The Day of the Scorpion

The Raj Quartet #2

by Paul Scott

In The Day of the Scorpion, Scott draws us deeper in to his epic of India at the close of World War II. With force and subtlety, he recreates both private ambition and perversity, and the politics of an entire subcontinent at a turning point in history.

As the scorpion, encircled by a ring of fire, will sting itself to death, so does the British Raj hasten its own destruction when threatened by the flames of Indian independence. Brutal repression and imprisonment of India's leaders cannot still the cry for home rule. And in the midst of chaos, the English Laytons withdraw from a world they no longer know to seek solace in denial, drink, and madness.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, India, Historical, 20th Century, British Literature, Classics

495 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Paul Mark Scott was an English novelist best known for his tetralogy The Raj Quartet. In the last years of his life, his novel Staying On won the Booker Prize (1977). The series of books was dramatised by Granada Television during the 1980s and won Scott the public and critical acclaim that he had not received during his lifetime.
Born in suburban London, Scott was posted to India, Burma and Malaya during World War II. On return to London he worked as a notable literary agent, before deciding to write full time from 1960. In 1964 he returned to India for a research trip, though he was struggling with ill health and alcoholism. From the material gathered he created the novels that would become The Raj Quartet. In the final years of his life he accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Tulsa, where much of his private archive is held.

Reviews

[Candi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little over a year ago I read the first in Paul Scott’s remarkable Raj Quartet, The Jewel in the Crown. Last month, I finished reading the next in the series, The Day of the Scorpion. Each are very captivating novels rich in history and deep characterizations. I would be hard pressed to tell you which one I liked better!

In The Day of the Scorpion, the end of World War II is approaching, and the end of the British Raj is on the horizon in India. In this installment, some of the characters from the first are once again part of the story, while some new individuals appear on the scene. Scott does a tremendous job of presenting to us the sensibilities of the people of an entire subcontinent through his characters. We see each through a lens that does not distort but reveals their inner feelings in such a way that you understand even if you do not agree with all. Racial tensions continue as the people of India seek and demand independence. The British in India are struggling with their place in this changing new world. Sarah Layton, in particular, is a fascinating young woman who stands for the newest generation of English; and her perspectives on their role and responsibilities as well as her growth throughout the novel are highly compelling. "She was herself because her sense of self, her consciousness of individuality was tenacious, grindingly resistant to temptations to surrender it in exchange for a share in that collective illusion of a world morally untroubled, convinced of its capacity to find just solutions for every problem that confronted it, a world where everything was accepted as finally defined, a world that thought it knew what human beings were."

This book seemed broader in scope than the first, but events and people are tied together in ways that demonstrate Scott’s skill and the great depth of the story. I was very invested in what happened to one particular character, Hari Kumar, after reading The Jewel in the Crown; and I was pleased to get some answers here. There is an incredibly moving scene in the middle of the novel that left me quite breathless. The writing is seriously that powerful. Continuing from the first book, Ronald Merrick is perhaps one of the best-written antagonists in literature – not necessarily because he is painted in the image of a typical wicked villain, but because he is drawn as an ordinary man on the surface. His deep insecurities and prejudices when laid bare explain and reveal the corruption within his soul. Side by side, Sarah Layton and Ronald Merrick make a stunning contrast.

I hesitate to really delve into plot with my review; I find this difficult to accomplish without giving away any events from the first in the series. I will leave you with the nudge to read this quartet if you are at all interested in the historical aspects of a nation on the verge of a significant transformation. The writing is rather dense, so I do recommend you prepare yourself for perhaps a slower-paced reading in order to grasp all that Paul Scott offers to the reader. His writing is well worth the additional effort required; the result is wonderfully rewarding. I plan to continue with the series – there is no way I can leave off now after becoming so attached to these characters and to India. I am anxious to see how independence and partition play out in the various lives of these people. Currently, I am watching the outstanding 1984 miniseries production thanks to my local library. If you are interested in my review of The Jewel in the Crown, you can find it here:
My Review

I have to finish with a quote that reflects the musings of one of the British characters in the novel, an older woman, as she expresses her inner thoughts towards one of her long-time Indian servants. I find it cleverly represents the relationship between not just these two, but between the British and the people of India as a whole as they are on the verge of momentous changes.

"Now you are alone and I am alone, and we cannot speak of it even yet as a man and a woman might speak who share recollections. But if you were to die I should weep. And if I were to die you would cover your head and speak to no one for days. But here in the world where both of us live – poised between entrance and exit, or exit and entrance – we still maintain the relationship of mistress and servant, although we have grown far beyond it and use it simply as a shorthand to get through the day without trouble to one another."

[Bionic Jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Raj Quartet”, Paul Scott’s epic drama of India, is set at the close of World War II, and covers events in the five-year period from 1942 to 1947 with great authenticity. These were particularly turbulent years in the country’s history, involving the gradual demise of the British Raj, who ruled India at that time. In 1945, India gained their independence from Great Britain, colonialism ended and the difficult transfer of power began.

The tetralogy “The Raj Quartet” is a tour de force, taking nine years for Paul Scott to write, and has been compared by some critics with Tolstoy. It continues with this second part, The Day of the Scorpion, which was first published in 1968. All four books can be read individually, but it is far better to read them in order, as they follow quite a few of the characters’ paths. If you have not yet read my review of the first part, “The Jewel in the Crown”, published in 1966, you may also like to do so before reading this, as it sets the scene.

The Day of the Scorpion, unlike “The Jewel in the Crown”, does not relate the same story from many points of view in a structured succession. Neither is it action-packed. Although there are some extremely shocking moments, the pace here is slow and leisurely. Paul Scott tended to write in a restrained manner, with much reported action, rather than placing us in the heart of the violent events.

Furthermore, much of the action is seen through others’ eyes, such as the interview of Hari Kumar in prison by Captain Rowan, who unbeknownst to him, knew him as a younger schoolboy in England, “Harry Coomer”, and the civil servant Vallabhai Ramaswamy Gopal. We also have yet another lens to look at this episode through, as it is secretly viewed by Lady Manners, Daphne’s aunt. Another significant example of this is when we see the homosexual Russian Émigré, Count Dimitri Bronowsky, and Ronald Merrick’s incisive discussion, from both sides. There are also Ronald Merrick’s two revealing conversations with Sarah; one as a candid probing on both sides, soon after their first meeting, and another in confessional mode, in hospital, after Ronald Merrick returns from the front. Both of these are viewed through Sarah’s eyes, but much of the account is Ronald Merrick’s verbatim monologue.

All these fill in many of the details of events we remember from the first novel, and give us new perspectives. We gain a greater understanding of the events we know, and a deeper perception of the characters. To some extent we may revise our ideas of both the characters and the history. There are subtle changes, as events necessitate that they play a different role.

The viewpoint character in The Day of the Scorpion is Sarah Layton, the elder daughter of an Anglo-Indian military family. Her father is Lieutenant Colonel John Layton, the commanding officer of the 1st Pankot Rifles, who is married to Mildred. The family live in Pankot, an imaginary hill fort in Mirat, which is in the same part of Northern India as Mayapore, where “The Jewel in the Crown” was set. At the time of the novel Sarah’s father is held in a German prison camp in Europe, and in his absence his wife has started to drink rather too much.

Mildred Layton is an unpleasant upper-middle class woman, who is overly conscious of her position in society. She believes her status entitles her to enforce her authority on all and sundry, and she makes her daughters’ lives very difficult. Mildred Layton resents the presence of anyone she considers her social inferior, such as the working class Barbie Batchelor. Barbie is simple and down to earth; a retired schoolteacher and missionary, with a strong faith and a desire to be useful. She is a figure of fun to many of the upper-middle class English enclave, living with Mabel Layton, and there are rumours that she is a lesbian. Mildred has harboured a long-term grudge against Mabel, who is her husband’s stepmother, partly for occupying Rose Cottage and also for bringing Barbie Batchelor into their privileged world.

It seems significant that Paul Scott explores female psychology just as much as his male characters, and often views through female characters. Sarah Layton has returned to India, where she was born, after going to school in England. Sarah, unlike her mother and sister Susan, and many around her, has a deep sympathy for India, which she regards as her home. She is clearly trying to work out her own position, as a soldier’s daughter who is a staunch supporter and defender of the British Raj, and trying to square this with her views of a regime which she is increasingly coming to believe, partly from her experiences in England, is inherently unfair. We are witness to her varied reactions to the mass of ambiguities evident in the last days of the Raj. It is not long before we realise that the character of Sarah reflects the same complexity and challenging attitudes as Daphne Manners’s, in “The Jewel in the Crown”.

As well as those English characters mentioned, we have Lady Ethel Manners, whom we met in the previous novel, and who is now caring for Daphne and Hari’s daughter Parvati, since Daphne died in childbirth. Interestingly Sarah visits them..There is also Fenella Grace: “Aunt Fenny”, who seems to act more as a mother to Sarah and Susan, offering advice about their behaviour, possible beaux, and in Sarah’s case, what she sees as inappropriate and possibly dangerous attitudes towards the Raj. It becomes clear that Aunt Fenny used to be in love with the sisters’ father, Colonel Layton, although she is married to Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Grace: “Uncle Arthur”.

Other crucial characters to the plot are the Nawab of Mirat, an unusually abstemious Indian prince, who relies on Count Bronowski’s advice, and Major James Clark, another Chillingborough alumni, who is much given to plain-speaking. He hates the Raj and immerses himself in Indian life. It is he who manages to seduce Sarah, mostly because of his direct manner . Others of the British community are Captain Kevin Coley and His Excellency, Sir George Malcolm.

The story begins however, with a new character, Mohammed Ali Kasim, known in the popular press as “M.A.K”. Kasim is an Indian politician and very much in the minority at this time, as a Muslim member of the Indian National Congress. He is a principled man, and his unwillingness to compromise those principles makes him a very sympathetic character. He had formerly been the chief minister of an unnamed province, until the Congress decided to boycott the elections. Immediately we learn that this fair and scrupulously moral man is to be arrested under the “Defence of India” Act, when the Congress votes to oppose the entry of the Indian Army into the Second World War.

Several characters in The Day of the Scorpion are based on real life people. It is likely that Paul Scott used Abul Kalam Azad, a prominent Muslim politician who stayed with the Congress and opposed partition, as the basis for his portrayal of Kasim.

Although Mohammed Kasim agrees with the overwhelming desire of Indians to rule their own country, and wants independence for India, he wants a unified India. His fellow Muslim leaders want to form the separate state of Pakistan, and they have left the Congress to join the Muslim League. We see this gentle, cultured, highly intelligent man thrown into prison for an unspecified length of time; his only crime being that he will not betray his principles. Later we are to meet his younger son, Ahmed Kasim, who is a very different type of person. Part of an upcoming type, he has an eye to how to get the most out of life, and in his father’s view, wastes his potential in a safe and easy job as secretary to the Nawab. Rather than describing the violence of India in lurid detail, Paul Scott details and contrast characters such as this father and son. Each comes across as unique, realistic and human, yet they act as symbols for the complexity of the divisions within India.

Pandi Baba, whose presence was felt throughout the first novel is still key politically. A devout Hindu, he is much respected by the Indian people, but has connections with Indian nationalists, so the British are extremely wary of him. He has taken Ahmed Kassim, the son of the imprisoned Mohammed under his wing, and seeks to advise him, stressing the importance of keeping his cultural identity, rather than taking on the mantle of British appearance. We also hear of Mohammed’s other son, Sayed, who makes his father despair when he switches sides from being a member of the British Army, to join the nationalists, and is charged with treason..

There are many symbols and recurring motifs. The very title of the book The Day of the Scorpion is a clear reference to a popular belief.

Sarah Layton remembers how, as a child, she had been shown by a servant that a scorpion, when encircled by a ring of fire, would sting itself to death. The scorpion clearly symbolises the British Raj. When threatened by the flames of Indian independence, its antagonistic reactions hasten its own destruction. Ironically, the idea that the scorpion stings itself to death if surrounded by fire, is a myth. In fact it dies as a result of a reflex action performed to protect itself. It is doomed by the inadequacy of its armour, just as the British community in India is doomed.

The death knell of the Raj is sounding, and the British Raj’s response is the brutal repression and imprisonment of India’s leaders. They refuse to accept the inevitable, and retreat into their isolated small communities, ignoring the cry for home rule. The Layton family serve as a symbol for all the upper-middle class English families, withdrawing in their various way from a world they no longer understand, and variously take solace in denial, drink, and madness. We follow stories of their constrained lives.

Sarah’s younger sister Susan, pretty and vivacious, always seems to be surrounded by eligible officers. But her impression as the life and soul of the party is merely a sham, and she actually has a low self-image. She marries a conventional young man, Teddie Bingham, almost at random. But there are subtleties and symbols even here. Sarah represents the analytical British way of thinking, whereas Susan perhaps exemplifies a more Indian philosophy; an attitude of passivity, and acceptance of one’s destiny.

It is interesting to wonder how Paul Scott could come to write such a masterpiece as “The Raj Quartet”. He had written, very early, “I mean and intend to become a great artist if I possibly can be.” Yet later, he admitted that his life was “fundamentally dull”.

Paul Scott was the son of a commercial artist, and possibly descended from the engraver Thomas Bewick. The family was prosperous enough for him to be sent to a small private school, but at the age of fourteen, due to money difficulties, he was sent to train as an accountant. He began writing poems and plays, but these seem to have been mediocre, nothing indicating the power and the scope of his magnum opus to come. The turning point for his writing, was his army career, which took him to Bengal, Imphal, and Malaya. After the war he got a job keeping accounts for a new publishing firm, and from there moved on to work for a literary agency where he stayed working as a literary agent for many years. Throughout this time he was writing, now mainly fiction. In 1960, he gave up his job in order to become a full-time novelist.

He had great commitment, and this is the time when he finally discovered the theme for his greatest work, depicting the twilight years of the British Raj in India. But as sometimes happens with great writers, the world he was creating became more and more real to him. He retreated further inside himself, existing only to write. For a decade Paul Scott submerged himself in a creative solitude where the fictional world of British India that he conjured up became his sole reality.

The cost of this, both physically and emotionally, was profound. He was eating very little, hardly sleeping, and drinking a quart of vodka a day. Many of the experiences described in “The Raj Quartet” had actually happened to the author himself. He complained that he only ever felt half alive except when he was writing, and apparently contemplated suicide. He became alienated from his wife, and eventually his long marriage broke up. By 1975, although still only in his mid-fifties, Paul Scott was a dying man. “The Raj Quartet”, that wonderful, vast and complex project, had exacted a terrible price. Tragically, he never lived to enjoy the fame and success that ensued. He died in 1978.

So how did Paul Scott suddenly develop his special knowledge and insight? His early literary attempts, when he had time from his army duties, were slight pieces, heavily influenced by W. Somerset Maugham. Yet now he seemed in total control of a gigantic scenario with immensely varied characters. He had a commanding voice, and the breadth of understanding to include a near psychopathic police superintendent, an aristocratic Rajput matriarch, an émigré Russian homosexual, acting as an influential advisor in an Indian state, a highly sophisticated and sensitive Muslim politician, two elderly English spinster missionaries, not to mention the many characters who comprise the military families brought up, generation after generation, to serve the Raj.

The turning point came in 1964, when for some reason, his publisher, Heinemann, arranged for him to return to India for six weeks. Two more such visits followed. He stayed in Bombay with Dorothy Ganapathy, who became a lifelong friend, and then for over a week with his wartime havildar (sergeant), in a rural village in Andhra Pradesh. Here he viewed the clash of cultures at first hand. In Calcutta he met Neil Ghosh, who, like Hari Kumar in the Raj Quartet, had received a a British public school education. Neil Ghosh was to become the model for Hari Kumar.

Paul Scott had openly discussed his homosexuality with friends, although it was not generally known by the public. But this perhaps made his exploration into the relationship between, for instance, Ronald Merrick and Hari Kumar have a different timbre. In The Day of the Scorpion we learn of the imprisonment and torture of Hari Kumar, at Ronald Merrick’s hands. We have a faithful record of this from Hari Kumar himself, as he believes that Daphne is still alive, and answers questions put to him honestly and neutrally. His interviewers are clearly shocked at the violence and degradation to which he has been subjected. We understand that Ronald Merrick is taking out his own grievances at his lowly background compared with Hari Kumar. He is ambitious, eager for glory, and keen to establish the status quo, putting this Indian upstart who speaks better English than he does himself, in his place. His obsession and jealously over Daphne Manners led him to attempt to frame Hari Kumar for her rape. This is a complex issue, as there are political reasons for his attempts to frame other innocent Indian lads. We see from his conversations with Sarah, that he is probably acting morally in his own view. Whatever he does is as a means to an end. But the subtext is also clear. There is a homoerotic content in the torture scenes, which would be hard to explain other than by Ronald Merrick having repressed urges.

There was also another breakthrough, with a correct diagnosis of what he described as “lassitude, depression, insomnia, mood swings, and a lack of concentration”. The amoebic dysentery that he had contracted during the war was responsible, and he managed to be treated and cured in Paris. Almost immediately afterwards, with his renewed acquaintance with India fresh in his mind, he began to write “The Jewel in the Crown”.

In October 1965, he wrote about his money worries to a friend, “I think my future largely depends now on what happens to my mammoth novel about the Indian rebellion of 1942.” At first it was to be just one novel. Then with each successive novel, Paul Scott realised that it threatened to become too unwieldy, and split it into another. Yet to a reader, it is seamless, never losing its overall cohesion. The four volumes constitute perfectly interlocking movements of a grand overall design.

We can see the origins of “The Raj Quartet” in “The Birds of Paradise”, a fictional memoir he had written in 1962. It purported to be by an Anglo-Indian who had been raised in India, and then went to school in England, before being interned in a Japanese POW camp. His sufferings seemed to relate to earlier parts of his life, as well as to being a prisoner of war.

Hitherto, E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India” had been the great novel of India, but that was written in 1924, before the British Raj’s declining years. Neither could E.M. Forster have written of the violent undercurrents; the complex, disparate factions of the nationalist forces set against the Raj. At the end of World War II, the British government were reeling from the costs of the war. The decision to grant independence to India was made hastily, and without much concern about the future. Partitioning at the same time as relinquishing responsibility now seems to us to indicate an unbelievable lack of care for the people whose lives it affected. The creation of Pakistan in this way, shifting populations at will, resulted in abominable violence between the factions, leaving over a million people dead. The British Empire’s so-called “civilizing” mission, had, after years of exploiting India, managed to entrench any existing tensions between Hindus and Muslims. Obviously then, most of the excellent histories and novels of these years, have been written by Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.

Paul Scott, conversely, told this story largely from the British point of view in “The Raj Quartet”. He demonstrated immense knowledge of army life, of high-level Anglo-Indian diplomacy, and even of the inner thoughts, emotions and problems of both British administrators and Muslim or Hindu nationalists. He never seemed to strike a wrong note, in the psychology of either caste or gender. One elderly distinguished member of the Indian Civil Service, on reading The Day of the Scorpion immediately assumed that it must have been written by one of his former colleagues under a pseudonym. It is a breathtaking achievement to write about the politics of an entire subcontinent at a turning point in history so honestly, without any illusions.

Two simple images stay with me. A lady of some means, wearing a burkha and exuding Chanel number 5, throws herself at the feet of Ronald Merrick. We deduce that she is Hari’s aunt, Shalini Gupta Sen, who is desperate to know the whereabouts of her nephew. Her prostrate demeanour and agonised cries, set against his stolid woodenness are a perfect metaphor for India’s pain at the constant presence of the British, who merely confuse their racial and religious confrontations.

The ending where Susan puts her child in a ring of fireis also a powerful metaphor. But my favourite might pass you by without notice; it is such a small detail. It is of a christening shawl, a beautiful and delicate piece embroidered by French nuns. When shaken, it appears as if a host of butterflies has been set free to fly, but they stay trapped when the shawl is still.

