, anticipating Mr T. S. Eliot, thought well of him'. Kipling, in fact, is much in Scott's thoughts, and much in the thoughts of his characters who 'used to find themselves thinking of Kipling or A.E.W. Mason and looking forward to sundown'.

At the very end, two ideas emerge which appear at first sight to make the strangest of bedfellows. We are reminded, through the survival of Kumar, of the legend of Philoctetes and the suppurating wound, and are given the hint that perhaps the rituals of Thuggee are not quite as obsolescent as the Raj would like to think them. Until this point, around page 2000, neither Thuggee nor Philoctetes has been mentioned, and their very incongruity in a text which has relied for its philosophic bromides on Emerson, suggests that perhaps Scott was triggered off by some other writer. The only work I know which embraces both Thuggee and Philoctetes is Edmund Wilson's The Wound and the Bow, in which he offers Philoctetes as an allegory of the creative artist, and presents the case for Thuggee as the key to the mystery of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Whether or not the links are tenuous, there is no question that the same process which interested Dickens and Wilkie Collins, of incorporating into English literature the Indian experience, has now inspired Scott's magnificent novel. The melodrama which opened in The Moonstone, with the British first becoming aware of the jewel in the crown, now ends with The Raj Quartet, as they mourn its irrecoverable loss.