Parade's End

By J.S.

A DIVISION OF THE SPOILS

by PAUL SCOTT

598 pages. Morrow. $10.95.

This long, rueful novel successfully winds up Paul Scott's enormous masterwork, The Raj Quartet, a brooding view of the last years of British rule in India. Together, the four novels of this remarkable cycle--The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence and A Division of the Spoils--are a considerable achievement of art and intelligence.

Scott is very much a psychological novelist, and the great length of his work (2,000 pages) is not a matter of kilometers of canvas and barrels of paint. The final important scene of this last book is typical and illustrates the point. It is 1947, and the British are leaving India. Moslem and Hindu mobs, quarreling over the separation of the two sections of Pakistan from India, are butchering one another. A train from an old British hill station in the north is stopped by angry Hindus as it crosses the plains. Shouting Indian attackers kill shrieking Indian passengers by the hundreds. A young upper-class Moslem man, traveling in a first-class compartment with several Britons and an Indian nursemaid, gallantly and rather apologetically saves their lives by giving himself to the mob. He is chopped to bits.

It is characteristic of Scott that he stages this violent scene without showing the great sweep of the plains and with no view of the exterior of the train, the mob, the blood, the bodies or the long knives. Instead, he shows the interior of the dark and shuttered first-class compartment, where the English huddle with their baggage, not understanding why the train has stopped or the reason for the tiresome shouting and banging outside. When the young Moslem leaves the compartment to go to his death, most of the British have no clear idea of what this dusky intruder in their first-class compartment is saying, or that he is about to die.

Such claustrophobic scenes are played and replayed as conscience chews at guilt in the minds of several British characters who serve as Scott's observers. One incident is central and obsessive. In 1942, at a shabby spot in Ranpur called the Bibighar Gardens, a young Englishwoman named Daphne Manners and her Indian lover, Hari Kumar, are beaten by a gang of six Indians drunk on illegal homemade liquor.

Perversion and Prejudice. An English policeman named Merrick, who also had his eye on Daphne, arrests six Indians and Kumar. A jealous Merrick assumes that the Englishwoman was the victim of a rape organized by Kumar. But when Miss Manners says that Merrick has the wrong men and refuses to testify, a conviction is impossible. Still it is clear to the English community that Merrick has done his job well, and there is no outcry when he manages to have Kumar and his friends imprisoned as political unreliables. The Japanese, after all, have just defeated the English in Burma, the Congress Party has declared a policy of noncooperation with the British war effort, and to the English, most of India seems unreliable.

The truth of Kumar's innocence and the fact that Merrick is a man for whom law is an instrument of perversion and prejudice are not sufficiently unexpected to require four volumes of explanation. What does fully justify Scott's endless, repetitive probing is the struggle of the British community to avoid acknowledging the truth and the dubious morality of its presence as ruler of India. Kumar's own cultural alienation tends to make his case hopeless. He was raised from infancy in England, and he acquired upper-class speech and habits at a prestigious public school. The bankruptcy and suicide of his financier father forced him to return, destitute, to India. There his English classmates ignored him, and the Indians with whom he lived regarded him as an unattractive curiosity. At the end of the final volume, as the two nations go through the hasty and humiliating process of separation, the man who might have represented the best of their coming together is submerged in a Ranpur slum.

A few reassurances: the currents in this work are complex, but Scott's style is lucid and well tethered to physical realities. The novels are serious, but they are also a weaving of well-told stories, and reading them gives no sense of swallowing a moral pill. For those who must have comparisons, the most apt one that comes to mind is Ford Madox Ford's four-volume meditation over the coming apart of the British Empire, Parade's End. Those few who have read Ford's magnificent work will know that the comparison is high praise indeed.

J.S.

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