Nothing can remain still. It needs to be shaken and make progress before it can be free. What a perfect metaphor for India.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

In The Day of the Scorpion, Paul Scott has followed up the first volume of The Raj Quartet, The Jewel in the Crown, with the same power and historical insight that makes his novels both captivating and informative. While we meet some new players in the drama, The Laytons, an English family caught in the changing attitudes and sensibilities of the Raj, we are also given an update on familiar characters. In the midst of a national upheaval, we come to know what has happened to Hari Kumar and Ronald Merrick since we saw them last.

It is significant that Scott is not only telling us the story of these two men, but that he manages at the same time to tell us the story of the entire nation of India. There is not a hovel or a mansion that he does not expose and no person or class is exempt from his piercing examination. He has an art for seeing into the hearts of people and sometimes even into their souls.

The British ruled India for some 200 years, which helps to explain why withdrawing and turning the country over to the Indians themselves was extremely difficult. Some families were invested to the point of feeling that India was more their country than England was. What hampered the procedure even more was the pervasive feeling among the British that the Indians were inferior and incapable of ruling the country competently. LIke surrendering your child to a nanny you are unsure of.

One of the Indian characters says: They are consciously or subconsciously aware of weakening their position by friendliness, so this friendliness always has to be on their own guarded terms. If we unwittingly think of it as mutual and go too far they are doubly incensed, first as individuals who feel they have been taken what they call advantage of, secondly as members of a class they fear they may have betrayed by their own thoughtless stupidity. And to a great extent, he is right. This leaves an Indian, even a well-respected one, in a no-win situation, or at the least a situation difficult to navigate.

In the hands of a less masterful storyteller, this might have been a dry tale because there is so much of historic fact about it, but Paul Scott ismasterful and the human element is the one that most consumes you. I feel so much the heartbreak and the injustice of Hari’s treatment, and what that kind of injustice must do to a man. I sense the evil spirit in Merrick that makes him hate others, even as I understand that some of what he hates is himself. It is his inequality that he resents, but if you remove the restrictions on the Indians and allow them to be equal, then a man like Merrick might find himself on the bottom rung.

He said you couldn't buck this issue, that relationships between people were based on contempt, not love, and that contempt was the prime human emotion because no human being was ever going to believe all human beings were born equal. If there was an emotion almost as strong as contempt it was envy.

What saves Hari Kumar, and what might be the thing that saves us all, is his realization that he has a choice. He can refuse to believe in Merrick’s version of who he is, and in doing so, he can define his own soul, he can protect the thing that no man can take away from another, the thing that makes them individual. When another man has control of your very life, what more could you have than this?

"There wasn't a single other person who was responsible for anything I did or said or thought. I wasn't to be categorized or defined by type, colour, race, capacity, intellect, condition, beliefs, instincts, manner or behavior. Whatever kind of poor job I was in my own eyes I was Hari Kumar--"

Finally, in the words of Sarah Layton when thinking about Merrick:

You reveal something that is sad about us, as if out here we had built a mansion without doors and windows, with no way in and no way out. All India lies on our doorstep and cannot enter to warm us or be warmed. We live in holes and crevices of the crumbling stone, no longer sheltered by the carapace of our history which is leaving us behind.

And there lies the situation in a nutshell. There are no built-in exits. The Raj is crumbling and what will follow is not in the control of any one of these groups. I love that choice of words--”something that is sad”, not evil but sad, and ”the carapace”--for indeed it is a shell that is being broken and an animal will emerge, and that animal might be a scorpion that, if legend is believed, can sting itself to death.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second book of "The Raj Quartet", the first being "Jewel in the Crown". That one concerned the rape of a white girl in the Bibighar Gardens in Mayapor, India, the reasons for and aftermath of the incident itself. The writing was impeccable, the history illuminating, and the characters unforgettable, both black (As the English referred to the natives) and white.

This second book continues where that left off, with different characters and settings, but still the aftermath of the rape and the escalating of WWII looms large in their lives. We get layers and nuances of the original story that explain some things, and create more questions about others. We are allowed glimpses of characters from Jewel in the Crown by new characters, creating an unusual perspective, but always through the sense of the history of the British rule of India, The Raj.

Yes, there is much racism in this book, but the class system of the British is exposed with the prejudice of the educated "right people" with their superior education in the right schools, their connections, speech patterns that identify "us" as opposed to "them", and condescension toward anyone not belonging to the ruling class. I finished this book with a much better sense of why and when things went south with the British rule, and fully expect the next book in this quartet to deepen my understanding.

[Nandakishore Mridula · Rating 4 out of 5]

The proud scorpion, surrounded by a wall of fire from kerosene, will sting itself to death in the face of its inescapable fate - such is the myth. Here we see an age-old empire do the same: and it is reflected in the life of two sisters, who face death and the loss of innocence in different ways.

Another masterly creation from Paul Scott.

[booklady · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is you-don't-want-to-put-it-down kind of reading. I could not sleep the other night and did not even mind. I have been motivated to exercise with this to listen to. (Somewhat bummed it is over, but still have two more in the series to go!) Compelling! You are drawn into the lives of the English and Indian characters who are struggling the last years of World War II. The British know their days in India are numbered, but not sure when and how to exit with face, grace and peace. The Indians are united about getting rid of foreign rule, but that is where unity ends and division begins. The various characters Scott has peopled his quartet with are so vividly drawn you feel you know them. Having watched The Jewel in the Crown, a BBC Series made about the books when we lived in the UK and then many times since*, the characters are even more familiar. It is a powerful, epic and and moving drama. My friend, Bionic Jean has the best review about this particular book (and the others too!) if you want to know all the ins and outs on it.

Excellent but sobering. On to The Towers of Silence...

*We bought the VHS tapes as soon as they came out.

[Kressel Housman · Rating 5 out of 5]

After I finished The Jewel in the Crown, my mother, who adores the Raj Quartet, was amazed that I didn’t immediately ask to borrow the next in the series. “Aren’t you curious about the characters?” she asked. She doesn’t understand the allure of a group read. I was perfectly content to postpone the pleasure of the next book until I’d get the even greater pleasure of dozens if not hundreds of Goodreaders to read and discuss the book with me.

But aside from that, The Jewel in the Crown works very well as a stand-alone novel. By the end, Daphne’s story has been completely told. What more was there to say? As it turns out, plenty. Hari gets his say in this book, as does Captain Merrick. There’s also a brand new character in this book: Sarah Layton. Her quiet strength and integrity remind me of my mother. She’s not beautiful, she’s not vivacious, but she’s the rock who holds her family together. I think part of why my mother loves the series so much is that Sarah is the kind of protagonist she can relate to. But if you would ask her, she would say it’s the subtle, unpredictable way that the lives of the diverse cast of characters come together. That’s even more true for this book than the last because all those characters lived in the town of Mayapore. This book is set in different parts of India, yet by the end, all the threads come together.

The most brilliant characterization by far is that of Captain Merrick. Hari’s story comes smack dab in the middle of the book, but surrounding it like book ends is Captain Merrick’s account for himself as he gets to know Sarah many miles away from Mayapore. The contrast is incredible. Hari paints him as a brutal villain, and as readers, we believe him, yet on his own, Captain Merrick shows that he can act like a gentleman and even a hero. I’ve come across some morally ambiguous characters in literature before – Gwendolen in Daniel Deronda, M. Paul in Villette, Snape in the Harry Potter series – but none of them hold a candle to Captain Merrick. He’s a genuine villain with detestable racial prejudices, yet at some level, he’s a decent human being, too.

Though I’m looking forward to more of Sarah’s story and rooting for resolution in Hari’s, once again, though I’ve finished the book, I’m not rushing to the next in the series. What an ending, though. Pow! What an ending.

[Quirkyreader · Rating 5 out of 5]

I rather enjoyed the second volume of the Raj Quartet. I like how it is turning into one big family saga. I saw the series a few years ago and it playing back in my head as I read the words.

The book is not all glamour about the British diaspora in India. Scott writes of India's struggle to seperate its self from England. And, I am further looking forward to the rest of the series when The Partition of the country comes into further play.

Also in the book there is a certain romanticism of the country. But each community reading this book with take that theme in a different way. My view is different because I was part of a diaspora community and saw many different feelings and attitudes towards India's history.

This book might be a bit tricky to find. But if you do find it, give it a go. And I am looking forward to part three.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second in the Raj Quartet. Stunning. The characterizations are brilliant and Scott captures the decline of the British influence on India beautifully.

The introduction of Sarah Layton and her family. The Kasim family and Count Bronowsky all add to the rich tapestry of the story. Merrick is back with his envy and his view of the world and Daphne Manners Aunt plays a key part albeit small in this story. Hari Kumar also gets to tell his story of his interrogation by Merrick. The war progresses and the repression continues of any unrest in India.

Other reviews do a much better job than I could especially Bionic Jean’s which is superb especially the background of the author Paul Scott. I liked the interpretation of the ring of fire and the ring of fire but is the scorpion India or the English?

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

More conventional than its predecessor, but so brilliant

Nothing becomes this second volume of Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet so much as its opening and closing. As he had done several times in The Jewel in the Crown , Scott leaps ahead in his prologue to post-Partition India. His image of a woman in a burqa in a Hindu town, trailing a distinct scent of Chanel No. 5, symbolizes the disorder that the British left behind them after Independence in 1947, and the demise of their own imperial dreams. The violence of that demise is suggested by the title image, a scorpion apparently stinging itself to death in a ring of fire, which returns in Scott's epilogue with startlingly literal application. Indeed the last fifty pages or so of the novel are equally superb, as Scott takes his many diverse themes—the approaching end of the Raj, the personal lives of several English characters caught in the middle of it, the war against the Japanese and its realignment of old loyalties, the emerging models for a new India, and of course the lingering repercussions of the events in Mayapore that were the subject of the first book—as he takes all these and ties them together through subtle reference and hinted outcomes, making this diverse, even sprawling volume at last emerge as an intricate indivisible structure.

One of the characteristics of The Jewel in the Crown was Scott's predilection for telling a story obliquely, though the narrative of characters only peripherally connected to it. For a time, it seems as if he is about to do the same here. The novel proper opens with the arrest of the politician Mohammed Ali Kasim, a prominent member of Ghandi's Congress Party that urged passive resistance to British rule even in wartime. His interview with the regional Governor and the letters and journals he keeps in prison form a superb summary of the political situation, setting idealism against pragmatism with admirable skill. A little later, the focus turns once more to Lady Manners, the widow of a previous governor; she is also a link to the first volume, which centered on the apparent rape of her niece Daphne in the Bibighar Gardens in Mayapore in 1942. Daphne died in childbirth, but Lady Manners has defied decorum by taking on her half-caste daughter Parvati. Her neighbors in Kashmir keep their distance, all except for Sarah Layton, the elder daughter of an entrenched military family. Unlike her pretty sister Susan, who plays her role in the center of a throng of admiring young officers, and whose marriage is the central event of the novel, Sarah keeps to herself, quietly conventional on the outside, but inwardly questioning the whole Imperial ethos.

From here on, Scott alternates two different ways of telling his story. He still likes his set pieces raking over past events in detail, but now he tends to put these into extended interview format, in which one character is induced to tell his side of a story to others. Taken literally, these are somewhat implausible; there is a long conversation between two wedding guests on a verandah and a scene involving a badly injured man in a hospital bed, neither of which could have lasted that long in real life, though the content of each is fascinating. In between these, however, Scott for the first time tells his story straight, as an omniscient narrator describing events as they happen. I was struck in the first volume by how different the book felt to the wonderful Granada TV series that was made from it. But in this one, I was on home ground, as the story progressed from episode to episode in familiar fashion. Yet familiar only in following the same linear storytelling as the series; it would be doing Scott an injustice to think of this as normal. One example: the interrogation by the Mayapore Superintendent of Police, Ronald Merrick, of the man accused in the rape case, an English-educated Indian named Hari Kumar. The television series placed it chronologically, in I think the second episode, and had to make certain decisions in staging it, thus ending any mystery. But Scott dances around the event in his first volume, only providing details in the middle of this one, and I suspect there will be other revelations still to come. So perhaps knowing the television version is actually a disadvantage?

But not, I think, in terms of the characters. I am amazed by how perfectly the television actors captured the essence of each, without any discord between read words and remembered image. Yet reading Scott, I was also struck by how much his text adds. Especially in the case of the two characters who I think of as the protagonists of this volume: Sarah Layton and Ronald Merrick. They are as different as can be, occupying different ends of the middle class, the privately educated English rose and the grammar school boy who has pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. Yet they are linked by daring to question the established values. Sarah goes through the social motions, but does not feel she belongs. Merrick criticizes the Indian army types as amateurs compared to his own professionalism—a comparison that will mean more to people who know the gentlemen-versus-players division in English cricket, but he is absolutely right. Their common skepticism makes for two scenes of extraordinary sympathy between them, even though Sarah later says that Ronald appalls her. Tim Piggott-Smith gave a wonderful performance of Merrick on television, but Scott is able to show him utterly more sympathetic at one moment, then in the next section make him seem more perverted and despicable (though always understandable) than he ever was on screen. And while Geraldine James was perfect as the well-spoken but gawky Sarah Layton, her portrayal seems almost static compared to the tissue of contradictions and self-questioning that make the character so fascinating in the novel. All leading to the seduction scene at the end that, fine though it was on screen, is nothing like the brilliant tour-de-force of Scott's writing, ushering in those final sections that, as I said, are the glory of the whole book.

======

Here are links to my reviews of all the books in the Quartet, in order:

    1. The Jewel in the Crown
    2. The Day of the Scorpion
    3. The Towers of Silence
    4. A Division of the Spoils

And to Scott's semi-comic quasi-sequel: Staying On.

