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Changes of address: A novel
Condition Good...Little Maggie trails round the India of the wartime Raj in the wake of her glamorous, demanding, impossible mother. The beauty and exoticism of India and the violence as the country struggles towards independence, are seen through the eyes of the solitary child and, later, the adult she becomes.
172 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1987
About the author
Lee Langley
25 books15 followersAward-winning novelist and travel-writer, Lee Langley was born in Calcutta in the late 1930s, of Scottish parents, and she spent most of her early childhood there. Her parents separated when she was 4, and she spent the next 6 years travelling through India with her mother, where she got caught up in the Indian independence riots. Her family returned to the UK as feelings rose higher against the British. Lee Langley has since written of a sense of loss and exile from a place that she had loved as a child. She won the Writers’ Guild Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Lee Langley has also written film scripts and has adapted novels for TV. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is also an active committee member of the P.E.N., the writers’ organization that campaigns for freedom of speech internationally. Lee Langley is married to the novelist Theo Richmond, and lives in Richmond in London.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 28, 2018
The sad finish of the third of Lee Langley’s books set in India. Not a sad finish. I’m just sad to have finished, as she writes so wonderfully about being in the magical depaisment, the chaotic movement, uncomfortable closeness, heat, smells and goddesses only found in India.
And i’m glad i read them in the order i did; starting with my favorite book, ever: Persistent Rumors and finishing with this. Because i think now i’ve figured out why i feel like she writes for me. To me. Why, long ago, with her first book, i had to rise from where i was reading late at night and go to the calmly sleeping form of my then, drowsily awoken & confused, 5 year old boy and hold him while i sobbed.
This book is called a novel but, i think this is autobiography. We watch as Moti - the Mother - cuts a wide swath - as they say - of destruction through the lives she encounters. After she hastily marries early, moves to India in the 1930s, & has Maggie (whose life we follow), she divorces, parties, drinks, and screws her way through colonial India seeing herself as some sort of Vamp Extraordinaire. Her disregard for everything that isn’t her next desire is impressive, but believable.
Moti is always looking for “someone who could rise to the demands of frivolity”. Maggie must remain young so Moti appears so, too; thus birthdays do not occur. Maggie is a fashion accessory? Used as a sympathy device? A way of maintaining a teeny modicum of respectability when that is wanted or needed? Sometimes it was unclear why Moti kept Maggie with her. Sometimes it was just to have someone tell her how beautiful she was, or not to be alone between men. Moti tells Maggie everything. Maggie sees everything.
Maggie, however, can’t tell Moti anything truthful, as she learns early that she’s playing a role and can not break character without there being horrible fallout and physical abuse. So at 4, when there is a creepy flasher stalking, scaring you, you know better than to upset Mummy. You have learned that, as ornamentation, you are the only stable thing in the chaos.
I too had an unpredictable mother; was forgotten for embarrassing hours, long after all the other children had been picked up. I too never quite knew for sure when or if. Pellucid, absurd excuses that made it worse. Nowhere near Maggie’s life, but like her, in response, i became a boringly predictable Mom - always where i said i’d be, early. Trying to be “Mom-like”.
Until, as a child, you grow old enough to have internalized the stability that carries you, that stays with you, wherever you are, until then, you are lost. The depth of yearning desperation with which a child needs stability from parents can only be seen in its absence, can only be felt in the pull of fear in the heart of one who has suffered an irretrievable loss.
A delightful romp for children with ordered existences, Lewis Carroll wrote a nightmare for Maggie:
”Alice in Wonderland...I hated it. How should I not? It was my story, a frighteningly accurate reflection of my everyday anxieties. This was no fantasy of dreamland. For me, too, things changed constantly, bewilderingly. People became hostile, flight necessary. I seemed, like Alice, to change my shape and identity with unsettling results….She had no one near her who was trustworthy...
Like Alice I wanted someone ordinary and reasonable to talk to….Moti was a combination of the Red Queen, Duchess and Mad Hatter: like them she seemed ruled by a logic not available to the rest of us.”
This is a short story of two very different people, told against the backdrop of the crumbling jewel in the crown of colonial England that India was in the 1930s and 40s. And Maggie is Sita - having survived trial by fire - she is swept away to Heaven by her mother-in-law. Ahhh, stability at last.
