⇒ Libro Gratis The Towers of Silence Paul Scott 9780380441983 Books

The Towers of Silence Paul Scott 9780380441983 Books

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The Towers of Silence Paul Scott 9780380441983 Books

In September 1939, when the war had just begun, Miss Batchelor
retired from her post as superintendent of the Protestant mission
schools in the city of Ranpur. Her elevation to superintendent
had come towards the end of her career in the early part of 1938.
At the time she knew it was a sop but tackled the job with her
characteristic application to every trivial detail, which meant
that her successor, a Miss Jolley, would have her work cut out
untangling some of the confusion Miss Batchelor usually managed
to leave behind, like clues to the direction taken by the cheery
and indefatigable leader of a paper chase whose ultimate
destination was not clear to anybody, including herself.

Thus Paul Scott opens the third volume of his magisterial RAJ QUARTET, with a loquacious, well-meaning, but ineffective retired school teacher with nowhere to go. In reviewing the first volume of the Quartet, THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN, I remarked on what I called Scott's liminal viewpoint, his tendency to tell the story of the last days of British rule in India through people who are relatively peripheral to it. This volume takes this almost to extremes, in focusing on a character with no power whatsoever. Barbie Batchelor is not a new arrival; we have met her already in the second volume, THE DAY OF THE SCORPION, and know that she takes a room in Rose Cottage, the house of the elderly Mabel Layton in the fictional hill town of Pankot. Indeed, with very few exceptions, all the action in THE TOWERS OF SILENCE has already been told in THE DAY OF THE SCORPION. It makes for a very peculiar book indeed, and not an entirely satisfying one.

Reading it was a strangely unsettling experience for me. A friend and I are spreading the four volumes over the course of a year, and it has actually been about four months since I read THE DAY OF THE SCORPION. Last year, however, I watched the brilliant Granada TV series again, so much of the story and many of the characters are burned into my mind. Reading the third volume now, I had a disturbing sense of déjà vu, not knowing whether something was familiar because I had read it before in a previous volume, or merely because I had seen the series. I now realize that almost all the familiarity came from having read it in previous volumes, and would apply to those who had not seen the television version at all.

Such action as there is centers around the Laytons, one of the most influential families in Pankot. Colonel Layton, Mabel's son, has been captured in battle and is in prison camp in Germany. His second wife, Mildred, now rules the roost in Pankot, and her daughters, the pretty Susan and the thoughtful Sarah, are the center of attention from the many young officers stationed in the town. Mildred feels she should be able to move her entire family into Rose Cottage, which her husband will inherit anyway, but Mabel dislikes her and offers the room to Miss Batchelor in part to keep her out. And indeed Mildred, a vindictive alcoholic snob, is surely one of the most unpleasant characters in literature, let alone in the Quartet. The volume will recap many of the events of its predecessor: Mabel Layton's death; Susan Layton's wedding and widowhood, and the birth of her baby; Sarah Layton's visit to Calcutta; and the complications of the Japanese tactic of recruiting captured Indian soldiers into the Indian National Army (INA) to fight against the British in the name of eventual independence. The only things that are really new in it are the events toward the end of the war, and the conclusion of Barbie's story. So two questions arise: what does Scott achieve in this volume if it mainly reexamines old events, and why does he choose to do it through Barbie?

Although Barbie is the main character, she remains essentially peripheral to Pankot society, and it is the structure of that society that is the main theme of this volume—a collective rather than individual focus. But this is more than a narrative device. The title of the first volume, THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN, refers to a painting of Queen Victoria reviewing a march past of her Indian subjects. It epitomizes a Hindi term known as "Man-Bap," or "mother-father." The Queen is both the mother and father of the Indian people, the parent to whom they owe obedience and will in turn feed and protect them. The man-bap principle then extends all the way down the hierarchical chain, and is the secret of the loyalty felt by Indian troops to their British officers. Hence the horror of Indians joining with the INA to fight against their military "parents." Hence, too, the hierarchical structure of the entire British colony, where wives take precedence over others by virtue of their husbands' rank, and even marriage is a matter of finding a girl whose father is of an appropriate seniority in a prestige regiment.