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just as history can’t be undone, innocence, once lost, can’t be retrieved. If history would allow, I would dearly love to read Paul Scott’s The Day Of The Scorpion without having first read The Jewel In The Crown. Scorpion is very much a continuation of the Crown and I am not convinced that a reader coming cold to the book as a stand-alone work would cope with the multiple references to what came before. Like the characters in Paul Scott’s novels, I can’t undo history and can only thus reflect on another time through this forensic tale of war-torn colonial India as someone who did the Crown first.

The incidents that formed the backbone of The Jewel In The Crown are still to the fore. There are implications and consequences. But time and people have moved on. Not all have survived. There is a child called Parvati who figures large in the tale but hardly ever appears. Ronald Merrick, however, the policeman from Mayapore who was only seen from afar and through others’ eyes in The Jewel In The Crown is now very much at the centre of things. His character, that of a self-made man, grammar school educated, middle, not upper class, provides the perfect contrast to the stiff upper lip fossilized Britishness of the military types. Merrick is no less British, no less confident in his prejudices. In fact he is arguably more aggressive in his need to assert a removed superiority, but his need is personal and antagonistic, containing neither the patronising nor the paternalistic tendencies of those born to rule. Racially he assumes superiority, whereas professionally he must earn it, because, unlike the upper classes, he was not born to it.

The Laytons are such an upper class colonial family. Daddy is a prisoner of war in Europe. Mildred is at home in India – if home it can be – silently stewing at the indignity of not being able to live in the larger house her status deserves. She has taken to the bottle. Susan, the younger daughter, is about to be married to a suitably stationed officer and, despite war, civil unrest, threats of political change in Britain and now fragile colonialism, expects a fairytale family future plucked straight from the pages of some glossy magazine. Sarah, her sister, is more down to earth, is perhaps both more phlegmatic and sceptical, certainly more conscious of her responsibilities and role and the fragility of life.

Both sisters remember a childhood experience when a gardener made a ring of fire and dropped a live scorpion into its midst. Thus surrounded by threat, it did for itself, or at least that’s how it looked. How would people react if conflagration surrounded them? They would have to get on with their lives, of course. But for some, the process might prove tougher than for others.

And what if you are a local ruler, a Nawab, for instance, a British puppet popping around a little kingdom claiming it’s a law unto itself? What to do if your chief minister has been imprisoned by your masters without trial, along with all others who share his opposition to the people who keep you in power? Where then should your loyalties lie?

Though The Day Of The Scorpion is primarily a novel about women, it’s the military side of the book that provides everyone involved with the ring of challenges they must face. With politicians in jail and Mr Ghandi’s advocacy of non-violence, how does anyone relate to those Indians who have joined the Indian National Army to fight alongside the Japanese? If your mindset has been tutored on notions of paternalism and the white man’s burden, how is possible that such people can exist? How can they reject what you have offered? But exist they do and their ammunition is live. And it’s not only the British who cannot cope with such concepts.

The Day Of The Scorpion has many more themes than these. It is an episodic novel of quite remarkable complexity. The characters are beautifully drawn, rounded individuals, each presented with personal, social and political dilemmas. Not least among them is Hari Kumar, still imprisoned, whose loyalty is repeatedly tested, and whose resolve to protect remains unbreakable.

Paul Scott’s novel recreates a complete world, a complete history via the experiences of individuals who, given the chance, are more than willing to explain their positions and dilemmas at length. But it is the detail of their stories that describes the pressures that now surround them. You cannot skip a word.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

In India nothing is self-evident

This second book in The Raj Quartet is remarkably complicated (in a good way) and sophisticated. The aftermath of the Daphne Manners story is still playing out and leads to an extraordinary middle section where Hari Kumar is interviewed in prison: a dense and thrilling piece of writing.

At the same time, we're introduced to a host of new characters and new locations that broaden out the scope of the novel. Everything is in a state of chaos and flux, on personal, national and international levels with WW2 playing out and bringing the Japanese army to India's borders.

Scott's ability to manage the multiple dimensions of his story is quite extraordinary: characters are both rounded personalities and also take on symbolic significances, just as the rape did in the first book:

She thought: You are, yes, our dark side, the arcane side. You reveal something that is sad about us, as if out here we had built a mansion without doors and windows, with no way in and no way out. All India lies on our doorstep and cannot enter to warm us or be warmed.

Images of fire, too, abound from the dying scorpion to the suicide of Miss Crane in the previous book, and now the explosions of war-time bombs.

The writing is dense and the connections between section not always clear so sometimes we just have to live with a slight unevenness. Scott, though, never simplifies the workings or effects of the colonial relationships on either side of the equation.

I have to admit to struggling with this book in places but with hindsight can see that everything adds to the cumulative effect. This was certainly a slower read for me than The Jewel in the Crown, but as an analysis of the Raj, India's struggles for independence, and imperialism more generally this is magnificent.

[Quo · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are countless novels detailing British rule in India over several hundred years, E. M. Forster's Passage to India standing at or near the top of that list. While not previously all that familiar with Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet, I very much enjoyed The Day of the Scorpion, the 2nd volume of the tetralogy. The concept of the reaction of a scorpion surrounded by a ring of fire can be said to stand for the British in India as it became apparent to many that the days of the Raj (British rule of India) were numbered. The novel is set during WWII and I thought the author did a masterful job of making the story a work unto itself, not dependent on the initial volume, achieving this by building & defining characters who were memorable in a particular context or subset of the literary quartet, with only occasional flashbacks to the preceding work.




The novel is above all about the nature of class in the particularly British setting of the Raj and the limitations it places on the various characters in the novel. The Day of the Scorpion also describes the sense of dislocation that so many years of British rule in India had on many of the characters, people who no longer feel very British but have never found it possible to integrate themselves within India, seeming to remain fundamentally apart from both cultures. One major character, British-educated Hari Kumar feels adrift in India, not fitting in to life there among Indians because of his seemingly British ways & accent but also not fully accepted by the British because of his color. Another, a longtime British female resident commits sutee immolating herself because the "old India is gone". It is said that

some British in India seem preserved by some sort of perpetual Edwardian sunlight that got trapped between the Indian Ocean & the Arabian Sea round about the turn of the century. The empire's crown jewel (India) is composed of English people who have said no to England.

Another of the primary characters, Ronald Merrick, is a British policeman who never had much of an opportunity in England but who quickly develops a sense of superiority to the Indians he confronts and most importantly to Hari Kumar, a much better-educated & more genteel Indian with rather deep British roots & whose relationship with a British woman causes rage in Merrick. An extreme tension develops between a rather traditional, upper class British soldier & regiment leader who sees great potential for the Indians he has trained, the so-called "Muzzy guides" & Merrick, whose views are that Indians will always be a subject people with minimal potential. Merrick feels that he is the "true professional" while Teddy Bingham is an amateur & a "privileged dilettante".



