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A Division of the Spoils The Raj Quartet #4 Paul Scott 9780380450541 Books

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A Division of the Spoils The Raj Quartet #4 Paul Scott 9780380450541 Books

Finally, after tackling the four volumes with a friend at three-month intervals, I come to the end of Paul Scott's RAJ QUARTET. It brings the story of this particular group of Englishmen in India, which had begun with an alleged rape in 1942, up to 1947, when the British withdrew and India split into two separate countries, India and Pakistan. Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of individual sections, this final volume brings a great sense of completion, not merely of a six-year epic, but also of a colonial rule lasting the better part of two centuries. Paradoxically, though, there is also a sense of incompleteness, for few of the story lines end with any more neatness than the still troubled fate of the subcontinent itself.

This fourth volume is a long book (600 pages), and by no means even. The first 200 pages are superb, but then begins a very gradual falling off that leads the reader into some pretty tedious territory before the action picks up once more in the final 50 pages or so, which are totally brilliant. The problem, for me, arises from a conflict between Scott's roles as novelist and historian. From the very beginning, the Quartet had been characterized by multiple perspectives and an unusual mixture of narrative methods: straight description; first-person accounts; journal entries; newspaper articles; and semi-formal interviews of key characters. I read somewhere that Scott adopts some of the methods of the historian to give objectivity to his portraits of people's lives as individuals. When he succeeds in doing this, the results are superb.

But there were times in the middle of this volume when I felt that, instead of using the methods of the historian to illuminate individuals, he is using individuals as an excuse to set the record straight on some point of history. Throughout the cycle, for example, he has made reference to a fictional ex-Congress Party politician, M. A. Kasim, who is imprisoned by the British and eventually released. He plays a significant role here in relation to his elder son, Sayed, and Indian Army officer captured by the Japanese and coerced to serve in the "Indian National Army" (INA) against the British war effort. All the time I was reading this, I was feeling that either the INA must have been a hot topic when Scott was writing or he wished to make it so, for the characters all but disappear in page after page of political and moral discussion between father and son. Contrast Kasim's younger son Ahmed, who is left to be his own character, and whose story is that much more moving because he is a person first and a political symbol only a very distant second.

But then there are those 250 pages of sheer magnificence, plus another 100 or so that are pretty good. Why? Because they focus on interesting and satisfyingly complex people. Because they include entertaining and significant action. Because they are emotionally involving. And because, even when rehashing old events (as most of the Quartet does, after the first chapter or so), they add depth and interest to characters we thought we knew. Chief among these is Ronald Merrick, the former police officer whose handling of the original rape case was so suspect. Scott has always balanced a tendency to see him as the villain with surprising touches that show him in a good light. Here, though, the chiaroscuro is many times richer, with deeper blacks interspersed with flashes of brilliance and even humanity. In many ways, this is Merrick's book, even though he spends far more time in the wings than center stage.

But of course it is not Merrick's book. The leading character, if there is one, is new to the series: a British sergeant named Guy Perron. The rank is an anomaly; he is distinctly upper-crust, having gone to the same exclusive private school as several of the other characters (but not Merrick) and thence to Cambridge, where he is pretty much guaranteed a faculty job upon demobilization. His refusal to go for a commission is a deliberate choice, but it leads to some delicious situations when the old boy network of former school friends completely trumps the military hierarchy that Lieutenant-Colonel Merrick attempts to hold over his not-so-humble sergeant.

The other major character, Sarah Layton, has been haunting Scott's pages since I think the second volume. We know her as sensible, competent, kind, and blessed with a slightly detached intelligence. Although not a beauty like her younger sister Susan, she has a surprising emotional life and is by now no virgin. All through the less political sections of the book there is the titillation of a possible romance between her and Guy. I believe the Granada TV version was more explicit about this, but the novel's slightly awkward obliquity is a strong plus here.

There is a very strange moment after what might be considered the climactic scene in Sarah and Guy's story. Scott seems to go out of his way to parallel it to quite a different episode from earlier in the cycle. At the time, it seems gratuitous and to detract from the present romance. Yet thinking about it, I realize that Scott's whole method has been to draw such parallels, by revisiting the same scene again and again, or showing similar patterns in many different characters and situations. It is as though he is tracing the eddies and ripples in a slowly moving stream, picking us up almost at random, turning us in the common human circles, then letting us go as the great river flows inexorably on.


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A Division of the Spoils The Raj Quartet #4 Paul Scott 9780380450541 Books Reviews

This is the final book of the Raj Quartet. All 4 books are long and not to everyone's taste I am sure. They deal with the final days of British rule in India and India's final independence. It took me a long time to read all 4 but for me it was worth it.
This is the fourth book in the Raj Quartet Series. Scott is a marvelous writer. His narrative flows in such a way that you are captured by the story and the historical context. This series was made into a remarkable BBC production some years ago called "The Jewel in the Crown". I went on to read book number 5 which is "Staying On". The relationship of the British as conquerors and occupiers of India for over 100 years to the native people of India is brought clearly to focus in these excellent works.
The final book of the quartet and the most bitter sweet I felt. The end of The Raj in India and a time of great upheaval and drastic change. It was interesting to find out the fate of some of the characters that made this quartet so compelling and addictive.

