Customer Reviews

India House

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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.