New Novels
13howanf Junction. By John Masters. (Michael Joseph. 12s. 6d.) Bhowani Junction is so ambitious a novel that I doubt if anyone but a practising novelist will realise how big a task Mr. Masters has taken on. He has set himself to reveal the strands in a knot of human relationships pulled tight by place and history, and make it prefigure in little the convolutions of human error: to show, in terms of a stretch of railway and the country round it, the sort o'f thing that was happening in India at the time of partition: and to grip our minds with an exciting story. More, he has elected to tell this story through the perceptions of the three main characters, two of them Eurasian, the third English.
Since much of the story's effect comes from suspense, I will give few details. The first narrator is Patrick Taylor, a Eurasian railway officer with a genius for saying and doing the wrong thing, which costs a valuable life before the story ends. Patrick is pitifully conscious of his betwixt-and-between status. He tries to take up his affair with Victoria where he left it off, but she has served in the WAC, and his sense of inferiority angers her and leads her to rebuff him. The poor man's precarious self-respect is further damaged by his encounters with Major Rodney Savage, an English- man who finds a sardonic delight in humiliating the inefficient. By the time Victoria takes over the story its pace is increasing. Victoria is no less aware of her position, but she sees it differently. "If the Indians rose against the English I could not be free, because they would count us Anglo-Indians as we counted ourselves—among the English." Through her eyes we see the manceuvres, the plotting, the sabotage, and the violence that follow the news of the naval mutiny. Rodney Savage amuses himself at her expense; his subordinate goes further. Each pays the penalty, Rodney relating, with crooked humour, his own capitulation. In the end a dazed Patrick finds that for once things go well with him; better, indeed, than heyealises.
This method is admirably suited to the analysis of a psychological tangle, but raises difficulties when it has to tell a story. Sooner or later there is bound to be some overlapping: the novelist will want a wider lens than any one of his narrators can supply, and so run a risk of going beyond the limits of character. Mr. Masters, faced with such a hurdle, takes it heroically—almost casually—and clears it, but with not an inch to spare.
Bhowani Junction is however much more than a tour de force. Patrick and Rodney are triumphs of characterisation. So-is Victoria —though she shines more clearly in the narrations of the two men than in her own. Rodney, arrogant, wry, unhealed, with his twist of cruelty, his self-contempt, and the affection released only in his dealings with his `Gurks,' is a figure that will live long after the detail of the book has been forgotten. If the complacency and Insolence of some of the English characters make one writhe, Mr. Masters extenuates nothing on the other side: and we feel, through- Out the story, the agonised subterranean heaves and struggles for Aquilibrium of a country staggered by the attempt to graft upon it a way of life wholly alien from its own. There is no space here to go
into the deeper implications of Mr. Master's magnificent story, btli, I hope it will be plain, from what I have tried to say, that he ha' added to our knowledge not only of India but of human nature. Two first novels follow, each of a strongly individual qualitY; Both centre on a flight from normal routine to an entirely nel:
environment which seems to bring disaster but is finally a waY t"
new understanding: yet no two books could be less alike. In Mr.,s' Mortimer's a family is given the loan of a cottage in the countrr,;
The journey to town and back takes four hours from the barrister' working day, and his wife finds herself up against snag after snag; Both tempers suffer, and the proprietors of a nearby co-educatio°!
school further endanger the harmony of a marriage which hithert..° had gone well. Mrs. Mortimer resembles the little girl who aPPeal. on the pair's first visit to the school, slashing at flowers with a stick,
She has a good eye, and an eyebrow humorously cocked above Head after head falls, neatly cut off. Seldom has a village cool munity been more wickedly and happily observed. This is a delight' ful performance, owing nothing to any other writer.
Mr. Leach's story is short, passionate, and unusual. His he° adventures alone into the desert and, sleeping on a deserted battle: field, is carried off by nomads. Accepting the situation, he is treat with increasing tolerance until he seduces one of their girls. Th.° girl is driven off, and he is bound to a wheel above a well at an oasli where for a long time he draws water for jeering travellers. Rescue at last by travelling dancers, he has the choice of sharing their
but returns to his own.
Mr. Leach obviously intends his fable to be read on more than on: level, and makes hisintention clearer by passages which seem to 111 violently over-written. I am in no way averse from heightened Out poetic writing, but these passages convey less to me than the excelle°, spare narrative which carries the action of the story. Above ark', ment, however, is the quality of experience, the sensitiveness tici perception, and the conviction of an insight that goes far beY°° appearances.
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