Wonderfully atmospheric, complex and interesting characters amidst a fascinating time in history. This is a series that could be read again and again. Time and money well spent.
The 4th volume in the series. This is a complicated read--a series of novels based on a few incidents of action/plot which are discussed, written about, observed from many perspectives. The story moves forward only slightly from early WWII to the end of the war and beginning of Indian Independence. It is not an easy read. I have found myself occasionally skimming passages and other times absolutely addicted. If you are struggling, I suggest watching the excellent PBS series which does follow the "plot" of the story and may help you stay on track.
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 4 is the tour-de-force of the series, the longest and the one that covers the greatest distance, emotionally and chronologically. Into the Laytons' social set come Nigel Rowan, an officer in the political branch whom we have met before in Book 2 interrogating Hari Kumar some years after his imprisonment, and Guy Perron, a sergeant in the intelligence service who is "chosen" against his will by Ronald Merrick to serve in his unit. Merrick seems deliberately to surround himself with people who dislike him Guy Perron, Sarah Layton, and before them Daphne Manners and Hari Kumar. Rowan and Perron, incidentally, are former schoolmates of Kumar's at the posh Chillingborough Academy in England. And they're not the only ones The British in India seem constantly reminded that Kumar symbolizes the insoluble problem of India's Britishness. He's too British for the Indians and too Indian for the British. Perron is an excellent guide through the final days of the Raj, stolid and proper yet inwardly seething with intellectual outrage. An explosive yet sombre climax in 1947 details the very end of the British presence in India, the beginnings of the Hindu-Muslim riots throughout the country, and gives an expansive sense of just how far one has come from the small town of Mayapore and the darkly deserted Bibighar Gardens.
Finally, after tackling the four volumes with a friend at three-month intervals, I come to the end of Paul Scott's RAJ QUARTET. It brings the story of this particular group of Englishmen in India, which had begun with an alleged rape in 1942, up to 1947, when the British withdrew and India split into two separate countries, India and Pakistan. Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of individual sections, this final volume brings a great sense of completion, not merely of a six-year epic, but also of a colonial rule lasting the better part of two centuries. Paradoxically, though, there is also a sense of incompleteness, for few of the story lines end with any more neatness than the still troubled fate of the subcontinent itself.

This fourth volume is a long book (600 pages), and by no means even. The first 200 pages are superb, but then begins a very gradual falling off that leads the reader into some pretty tedious territory before the action picks up once more in the final 50 pages or so, which are totally brilliant. The problem, for me, arises from a conflict between Scott's roles as novelist and historian. From the very beginning, the Quartet had been characterized by multiple perspectives and an unusual mixture of narrative methods straight description; first-person accounts; journal entries; newspaper articles; and semi-formal interviews of key characters. I read somewhere that Scott adopts some of the methods of the historian to give objectivity to his portraits of people's lives as individuals. When he succeeds in doing this, the results are superb.

But there were times in the middle of this volume when I felt that, instead of using the methods of the historian to illuminate individuals, he is using individuals as an excuse to set the record straight on some point of history. Throughout the cycle, for example, he has made reference to a fictional ex-Congress Party politician, M. A. Kasim, who is imprisoned by the British and eventually released. He plays a significant role here in relation to his elder son, Sayed, and Indian Army officer captured by the Japanese and coerced to serve in the "Indian National Army" (INA) against the British war effort. All the time I was reading this, I was feeling that either the INA must have been a hot topic when Scott was writing or he wished to make it so, for the characters all but disappear in page after page of political and moral discussion between father and son. Contrast Kasim's younger son Ahmed, who is left to be his own character, and whose story is that much more moving because he is a person first and a political symbol only a very distant second.

But then there are those 250 pages of sheer magnificence, plus another 100 or so that are pretty good. Why? Because they focus on interesting and satisfyingly complex people. Because they include entertaining and significant action. Because they are emotionally involving. And because, even when rehashing old events (as most of the Quartet does, after the first chapter or so), they add depth and interest to characters we thought we knew. Chief among these is Ronald Merrick, the former police officer whose handling of the original rape case was so suspect. Scott has always balanced a tendency to see him as the villain with surprising touches that show him in a good light. Here, though, the chiaroscuro is many times richer, with deeper blacks interspersed with flashes of brilliance and even humanity. In many ways, this is Merrick's book, even though he spends far more time in the wings than center stage.

But of course it is not Merrick's book. The leading character, if there is one, is new to the series a British sergeant named Guy Perron. The rank is an anomaly; he is distinctly upper-crust, having gone to the same exclusive private school as several of the other characters (but not Merrick) and thence to Cambridge, where he is pretty much guaranteed a faculty job upon demobilization. His refusal to go for a commission is a deliberate choice, but it leads to some delicious situations when the old boy network of former school friends completely trumps the military hierarchy that Lieutenant-Colonel Merrick attempts to hold over his not-so-humble sergeant.

The other major character, Sarah Layton, has been haunting Scott's pages since I think the second volume. We know her as sensible, competent, kind, and blessed with a slightly detached intelligence. Although not a beauty like her younger sister Susan, she has a surprising emotional life and is by now no virgin. All through the less political sections of the book there is the titillation of a possible romance between her and Guy. I believe the Granada TV version was more explicit about this, but the novel's slightly awkward obliquity is a strong plus here.

There is a very strange moment after what might be considered the climactic scene in Sarah and Guy's story. Scott seems to go out of his way to parallel it to quite a different episode from earlier in the cycle. At the time, it seems gratuitous and to detract from the present romance. Yet thinking about it, I realize that Scott's whole method has been to draw such parallels, by revisiting the same scene again and again, or showing similar patterns in many different characters and situations. It is as though he is tracing the eddies and ripples in a slowly moving stream, picking us up almost at random, turning us in the common human circles, then letting us go as the great river flows inexorably on.