Beyond everything else, including fascinating characters & a rather well-defined feel for the diversity of Indian landscape & including its diverse "human architecture", author Paul Scott's prose is exceptional. Here was an author who struggled almost his entire career for recognition & seemed finally to have achieved it with his quartet of novels based in WWII India. Speaking of Merrick, Susan Layton whose sister Teddy married considers:

I see a man in love with legends, a way of life, all those things that distinguish people like us from his own kind. I don't understand the distinction he makes between what he calls an amateur & what he calls a professional but feel it's a distinction he has made to heal a wound. After all, there are only people, tasks, myths & truth. And truth is a fire few of us get scorched by. Perhaps it's an imaginary flame & can't be made by rubbing two sticks together.

Indeed, there are many examples of fire within The Day of the Scorpion beyond the legend of the scorpion who is said to sting itself to death when surrounded by a fire it senses will ultimately consume it. While reading the novel, I wondered if a reader might react differently to the story if he or she has experienced India, even an India drastically different today than under the Union Jack & after the 1947 partition. Personally, while some reckon that India is a place defined by disease, dirt & destitution, I found India a rather wondrous place, a formidable country that is both very compelling & at times quite exhausting. What I think Paul Scott captures so well is the sense of an India on the verge of great change, a transformation that will change the lives of everyone living on the subcontinent. Here is a last bit of dialogue between a father & son with different concepts of India:

Ahmed hesitated. The game had gone wrong but his father had always played it honorably. No doubt he would do so till the end. What was sad was that his father was not looking for a country for himself but for his sons, and they could never inhabit it because a country was a state of mind & a man could properly exist only in his own. His mind was not clear enough to penetrate the shadows of other men's beliefs. The bizarre notion struck him that if only there was a mirror in the room, he would take it down from the wall, put it on the table & say: "There's the India you are looking for." On the table was an old school cap & Ahmed put it on his father's head, giving it a jaunty tilt. His father's hands touched his, seeking to impose an adjustment. "No, straight", he said. "And firm!" His father also muttered something which Ahmed only partly heard but outside on the veranda, it came to him, "Straight & firm", his father had said, "like a crown of thorns".

Whether one has visited India, longs to do so one day or has little desire to experience the Indian subcontinent, Paul Scott's The Day of the Scorpion is a skillfully written work, one that can stand quite apart from the other 3 volumes of the author's India-set literary quartet that begins with The Jewell in the Crown. I also enjoyed reading an insightful biography by Hillary Spurling, Paul Scott: A Life of the Author of the Raj Quartet. Not long before the author died, he was awarded the Booker Prize for his final novel, Staying On, gathering literary distinction that had eluded the author for so very long.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Independence is not something you can divide into phases. It exists or does not exist."

This is the second novel in the author's Raj quartet which maps the decline of the British Raj in India. The aftermath of the assault of Daphne Manners is still playing out but the action has moved to the the town of Ranpur where a wedding is to take place.

A groom and his best man are travelling to the ceremony when a rock is hurled at their limousine. A window is shattered and the groom, Teddie, suffers a small cut on his cheek. The service is slightly delayed but otherwise goes ahead without further incident. But what prompted this act of violence?
Could it be because the limousine belongs to the Nawab, the ruler of the state, and perpetrator making a statement against his rule? Or could it be because the occupants were English and the thrower a Nationalist? Or could it be that the best man happens to be Ronald Merrick, the police superintendent at the heart of the incident involving Daphne Manners and the chief suspect, Hari Kumar? An incident which is still an open wound between Indians and English and was central to the previous novel, The Jewel in the Crown.

Merrick has by now left the Police and is now an officer in the Army whilst Hari Kumar is languishing in jail despite the fact that there has never been a trial. Merrick was not Teddie’s first choice as best man, rather a last minute substitute, and Teddie has no idea of Merrick’s past.

The middle books in a series are always hard, however there is still plenty to admire here. Along with a change of location, with the exception of Merrick and Hari Kumar there is a whole set of new characters which allows the author to give some details as to the fate of the two characters who were prominent in the first novel without it feeling like a continuation of that particular story, rather the wider repercussions that it caused.

As with the first novel there isn't a lot of action but where there is some it is quite explosive. However, this book is is at its best during some long conversations between the disparate characters. In these conversations we see the clash of personalities, classes and social status, race and political persuasions but for me the most interesting conversation is about whether or not colonisers and the colonised can ever really learn be friends or merely learn not to hate one another. Even today, in a world where terrorist incidents happen with depressing regularity, this seems to be a relevant question.

This book isn't as overtly about a commentary about colonialism and racism and the first, instead it looks in particular on the effect colonialism has on the colonisers. Therefore I have to admit that I didn't enjoy this book quite as much as I did book 1 but it is still an interesting and thought provoking read which successfully achieves what a middle-book needs to do, make the reader eager for the next, so on to The Towers of Silence.

[Sarah Harkness · Rating 5 out of 5]

In some ways, an easier book to read than the Jewel in the Crown, as the narrative is more straightforward, with one principal protagonist, Sarah Layton. Still very dense with backstories and political insight, and a whole cast of fabulous new characters - Bronowski, Barbie, the poisonous Mildred, the tragic Susan - the slightly less-well-drawn Ahmed...there are dialogues that bear very close reading - for instance Jimmy Clark's seduction of Sarah - and there are plots almost too dense to decipher - I'm still not sure I understand about Ahmed's father's release and the link with his other son. Disappointing that the wonderful incident with the bicycle seems to have been an invention of the TV script - but again, I love how closely some of the script followed the scenes in the book, my favourite being Bronowski's dialogue with Merrick at the wedding reception - only very slightly altered from how Scott pictured it, and yet an extraordinarily chilling TV moment.

