Skip to main content

The Jewel in the Crown


I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television.

It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date.

This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrative spreads, sprawls outwards incorporating politics, history, religion but never departs from the intimate texture of particular lives. It is a remarkable achievement.

The television series that I watched in my early teens was the first time I knowingly saw the depiction of homosexuality on screen. It was a covert, electric excitement - and, thankfully, Merrick was not the only model. There was, most of all, the suave, accomplished Count Bronowsky played by Eric Porter who runs a minor Indian state for his compliant prince (what an opportunity to identify)!

The book is a rich and complex meditation on identities - their capacity to fascinate and bind.

Merrick is exemplary. The grammar school boy confronted by a public school educated Indian who repels in that difference and attracts in his physicality. A man who every day lives with a double exclusion - the wrong social status amongst the English, and a repressed sexual identity that (at that time) would distance, repulse most, who projects power as a compensation, and a place to hide. His death comes when finally he lives out (in private) his sexual fantasy - a mixture of desire, power and violence.

It is a series of books noticeable for the absence of any simple solutions (or escapes). In many ways a tragic narrative of people misunderstanding and misunderstood but there are glimpses of light. Lady Manners adoption of Daphne's child of ambiguous origin - Hari's or a rapist's? The count's non-judgemental attitude to the world, his ability to navigate towards well-being, recognizing the compromises on the way, and light's fragility. Sarah Layton's even temperament and capacity not to succumb to easy prejudice or false certainty.

It is in the small acts of human decency that hope is found even as the tides of history sweep on.

I am thinking of embarking on a second reading...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more