I have read many English novels dealing with class, but seldom anything so quietly vitriolic as the picture here. Mildred and most of the women around her despise Barbie because she is "not out of the top drawer." As soon as Mabel dies, Mildred does all she can to belittle her and oust her. Finding that Mabel has left her a small annuity, she is convinced that Barbie herself must have angled for it (not true), "because its a typically lower-middle-class idea of upper-class security and respectability." But this is not a surprise from the woman who constantly refers to Captain Samuels, the psychiatrist treating her own daughter, as "that trick-cyclist Jew boy." The more I learned about Mildred, the more I wanted to watch her come-uppance, but if Scott intends to give her one, he is saving it until the final volume.

I have been reading an interesting monograph by John Lennard called READING PAUL SCOTT. His section on Barbie Batchelor comes in a chapter titled "There's Nothing I Can Do," exploring what he calls "personal nullity" or the inability to influence events. This is obviously the case with Barbie. By showing her as increasingly visionary or delusional (one is never sure which), he makes her an apt commentator on a political and moral crisis that she can intuit but not entirely understand. And by making her a devout Christian, he is also—shockingly—able to make her an ultimate commentator on the uselessness of Christian belief, at least as applied to the problems of India.

Lennard also makes the point that, as one of the only two lower-middle-class characters of significance, she stands as the female counterpoint to Ronald Merrick, the other. Lennard has two sections on Merrick: "Merrick as Antagonist" focuses on his role as the police officer who framed the suspects in the original rape case; "Merrick as Protagonist," however, looks at his more sympathetic side, and suggests that the character may have been the alter-ego of the author himself. Merrick makes only a few appearances in this volume (one as the almost unbelievably well-informed intelligence officer who delivers a necessary briefing on the INA), but the final one, with Barbie Batchelor in the uprooted garden at Rose Cottage, is extraordinarily touching. Barbie is almost the only one who sees this other side of Merrick, and her kindness to him is in many ways the culminating act of her life.

The only other person who sees something good in Merrick (and even that is shaded) is Sarah Layton. She is also the one woman in Pankot, after Mabel's death, to have any time for Barbie. With one significant exception, nothing new happens to Sarah in this volume, and her role is a small one. Nonetheless, she suffuses the volume with her thoughtfulness and kindness; if her mother is the book's least likeable character, she herself is the nicest. [And in this case, my memory of the extraordinary performance by Geraldine James on television does no harm whatsoever.] I see that Lennard lists Sarah as the fourth of the characters exemplifying personal nullity (the other two are Edwina Crane and Daphne Manners). I guess I shall have to wait until the final volume to see what he means by that. Meanwhile, I shall end with Barbie Batchelor's extraordinary insight into the younger woman's problem, which might also stand as the theme of the entire series. It is a beautiful testament to the friendship between a very young woman and a rather old one, the two loveliest characters in the book, and arguably the most perceptive:

Looking at Sarah, Barbie felt she understood a little of the sense
the girl might have of having no clearly defined world to inhabit,
but one poised between the old for which she had been prepared, but
which seemed to be dying, and the new for which she had not been
prepared at all. Young, fresh, and intelligent, all the patterns to
which she had been trained to conform were fading, and she was
already conscious just from chance or casual encounter of the gulf
between herself and the person she would have been if she had never
come back to India: the kind of person she 'really was.'


Tags : The Towers of Silence [Paul Scott] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Book III only of the Raj Quartet. A spectacular explosion of history set off within the lives of a dozen or so Britons and Indians on the edges of vast change. (New York Times),Paul Scott,The Towers of Silence,Avon Books,0380699338

The Towers of Silence Paul Scott 9780380441983 Books Reviews

A trunk filled with a woman's memorabilia of her life us set on end in a two wheeled horse drawn cart, almost lifing the horse off the ground. A man advises her not to go in the cart, thinking it unsafe. She has already said goodbye to a friend "in case we don't see each other again." She climbs aboard, next to the driver. The road from the cottage down to the village is steep and narrow. On the way down, it begins to lightning in the distance. The horse shies, but continues on. Again, there is a clap of thunder. . . It is several paragraphs later before we find out what happened---the horse dies. That is typical of Paul Scott's writing detailed, gripping, foreboding, but never predictable. This is a work of genius.
This is third in a series called "The Raj Quartet." The writing is quite dense and, for the most part, nonlinear. The plot line is pretty basic the rape of an Englishwoman who is in love with an Indian Man, educated and raised in Great Britain; and the fall out over wrongful imprisonment and an illegitmate child. This central story is the pivot around which many, many characters play out their roles in the final days of British rule in India/Pakistan. Narrative style shifts and the same incidents are retold from multiple perspectives. This isn't a "beach read" but it is worthwhile if you enjoy literary history.
May be my favourite of the quartet to date. Events from the preceding novels are told from the perspective of characters who were of secondary importance in the preceding novels. The main character here is Barbie Batchelor. Barbie is frail, careworn but quite a strong character in her own right. It's through this novel that the differing class structure and prejudices really stood out.

Actually enjoyed seeing past events through the eyes of the secondary characters, for my mind they offered a clearer insight and perspective.

Found this to be a more emotive read because of Barbie Batchelor.
In September 1939, when the war had just begun, Miss Batchelor
retired from her post as superintendent of the Protestant mission
schools in the city of Ranpur. Her elevation to superintendent
had come towards the end of her career in the early part of 1938.
At the time she knew it was a sop but tackled the job with her
characteristic application to every trivial detail, which meant
that her successor, a Miss Jolley, would have her work cut out
untangling some of the confusion Miss Batchelor usually managed
to leave behind, like clues to the direction taken by the cheery
and indefatigable leader of a paper chase whose ultimate
destination was not clear to anybody, including herself.

Thus Paul Scott opens the third volume of his magisterial RAJ QUARTET, with a loquacious, well-meaning, but ineffective retired school teacher with nowhere to go. In reviewing the first volume of the Quartet, THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN, I remarked on what I called Scott's liminal viewpoint, his tendency to tell the story of the last days of British rule in India through people who are relatively peripheral to it. This volume takes this almost to extremes, in focusing on a character with no power whatsoever. Barbie Batchelor is not a new arrival; we have met her already in the second volume, THE DAY OF THE SCORPION, and know that she takes a room in Rose Cottage, the house of the elderly Mabel Layton in the fictional hill town of Pankot. Indeed, with very few exceptions, all the action in THE TOWERS OF SILENCE has already been told in THE DAY OF THE SCORPION. It makes for a very peculiar book indeed, and not an entirely satisfying one.

Reading it was a strangely unsettling experience for me. A friend and I are spreading the four volumes over the course of a year, and it has actually been about four months since I read THE DAY OF THE SCORPION. Last year, however, I watched the brilliant Granada TV series again, so much of the story and many of the characters are burned into my mind. Reading the third volume now, I had a disturbing sense of déjà vu, not knowing whether something was familiar because I had read it before in a previous volume, or merely because I had seen the series. I now realize that almost all the familiarity came from having read it in previous volumes, and would apply to those who had not seen the television version at all.

Such action as there is centers around the Laytons, one of the most influential families in Pankot. Colonel Layton, Mabel's son, has been captured in battle and is in prison camp in Germany. His second wife, Mildred, now rules the roost in Pankot, and her daughters, the pretty Susan and the thoughtful Sarah, are the center of attention from the many young officers stationed in the town. Mildred feels she should be able to move her entire family into Rose Cottage, which her husband will inherit anyway, but Mabel dislikes her and offers the room to Miss Batchelor in part to keep her out. And indeed Mildred, a vindictive alcoholic snob, is surely one of the most unpleasant characters in literature, let alone in the Quartet. The volume will recap many of the events of its predecessor Mabel Layton's death; Susan Layton's wedding and widowhood, and the birth of her baby; Sarah Layton's visit to Calcutta; and the complications of the Japanese tactic of recruiting captured Indian soldiers into the Indian National Army (INA) to fight against the British in the name of eventual independence. The only things that are really new in it are the events toward the end of the war, and the conclusion of Barbie's story. So two questions arise what does Scott achieve in this volume if it mainly reexamines old events, and why does he choose to do it through Barbie?

Although Barbie is the main character, she remains essentially peripheral to Pankot society, and it is the structure of that society that is the main theme of this volume—a collective rather than individual focus. But this is more than a narrative device. The title of the first volume, THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN, refers to a painting of Queen Victoria reviewing a march past of her Indian subjects. It epitomizes a Hindi term known as "Man-Bap," or "mother-father." The Queen is both the mother and father of the Indian people, the parent to whom they owe obedience and will in turn feed and protect them. The man-bap principle then extends all the way down the hierarchical chain, and is the secret of the loyalty felt by Indian troops to their British officers. Hence the horror of Indians joining with the INA to fight against their military "parents." Hence, too, the hierarchical structure of the entire British colony, where wives take precedence over others by virtue of their husbands' rank, and even marriage is a matter of finding a girl whose father is of an appropriate seniority in a prestige regiment.

I have read many English novels dealing with class, but seldom anything so quietly vitriolic as the picture here. Mildred and most of the women around her despise Barbie because she is "not out of the top drawer." As soon as Mabel dies, Mildred does all she can to belittle her and oust her. Finding that Mabel has left her a small annuity, she is convinced that Barbie herself must have angled for it (not true), "because its a typically lower-middle-class idea of upper-class security and respectability." But this is not a surprise from the woman who constantly refers to Captain Samuels, the psychiatrist treating her own daughter, as "that trick-cyclist Jew boy." The more I learned about Mildred, the more I wanted to watch her come-uppance, but if Scott intends to give her one, he is saving it until the final volume.

I have been reading an interesting monograph by John Lennard called READING PAUL SCOTT. His section on Barbie Batchelor comes in a chapter titled "There's Nothing I Can Do," exploring what he calls "personal nullity" or the inability to influence events. This is obviously the case with Barbie. By showing her as increasingly visionary or delusional (one is never sure which), he makes her an apt commentator on a political and moral crisis that she can intuit but not entirely understand. And by making her a devout Christian, he is also—shockingly—able to make her an ultimate commentator on the uselessness of Christian belief, at least as applied to the problems of India.

Lennard also makes the point that, as one of the only two lower-middle-class characters of significance, she stands as the female counterpoint to Ronald Merrick, the other. Lennard has two sections on Merrick "Merrick as Antagonist" focuses on his role as the police officer who framed the suspects in the original rape case; "Merrick as Protagonist," however, looks at his more sympathetic side, and suggests that the character may have been the alter-ego of the author himself. Merrick makes only a few appearances in this volume (one as the almost unbelievably well-informed intelligence officer who delivers a necessary briefing on the INA), but the final one, with Barbie Batchelor in the uprooted garden at Rose Cottage, is extraordinarily touching. Barbie is almost the only one who sees this other side of Merrick, and her kindness to him is in many ways the culminating act of her life.

The only other person who sees something good in Merrick (and even that is shaded) is Sarah Layton. She is also the one woman in Pankot, after Mabel's death, to have any time for Barbie. With one significant exception, nothing new happens to Sarah in this volume, and her role is a small one. Nonetheless, she suffuses the volume with her thoughtfulness and kindness; if her mother is the book's least likeable character, she herself is the nicest. [And in this case, my memory of the extraordinary performance by Geraldine James on television does no harm whatsoever.] I see that Lennard lists Sarah as the fourth of the characters exemplifying personal nullity (the other two are Edwina Crane and Daphne Manners). I guess I shall have to wait until the final volume to see what he means by that. Meanwhile, I shall end with Barbie Batchelor's extraordinary insight into the younger woman's problem, which might also stand as the theme of the entire series. It is a beautiful testament to the friendship between a very young woman and a rather old one, the two loveliest characters in the book, and arguably the most perceptive

Looking at Sarah, Barbie felt she understood a little of the sense
the girl might have of having no clearly defined world to inhabit,
but one poised between the old for which she had been prepared, but
which seemed to be dying, and the new for which she had not been
prepared at all. Young, fresh, and intelligent, all the patterns to
which she had been trained to conform were fading, and she was
already conscious just from chance or casual encounter of the gulf
between herself and the person she would have been if she had never
come back to India the kind of person she 'really was.'