And i’m glad i read them in the order i did; starting with my favorite book, ever: Persistent Rumors and finishing with this. Because i think now i’ve figured out why i feel like she writes for me. To me. Why, long ago, with her first book, i had to rise from where i was reading late at night and go to the calmly sleeping form of my then, drowsily awoken & confused, 5 year old boy and hold him while i sobbed.
This book is called a novel but, i think this is autobiography. We watch as Moti - the Mother - cuts a wide swath - as they say - of destruction through the lives she encounters. After she hastily marries early, moves to India in the 1930s, & has Maggie (whose life we follow), she divorces, parties, drinks, and screws her way through colonial India seeing herself as some sort of Vamp Extraordinaire. Her disregard for everything that isn’t her next desire is impressive, but believable.
Moti is always looking for “someone who could rise to the demands of frivolity”. Maggie must remain young so Moti appears so, too; thus birthdays do not occur. Maggie is a fashion accessory? Used as a sympathy device? A way of maintaining a teeny modicum of respectability when that is wanted or needed? Sometimes it was unclear why Moti kept Maggie with her. Sometimes it was just to have someone tell her how beautiful she was, or not to be alone between men. Moti tells Maggie everything. Maggie sees everything.
Maggie, however, can’t tell Moti anything truthful, as she learns early that she’s playing a role and can not break character without there being horrible fallout and physical abuse. So at 4, when there is a creepy flasher stalking, scaring you, you know better than to upset Mummy. You have learned that, as ornamentation, you are the only stable thing in the chaos.
I too had an unpredictable mother; was forgotten for embarrassing hours, long after all the other children had been picked up. I too never quite knew for sure when or if. Pellucid, absurd excuses that made it worse. Nowhere near Maggie’s life, but like her, in response, i became a boringly predictable Mom - always where i said i’d be, early. Trying to be “Mom-like”.
Until, as a child, you grow old enough to have internalized the stability that carries you, that stays with you, wherever you are, until then, you are lost. The depth of yearning desperation with which a child needs stability from parents can only be seen in its absence, can only be felt in the pull of fear in the heart of one who has suffered an irretrievable loss.
A delightful romp for children with ordered existences, Lewis Carroll wrote a nightmare for Maggie:
”Alice in Wonderland...I hated it. How should I not? It was my story, a frighteningly accurate reflection of my everyday anxieties. This was no fantasy of dreamland. For me, too, things changed constantly, bewilderingly. People became hostile, flight necessary. I seemed, like Alice, to change my shape and identity with unsettling results….She had no one near her who was trustworthy...
Like Alice I wanted someone ordinary and reasonable to talk to….Moti was a combination of the Red Queen, Duchess and Mad Hatter: like them she seemed ruled by a logic not available to the rest of us.”
This is a short story of two very different people, told against the backdrop of the crumbling jewel in the crown of colonial England that India was in the 1930s and 40s. And Maggie is Sita - having survived trial by fire - she is swept away to Heaven by her mother-in-law. Ahhh, stability at last.
July 23, 2023
201📙🇮🇳INDIA🇮🇳This is one of those books I read because it’s the first in a series, when the book I have actually selected to read is No. 2…only to discover that it’s not a series as such, as none of the characters follow on…however of itself this is an almost perfect work. At only 172 pages, it centres on Maggie and her mother Moti. Born in British India, Maggie is the product of an unhappy marriage and a restless, irresponsible, narcissistic mother. It’s a heartbreaking survivor story, that I am sure many can relate 😞Maggie will live in my heart forever 🌏📚#readingworldtour2021 #readtheworld #worldliterature #readingworldliterature #reading #readingwomenchallenge #readersofinstagram #readmorebooks #bookstagram #booklover #book #booknerd #bibliophile #travel #travelogue #fiction #nonfiction #nonfictionreads #travelbooks #ayearofreadingaroundtheworld #india #britishindia #leelangley
October 20, 2009
An interesting, easy and colourful read, but I felt that the material - an itinerant childhood with a scandalous mother in thirties and forties colonial India - was unfulfilled. The book read more like a memoir with a memoir's biases than a rounded novel. See my reading group's discussion of this. http://elizabethbaines.blogspot.com/2...
September 17, 2015
Did the Britishers really lived like that? Nothing remarkable about the style. The characters are quite awkward, misfit and lacking details.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews