The Towers of Silence

Rating:
Summary: Why were we there?
Review: "The Towers of Silence" is the third volume in Paul Scott's "Raj Quartet". Scott does little in this novel to develop the plot of the first two volumes: the rape in the Bibighar Gardens still looms ominously in the background, but is not the central issue here - rather, Scott uses this novel to refocus on events and characters who have already appeared, and to introduce some new characters. Still, Scott's intricate examination of the last days of the British Raj is as acute and convincing as it was in those earlier volumes.

The central character in "The Towers of Silence" is Barbara Batchelor, a spinster and retired superintendent of a Protestant mission school. Scott relates with great care the vicious social snobbery of the British in India, both among themselves and against the Indians. The divisions within the British in India are accentuated by the tensions caused by social change in Britain itself - the imminence of a Labour government and the questioning of automatic social superiority based upon birth and "going to the right school".

Because the British isolate themselves from the Indians, living in small cantonments, it's almost a pressure-cooker situation, small differences and social mores taking on a great importance. Could Scott have been saying that Empire accentuated these trends or highlighted them, or was he saying that given such changes, imperialism seemed all the more absurd - a society so deeply at odds with itself, so unsure of its way forward could hardly continue to claim a right to rule over another society?

It seemed to me that Barbara Batchelor was symbolic of the obsolescence of British imperial ideals, both directly and indirectly. Dirctly, because she represented an anachronistic Christian missionary type of imperialism that (as far as my reading tells me) had been waning badly since the Mutiny of 1857. But also indirectly, because she irritates the British imperialists of the 1940s - her very presence and manners highlight their own lack of an imperial raison d'être.

Of the other characters, Teddie Bingham reappears from "The Day of the Scorpion" and his (often comic) courtship of Susan Layton is retold, but in far more detail. Ronald Merrick also reappears, and through him Scott exposes the deep insecurity and bafflement caused in the Army by the discovery that Indian prisoners of war were fighting alongside the Japanese in the "Indian National Army".

A suberb addition to an excellent series of novels.

G Rodgers

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant series
Review: Each volume of Scott's The Raj Quartet has its own beauty and power. This volume could perhaps be said to view of India from the English point of view... although that viewpoint is, like India itself, always shifting, sometimes hallucinatory. The character I love most in this volume is the missionary, who comes to live in Rose Cottage... she is a link between the first volume, and the symbolic picture "The Jewel in the Crown", and the post-war India to come. To say what happens to her would give away the story... suffice to say that Scott's powers of characterization are as brilliant as ever. If you have read the first 2 volumes, you are already hooked, and will hardly need this review to read on!

The Raj Quartet is one of the finest works of literature I have read. Don't miss it.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant series
Review: Each volume of Scott's The Raj Quartet has its own beauty and power. This volume could perhaps be said to view of India from the English point of view... although that viewpoint is, like India itself, always shifting, sometimes hallucinatory. The character I love most in this volume is the missionary, who comes to live in Rose Cottage... she is a link between the first volume, and the symbolic picture "The Jewel in the Crown", and the post-war India to come. To say what happens to her would give away the story... suffice to say that Scott's powers of characterization are as brilliant as ever. If you have read the first 2 volumes, you are already hooked, and will hardly need this review to read on!

The Raj Quartet is one of the finest works of literature I have read. Don't miss it.

Rating:
Summary: What?? Rewrote the 2nd book?
Review: Thats how I felt reading this book! It was like Scott wasn't happy with his second book, so he rewrote it again! At least, the first 80% of the book was rehashing history already covered in the second book.

To give him credit, he didn't go into expansive detail in areas where he did in the second book, but it was so frustrating reading of exactly the same events as the second book, except from someone else's point of view. Very exasperating in fact. And unlike the second book, he somehow lost that fantastic ability to tell the story through the characters.

This book focuses on Barbie Batchelor, a retired missionary lady who lived with the Layton's Grandmother until her death. There is nothing wrong with telling the story through Barbie, except we already know most of it from the second book and somehow, Barbie's account doesn't add much to it - although we learn more about her!

