Customer Reviews

The Day of the Scorpion: A Novel (G K Hall Large Print Book Series)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A scorpion, when death is imminent, will simply coil up into a ball, and succum to death; this is what the reader is led to believe in part two of the Raj Quartet. This prevailing theme appears and reappears throughout the entire series; sometimes subtly. Reader beware, however, as the real cause for the scorpions coil is revealed in "A Division of the Spoils."

Indians coil at English oppression as demonstrated by Hari Kumar's silence over the rape of the white woman he loves; Hindus coil at Muslim antagonism, and Susan, an English woman coils up again and again, in fear of life itself. Scott uses this theme to capture the essence of the strife between England and India, and between the Muslims and the Hindu's.

While part one of the Jewel in the crown puts the focus on Hindu culture, Scott leads the reader to understand the Muslim perspective in "The Day of the Scorpion." Perhaps Paul Scott, in the Raj Quartet, can bring the reader to more fully understand the dynamics of human nature, morality and culture better than any writer of this century. The thoughts and ideas that prevail throughout the series are applicable to many international situations. This truely makes "The Day of the Scorpion" a cross cultural work of art.

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 2 introduces what is going to be the main storyline of the tetralogy, although the rape in the Bibighar Gardens will remain in the back of everyone's mind, and sometimes at the front, throughout. First of all there is Mohammed Ali Kasim, a respected Indian Congressman arrested by the British as a matter of course when Congress finalizes its "Quit India" resolution; and his son Ahmed, the dissolute intellectual who spends his time in one of the remaining Princely States of India. Second, the Layton family is introduced, a typical example of the British military in India. Sarah Layton, the elder of the two daughters, is exquisitely rendered and will become one of the series' most familiar and constant characters. Ronald Merrick, the police officer who victimized Hari Kumar during the Bibighar Gardens affair, slouches back into the story as the best man at Susan Layton's wedding, only to be made into an unlikely hero and martyr at the end of the novel.

THE DAY OF THE SCORPION continues Paul Scott's very long story (total of 2000 pages) of the last days of British colonial rule in India. SCORPION is book 2 in the so-called Raj Quartet. These books are not about the external events per se as much as they are about the effects of these external events on the lives of several individuals, most prominently, Hari Kumar, Sarah Layton, and later in book 4 Guy Perron. In SCORPION, several new characters are introduced to the series, including members of the Layton and Kasim families.

In book 1, JEWEL IN THE CROWN, Hari Kumar was wrongfully jailed by the wicked Ronald Merrick for the rape of Daphne Manners Hari's secret love. When Daphne refused to press charges Hari was detained as a political prisoner. In JEWEL, the story of Hari's life was told from the court proceedings and other second hand accounts. JEWEL covers a period of about fifty years.

In SCORPION, Hari tells the story of his life up to 1942. A large section of this 500 page volume reads like a court proceeding since Hari shares his story with Captain Rowan, who has been ordered by the Governor to interview Kumar in prison.

Lady Manners, Daphne aunt, is a secret witness to the interview. It is Lady Manners who has persuaded the British authorities to revisit the reasons for Hari's imprisonment. During the proceedings, Hari is told Daphne is dead. "Twin rivulets gleamed on his prison cheeks, and then the image became blurred and she felt a corresponding wetness on her own..."

I think it would be extremely hard to follow this book without having first read JEWEL IN THE CROWN. A large part of SCORPION is used to elaborate and further the plot introduced in JEWEL. Dipping into SCORPION without having first read JEWEL would be like trying to watch a serial after missing a few critical episodes.

In addition, the introduction of the Laytons and the Kasims might also seem disjointed unless one knows SCORPION is not a "stand alone" novel. In spite of these limitations, SCORPION is a wonderful book, and thus I have given it 5 stars.

In SCORPION, Sarah Layton takes on the central role. Sarah is the only Layton to have had contact with Lady Manners and be concerned about the events in Mayapore. Sarah has two long exchanges with Ronald Merrick, Hari Kumar's nemesis. Sarah meets Captain Rowan Hari's liberator. Sarah is struggling with her own issues surrounding the lives of the English in India. Sarah is the one to watch. And Sarah is an Aries. Her sister Susan is the Scorpio.

it is really not possible to review the quartet seperately because each volume centers around two incidents that occur in the first volume. new insights and characters are introduced as the story progresses and the incidents gather more clarity. i have never in all my years of reading, encountered a more complex and insideous evil than that of the character merrick. he is even better at being evil than iago. also, scott is so good at describing the end of empire in india, the isolation of the colonialists from each other, india, england and their own sense of self. on the part of the indians, to find their selves as separate from what they have had to become over years of domination and humiliation. the history of division between muslim and hindu and the indian arguments for non-participation in the war with japan and the way that plays into the whole idea of loyalty (to whom) was fascinating. i was sorry when i finally came to the end of the last volume. it was great reading!!!!!

