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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A second Voyage Out,
By
This review is from: Far Cry (Paperback)
Emma Smith wrote only two novels in the late 40s before she married and put away her typewriter for decades; they were bestsellers and were critically acclaimed, yet they remain today largely forgotten. The Persephone Press has reissued one of them, THE FAR CRY, and like its central characters it is odd and difficult to appreciate at first but well worth it in the end. Fourteen year-old Tersea is pulled out of school by her cantankerous and dislikeable father to go to India with him simply to spite her mother, from whom her father is estranged and who is coming to England to reclaim her; in India, he hopes to reunite with his other daughter from a previous marriage, the lovely Ruth. For the first hundred pages or so this book is very hard-going: the characters seem not only unlikeable but also unloveable, and you wonder why you put up with them. Like Forster in his rougher early fiction (WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD and THE LONGEST JOURNEY), which seem among her clearest models, Emma Smith seems intent on showing us the worst side of people: the luxury of a bright and alienated young author, perhaps. But when Teresa and her father get to India, everything changes: their responses to this nation unknown to them show them to be capabnle of stronger sensibilities and reactions then we supposed, and when they arrive at the house of Ruth and her husband in Assam (both of whom are themselves strongly realized characters) we feel we know them much more thoroughly, and Smith's wider precocious pattern makes more sense.It may be objected of this book (as Salman Rushdie objected to Paul Scott's RAJ QUARTET, which four novels this book anticipates in many ways) that Smith uses India only as a backdrop for her Anglo-Indian characters' problems, and is content to have the Indians in her novel only play walk-ons in their own country. There is no real answer to such a charge, because Smith is concerned with India mostly in terms of the distance and immensity it implies for central Anglo-Indian family, and what it says about their own problems regarding human contact and friendship. In this the novel seems much like another early Bloomsbury novel, Woolf's THE VOYAGE OUT, which is the clearest of all precursors for this work. But unlike Woolf's imagined South American country, the India Smith uses as the backdrop for her character's Bildungsroman is real, and was really observed, and Smith's powers of description are exceptional. This is not an easy novel to like, but I think it is well worth the effort.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stunning,
By
This review is from: The Far Cry (Hardcover)
The Far Cry was inspired by the author's experiences in India. In 1945, at the age of 21, Emma Smith (who describes herself as "a green young woman" in her preface to this edition) traveled to India with a film production crew as a junior script writer/gopher. While she was there, Smith kept a journal of her experiences and thoughts to detail her "magical Cinderella-like transformation" into a worldlier person. In the preface of the novel, Emma Smith writes brilliantly about what kind of impact her travels to India had upon her, a first-time visitor. What she wrote in her journal went largely into the writing of this novel; and the stronger it is for it, I think, because this is an absolutely stunning book.
When Mr. Digby's ex wife returns from America, he's absolutely certain that she's coming to take their daughter, Teresa, away from him; and so he pulls her out of school in order to go to India, where Mr. Digby's other daughter from a previous marriage, Ruth, lives with her husband. The novel's progress takes its reader on the boat journey out to India; to Bombay; to Calcutta; and then, finally, to Assam near the Naga hills, where Ruth's husband, Edwin, is a tea planter. My goodness, what a gorgeous book! I've never been to India, but this novel certainly makes me want to go. The people and places of India are described in painstaking detail, as only a first-time visitor to India could describe it. They're probably some of the best descriptions of India written by a Westerner that I've ever read (Emma Smith is right up there with MM Kaye in that respect, though they wrote about different time periods and people). In a sense, though, The Far Cry is a novel not so much about India as it is about India as it's experienced by the British. Emma Smith is especially skilled at describing various foreigners' experiences in India: Ruth and Edwin, who have lived in India for a while and are sort of immune to the place; Teresa, experiencing the angst that comes with adolescence; and the downright boorish Mr. Digby, who imagines something greater for himself than life has given him. The novel is populated with a number of other, minor characters as well: the elderly yet intrepid Miss Spooner; Richard, Edwin's second-in-command; or Mr. Littleton, who believes implicitly in the superiority of the British over the natives. There's also Sam, an Indian fellow whose happy complacency instantly warms the reader's heart. There are a couple of unlikely coincidences in this novel (i.e., running into Miss Spooner by chance in Calcutta, of all the people you could run into in a city of that size), but other than that, I absolutely adored this novel.
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