When finally the book moves on into the future, it is well and truly 80% over and just glosses over the future, almost like its stampeding through Barbie's breakdown. There are hints of what to expect in the forth book, and given the precedence set in these three books, I suspect the beginning of the 4th book is going to be rehashing in expansive detail the material glossed over at the end of the 3rd book.

Quite honestly, I think this book could have been just about completely dumped from the quartet (maybe some of the better description replacing some of the duller descriptions in the 2nd book...), and we'd have been none the wiser!

Rating:
Summary: The Chamber Novel
Review: 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 3 is the shortest of the four volumes, and may almost be termed a "chamber novel," focusing as it does on the peripheral character of Barbie Batchelor, a retired missionary and lodger at the Laytons' ancestral home. Barbie is an instantly recognizable character: The kind of person who always lurks about the edges of society, awkward, embarrassing, barely tolerated by her peers. Book 3 covers much of the same time period as Book 2, this time from Barbie's point of view and also from that of Teddie Bingham, Susan Layton's husband. Teddie meets Ronald Merrick while on duty and more of Merrick's character and history is filled in. Book 3 then moves beyond the point at which Book 2 ended and continues Barbie's story, her eventual ouster from the Layton's home and slow descent into illness and madness.

Rating:
Summary: The Jewel of the Raj Quartet
Review: This is by far the best and most important book in Scott's Raj Quartet (though you need to have read the first two to appreciate it). The character of Barbie Batchelor makes this the masterpiece that it is. Scott's ability to create a sweeping historical, political, and philosophical panorama through the mind of such a seemingly marginal figure -- a retired missionary teacher of no great brilliance, who may be slowly losing her mind -- is a real achievement.

Rating:
Summary: Someone should be haunted by it....
Review: TOWERS OF SILENCE by Paul Scott is the third book in the Raj Quartet and continues the story of the last days of British rule in India as told mostly from the perspective of English people living in India during this period. The "towers" of the title are many things including quite literally the place where the dead of a particular Indian relgious sect are laid out and their bodies exposed to carrion who devour them. Metaphorically, the towers may represent the place to which the mentally ill retreat after they witness what they believe to be the death of God.

In TOWERS at least two people appear visably "mad" -- Susan Layton and Barbie Bachelor. Others may be equally insane but these two defy established conventions and disrupt the equilibrium of those around them to the point they must be incarcerated.

Susan has been made a widow by the death of her new husband. She is pregnant at the beginning of the book and gives birth to Edward shortly after a terrible experience with another death. Afterward she suffers from postpartum depression.

Barbie is an ex-missionary--now retired--who has lived with Old Mrs. Mabel Layton for the past five years. Suddenly, Barbie finds herself without a home and with no relatives or close friends. She exhibits behavior deemed odd by the establishment. Barbie also has an uncanny way of pointing to the truth others refuse to acknowledge -- except Sarah Layton.

Once again, Sarah reacts very negatively to the obviously bizarre Ronald Merrick whom she visits in a Calcutta hospital in place of her sister who is too ill to travel. Sarah first met Ronald when he served as best man at Susan's wedding. He has since been wounded in a failed attempt to save Susan's husband who died in combat in Maylasia. Merrick provided his spin on the events at Mayapore to Sarah in DAY OF THE SCORPION. Sarah does not believe he tells the truth. In a conversation with Barbie Bachelor, Sarah exclaims regarding the Mayapore incident (first described in JEWEL IN THE CROWN but retold several times from many different perspectives), "Someone should be haunted by it." The four books of the Raj Quartet are haunted by the events in Mayapore in August 1942.

Barbie Bachelor becomes aware that Sarah has seen the Manners child in Srinigar. She feels the presence of the "unknown Indian." In the end she feels and sees too much. She writes to her friend Miss Jolley, "After many years of believing I knew what love is I now suspect I do not which means I do not know and have never known what God is either."

Philosophical, mystical, this book must be read in succession with the others in the series. You will never forget these people.