In this second book of the Raj Quartet, Paul Scott begins to develop his characters more as opposed to the Indian landscape, and that makes this book a lot more readable than the first one.

Scott continues to have 'lapses' into long-winded paragraphs with descriptive detail, but this time, a much larger human element creeps in. Instead of the Indian countryside and endless narrations about the changing Indian political landscape, Scott focuses on how these changes are impacting the British - in particular, the Layton family.

Somehow, this brings alive the demise of the British Imperialism in India. No longer is it facts and stats, its not only the British rule collapsing, its the disintegration of British society and class structures. Everyone is fighting valiantly to preserve a dream which no longer exists.

This book overlaps slightly with the first book but goes a lot further to explain what happened to Daphne Manners in the first book. It also opens our eyes to the aforementioned collapse of British society in India as experienced by the Layton sisters.

All in all, this book was quite enjoyable. It's just a shame you have to read the first book to know where this book is heading...

Part two of the Raj Quartet explores WWII-era India from two perspectives. Hari Kumar, back from an English upbringing, languishes in prison after his arrest for the rape of his lover, Daphne Manners, who died at the end of "The Jewel in the Crown." Their baby's fate remains rather open, while Sarah Layton meets it as the sequel opens. She provides the central consciousness, filtered again by an omniscient narrator, into the British response to the rape trial and its prisoners.

Captain Merrick, who played a leading role in the interrogations, now looms as a possible swain for Sarah, but his own injury on the front fighting the Japanese and their Indian allies-- in a dramatically paced episode-- makes their courtship more oblique than direct. She does lose her virginity to an enlisted cad in a late scene that reveals Scott's powers of description: "She closed her eyes, exploring the illusion of possession which such an adoration might create between two people and was then aware that her hands were no longer held except by the desire to explore. Her own head was taken. For a while they stayed so, enacting the tenderness of silent lovers, and then slowly bending her head she allowed him to deal with the old maid's hook and eye." (946; Everyman edition)

Combining compassion and distance, Scott's voice registers throughout this lengthy novel memorably. This will place demands on the reader, and while some of the passages defy it seems the normal pauses and silences and bathroom breaks that in real life might make for less sustained and elegant recollection, the literary artifice of the narrative brings instead of brute realism its own shimmering and dreadful beauties. The very long interrogation of Hari, the reveries of Sarah, and the machinations of Count Bronowsky, the Pandit, and other military officials add verisimilitude and interest to this story.

Still, as before with "Jewel," this remains the story of the British reaction to India. Sarah muses: "They did not transplant well. Temperate plants, in the hot-house they were brought out too quickly and faded fast, and the life they lived, when the heat had dried them out and left only the aggressive husk, was artificial. Among them, occasionally, you would find a freak in whom the sap still ran." (629)

Later at her sister Susan's wedding: "She had a fleeting image of them all as dolls dressed and positioned for a play that moved mechanically but uncertainly again and again to a point of climax, but then shifted in ground, avoiding a direct confrontation. Each shift was marked by just such a pause, and the wonder perhaps was that the play continued. But the wind blew, nudging her through the creamy thinness of peach-coloured slipper satin and she and they were reanimated, prodded into speech and new positions." (667)

Such artificiality permeates their Indian presence. Loneliness dominates. "Why we are like fireflies too, she told herself, travelling with our own built-in illumination, a myriad portable candles lighting windows against some lost wanderer's return." (716) Miss Manners, aunt of Daphne, when witnessing Hari's interrogation, reflects on them as "lovers who could never be described as star-crossed because they had no stars. For them heaven had drawn an implacable band of dark across its constellations and the dark was lit by nothing except the trust they had had in each other not to tell the truth because the truth had seemed too dangerous to tell." (793)

Near the end, Sarah sees her sister's reaction to her new husband's death, after Merrick had tried to save them both on the front. Susan, as did Daphne, brings another long narrative to a close with a mix of horror and poignancy, and another child is born by a disturbed British woman into this troubled land. "We sense from the darkness in you the darkness in ourselves, a darkness and a death wish. Neither is admissible. We chase the illusion of perpetual light. But there's no such thing. What light there is, when it comes, comes harshly and unexpectedly and in it we look extraordinarily ugly and incapable." (988) No plucky heroism or stiff upper lips here.

This disturbs the reader. Less than its predecessor, which spread the narrative among different voices and registers, Sarah's tone darkens this installment. Even when she retreats, the ominous detachment dominates. Sometimes an eerie Orientalism arises between the British and the Indians, a doomed inevitability. Hari, the embodiment of British and Indian in one troubled soul, tells his captors about Merrick's stress on "enactment" of actions which are negative themselves, but fall between earlier actions as a consequence and before others as a prelude. History adds up to situations in which no significance can be seen until the actions are finished, or abandoned for fear of responsibility by their actors, "and so in a curious way the situations did become part of a general drift of events." (797) This combined fatalism and control drifts over the events that Hari has acted in, but determines to stand apart from as he asserts his right to silence about the night he and Daphne became lovers, and that same night he was arrested for her gang-rape.

