The locals call it 'The India House'. But they have little to do with the three women who live there: grandmother, mother and daughter. Upstairs, old Mrs Covington dreams of India and the days of the Raj. Her widowed daughter Evelyn watches obsessively over eighteen-year-old Julia. She has decided that the girl is to be kept in a state of 'innocence'. The tutor, Mr Henry, is allowed to teach only a bizarre mixture of mythology, history, the Romantic Poets, arithmetic, French, and the perils of socialism. His second duty is to fillet the news in the Times each day and report a sanitised version to the family. As little as possible of the modern world must intrude...But it is 1956. India has been lost for a decade; the rest of the Empire is just about holding together. Britain is about to face the great misadventure of Suez. Mrs Covington may try to avoid the modern world, but she cannot prevent the arrival of two men, her son Roland, and her eighteen-year-old grandson, James. The fragile paradise the women have constructed is about to be changed forever. In this blackly comic novel the past is richly evoked, but its message of colonial ambition and disaster and of love and corruption are both moving and timely.
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Book Description
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About the Author
William Palmer has had five books published, and many stories, reviews and poems in newspapers and journals such as London Magazine, Literary Review, the Independent, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Daily Telegraph. His previous novels are The Good Republic (Secker & Warburg, 1990), Leporello (Secker & Warburg, 1992), The Contract (Jonathan Cape, 1995) and The Pardon of Saint Anne (Jonathan Cape, 1997). Anvil Press published a selection of his poems in 1990, and a collection of short stories, Four Last Things was published by Secker & Warburg in 1996. In 1997 he was awarded the Society of Authors' prestigious Travelling Scholarship. For three years, from 2000-2003, he was Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Birmingham. In the autumn he is taking up a part-time Fellowship at the University of Warwick. William Palmer lives in South West London.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Julia needs to be rescued,
By
This review is from: India House (Hardcover)
The year is 1956, and on the outskirts of a village in Shropshire there is the India House, so called by the locals because the inhabitants had filled it with artefacts from the time they had been in India before that country's independence, after which they had returned to England. The inhabitants are Julia, aged nearly 18, her mother and her grandmother; also Julia's resident tutor, Mr Henry, because the mother and grandmother want to prevent her from being corrupted by the outside world, every aspect of which they hate and fear. Their eccentricities go so far that they do not have a telephone in the house, and they have Mr Henry go to the village each morning to buy The Times and present, at lunch-time, an extract of material thought suitable for the two older women, who are soaked in vicious right-wing, imperialist and racist prejudices. There were of course some people like that in 1956, nostalgic about the old days and intemperate in their condemnation of the modern world; but I feel the depiction of these two women are close to caricature - clever and witty caricature, and fun to read about, but lacking, I think, in credibility. Poor old downtrodden Mr Henry is also a bit of a caricature, but there are passages of real pathos about him which I found the best part of the book. Julia is kept on a very tight rein, forbidden to go outside the house, even into the village, without her mother's permission, which is always withheld. When the book opens, it appears that Julia had never experienced the slightest teenage rebellion, and it needs the visit of James, a handsome cousin of hers, to make her aware of how she has been imprisoned. The book is a very good read, but I think it strains credulity.
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