Few will survive this pressure. Miss Manners watches Hari's testimony and feels that she's "driving to my grave." "Why and so you are, a voice told her. She recognized it from other occasions. Old people talked to themselves. From a certain age. No. Always. Throughout life. But in old age the voice took on a detached ironical tone. Passion had this determination to outlive its prison of flesh and brittle bone. As it made arrangements to survive it grew away, like a child from its favourite parent, impatient for the moment of total severance and the long dark voyage of intimate self-discovery. And so you are, her voice said. Driving to your grave. The parting of our ways. A release for both of us. One to oblivion, one to eternal life so unintelligible it ranks as oblivion too. And already our commitment to each other is worked out and nearly over. Momentum will carry you through what motions are left to you to show your grasp of situations and responsibilities." (807)

Among these, little Parvati Manners, child of imprisoned Hari and the dead Daphne, must be cared for by the elderly Lady M. Meanwhile, Sarah lingers in her own aftermath of her brief passion, and within such fragile lives, Anglo-India prepares to meet its own demise. Surrounded as the title indicates by their enemies, the colonials will attack back, symbolized by the scorpion stinging itself to death when circled by a ring of fire by those who seek its destruction.

Just as history can't be undone, innocence, once lost, can't be retrieved. If history would allow, I would dearly love to read Paul Scott's The Day Of The Scorpion without having first read The Jewel In The Crown. Scorpion is very much a continuation of the Crown and I am not convinced that a reader coming cold to the book as a stand-alone work would cope with the multiple references to what came before. Like the characters in Paul Scott's novels, I can't undo history and can only thus reflect on another time through this forensic tale of war-torn colonial India as someone who did the Crown first.

The incidents that formed the backbone of The Jewel In The Crown are still to the fore. There are implications and consequences. But time and people have moved on. Not all have survived. There is a child called Parvati who figures large in the tale but hardly ever appears. Ronald Merrick, however, the policeman from Mayapore who was only seen from afar and through others' eyes in The Jewel In The Crown is now very much at the centre of things. His character, that of a self-made man, grammar school educated, middle, not upper class, provides the perfect contrast to the stiff upper lip fossilized Britishness of the military types. Merrick is no less British, no less confident in his prejudices. In fact he is arguably more aggressive in his need to assert a removed superiority, but his need is personal and antagonistic, containing neither the patronising nor the paternalistic tendencies of those born to rule. Racially he assumes superiority, whereas professionally he must earn it, because, unlike the upper classes, he was not born to it.

The Laytons are such an upper class colonial family. Daddy is a prisoner of war in Europe. Mildred is at home in India - if home it can be - silently stewing at the indignity of not being able to live in the larger house her status deserves. She has taken to the bottle. Susan, the younger daughter, is about to be married to a suitably stationed officer and, despite war, civil unrest, threats of political change in Britain and now fragile colonialism, expects a fairytale family future plucked straight from the pages of some glossy magazine. Sarah, her sister, is more down to earth, is perhaps both more phlegmatic and sceptical, certainly more conscious of her responsibilities and role and the fragility of life.

Both sisters remember a childhood experience when a gardener made a ring of fire and dropped a live scorpion into its midst. Thus surrounded by threat, it did for itself, or at least that's how it looked. How would people react if conflagration surrounded them? They would have to get on with their lives, of course. But for some, the process might prove tougher than for others.

And what if you are a local ruler, a Nawab, for instance, a British puppet popping around a little kingdom claiming it's a law unto itself? What to do if your chief minister has been imprisoned by your masters without trial, along with all others who share his opposition to the people who keep you in power? Where then should your loyalties lie?

Though The Day Of The Scorpion is primarily a novel about women, it's the military side of the book that provides everyone involved with the ring of challenges they must face. With politicians in jail and Mr Ghandi's advocacy of non-violence, how does anyone relate to those Indians who have joined the Indian National Army to fight alongside the Japanese? If your mindset has been tutored on notions of paternalism and the white man's burden, how is possible that such people can exist? How can they reject what you have offered? But exist they do and their ammunition is live. And it's not only the British who cannot cope with such concepts.

The Day Of The Scorpion has many more themes than these. It is an episodic novel of quite remarkable complexity. The characters are beautifully drawn, rounded individuals, each presented with personal, social and political dilemmas. Not least among them is Hari Kumar, still imprisoned, whose loyalty is repeatedly tested, and whose resolve to protect remains unbreakable.

Paul Scott's novel recreates a complete world, a complete history via the experiences of individuals who, given the chance, are more than willing to explain their positions and dilemmas at length. But it is the detail of their stories that describes the pressures that now surround them. You cannot skip a word.

Paul Scott did an exceptional job of weaving the rich history of India's independence and great character study in creating the 'Raj Quartet'.