[Megan Gibbs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review to come after completion of book 4. AMAZING SERIES SO FAR

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

The whole section about Hari. That is good writing. Seriously. Wonderful second book. Treats women as people and not just tits.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Day of the Scorpion" is a very powerful if somewhat tedious novel about human despair. It is the second novel of the "Raj Quartet" of which the four parts are all very tightly coupled and which must be read in the proper sequence. As most other GR readers have noted, the strong suit of the "The Day of the Scorpion" is historical analysis. Its literary sins are great. The work is far too long in relation to its plot and objectives. The characters fail to engage the reader. Their suffering greatly exceeds their lucidity as they resolutely march into every trap set for them. There is no one protagonist who grasps the whole and attempts to deal with the crisis.
Nonetheless "The Day of the Scorpion" provides a brilliant but partial sketch of Anglo-Indian society on the eve of Indian independence and its interactions with the indigenous peoples. It is a study of two caste systems. The Anglo-Indians are rigorously analyzed. The Indians whom Scott makes no claim to understand are described but not explained.
What Scott does note is that the Indians have clearly studied the British better than the British have studied them. The Indian political leaders realize that British cause has already been lost in India and are jockeying to position themselves in the post Imperial world. The Anglo-Indians also have the vague sense that the end is near. They understand that the Empire is an abomination in the socialist Welt•an•schau•ung (worldview) and that the Raj (British Regime in India) will not survive a Labour electoral victory.
Through two volumes I have not encountered any socialist or Marxist characters. The Anglo-Indians in Scott's all have Tory and pro-Imperial sympathies. The English missionaries who feel passionately for the Indians want Christian charity from the British not revolution from the locals.
Scott is most brilliant in his descriptions of the courting rituals of the British military community. What Scott knows but does not explain is that the British Army was a completely different entity from the British civil administration. Entrance to the Indian Civil Service depended on a set of exams in Greek and Latin open only to graduates of Oxford and Cambridge which effectually restricted membership in the Indian Civil Service to very intelligent aristocrats.
The officer class of the British army was effectively self-perpetuating. The army officers sent their children home to England to be educated. After military college, the young men would then elect Indian regiments. The girls at the end of their teen years would return to marry young officers. Scott understands just how difficult it is in fact for a young girl to marry well especially when it is the only thing expected of her. In this area, he has Jane Austen's eye for detail but sadly none of her concision.
"The Day of the Scorpion" takes place in tragic and catastrophic times. The Japanese invade British Burma, Malaya and finally India. Worst of all some Indians desert the colonizer's army and fight with the Japanese. The young Anglo-Indian officers depart for the front and their young wives become widows.
Indian characters do not dominate this novel but are present. One is an Indian prince whose principality will also disappear with the Indian regime. Another is a Muslim politician who is looking for a graceful way to leave Congress which is starting to emerge as a purely Hindu force rather than a global Indian movement and join the All-Indian Muslim league.
"The Day of the Scorpions" is a forceful novel about the last days of a doomed caste. I found it very worthwhile.

[Jill H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This second book of the Raj Quartet continues the story of those English men and women who live in India during WWII. Much is happening in India at this time besides the war as the indigenous population is chaffing for independence. Gandhi has been imprisoned as well as member of the Indian Congress and unrest, although somewhat subtle at this point, is stirring

In this installment, we follow the lives of Sarah and Susan Layton, two young women whose father is a POW in Germany. These sisters could not be more different.....Sarah is introspective and serious while Susan is a "social butterfly" whose life revolves around herself. Their lives intersect with characters from the first book although sometimes tangentially. The author begins to pull together some of the plot lines and questions that may have been raised by the reader of Volume I.

This is a series that is a "must-read" for those who are interested in Indian history and independence. Although it is fiction, it reads like history and is based on true incidents in the larger sense. Recommended.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally we hear Hari Kumar's side of the story. Ronald Merrick loses an arm, which perhaps compensates for the torture and jail time inflicted on Kumar. Sarah Layton entertains vague fantasies about her Indian equestrian escort, but loses her virginity to a British douchenozzle. Living in the Raj has pickled Susan Layton's brain and being a new mother, it turns out, is not her thing.

An astonishing number of typos litter the text, particularly toward the end. I had fun underlining them.

[Hana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review in Progress

I finished this one in the wee hours of the morning. And sat staring at the last page with my hands over my mouth, stunned. I felt it had all happened to me. Just happened.

I will defer my detailed review until I have re-read this extraordinary book along with the HBC, and I'll be posting thoughts from time to time here. If you are thinking of reading this, the group read is only just getting started.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group...

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Liked even more than The Jewel in the Crown.

[Martin Zook · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second volume of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet shifts focus more exclusively onto the deteriorating British Raj administration in contrast to the opening volume which invested more attention to the insights, perspectives, and myths of Indians during the birthing of their state.

The artistic peaks of The Jewel in the Crown are sacrificed to a tighter focus and more linear narrative in The Day of the Scorpion. But what emerges is a more accessible book and more linear story that doubtlessly has a wider appeal to readers, without sacrificing the overall artistic merit.

Scott does step back in time during the beginning of some narrative in DotS so that the lines sometimes overlap, but the circular space and time of JitC has given way to a more linear progression.

Also, with the compelling exception of an interview of Hari Kumar, imprisoned under false security charges for consorting with the young English woman Daphne Manners, Indians are in the background, here. And, so have men for the most part. Center stage is populated with women.

DotS works on three levels: 1) characters as the action, 2) history of the period August 1942-June 1944, and 3) mythological.

Experiential knowledge that leads to the grace associated with a fulfilled life is the main transcendent action. It begins with Sarah Layton visiting Lady Ethel Manners, the aunt of Daphne who died while giving birth to the daughter she conceived with Hari Kumar at the end of the first volume.

Lady Manners has become a pariah, an untouchable, within the Raj community for her role in bringing the mixed raced Pavrati into the world. Sarah, left on her own, feels compelled to visit Lady Manners, her neighbor who has been snubbed to this point. "What a lot you know," remarks Sarah Layton to herself about Lady Manners after the visit. It's an epiphany to her of what life can be.

The knowing that Sarah accumulates between the book's covers is distinct from knowledge derived from memory and dependent upon experience resulting in the sense of grace embodied by Lady Manners, who becomes a ghost figure drifting in and out of the narrative, but always a haunting and disrupting presence.

Sarah is twinned with her younger sister Susan, who marries, births a son, and is widowed in these pages. The contrast between the two is yin and yang stuff.

Susan is the beauty, the center of attention who lets the world orbit around her, and she absorbs thoughtlessly without weighing what it is she is absorbing. She is the darling of the Raj's Pankot outpost.

Sarah, while not unattractive, is plainer, open minded, circulates within and without the Raj community, is linked with the deceased Daphne in comparison and spirit. Her independence makes her the object of vicious gossip about her loyalty to the Raj.

Sarah also is linked to her Aunt Mabel, twice widowed, who openly cares not a whit about what the ladies of the Raj think or say. Mabel sees what the Raj has become. She recognizes its demise while the mainstream ladies play bridge and congregate for afternoon drinks, dining, dancing, and other things Raj.

When the Raj community rallies round General Reginald Dyer, who gave the order in 1919 to slaughter unarmed and peaceful civilians without an avenue of escape at Jallianwalla in Amrister, Mabel makes a sizable donation the fund for Indian victims.

The men in DotS are background actors. Mohammed Ali Kasim, a Muslim arrested in the infamous lockup of Congress, is introduced, but plays no major role.

The Nawab Sahib, who lends his guest house to the Laytons in Susan's rushed marriage, is slighted at entrance to the wedding reception, but it is Susan who saves the day by offering the Indian royalty a curtsy, causing gasps among the ladies of the Raj.

Reginald Merrick, described here by Sarah as a man with an intellectually active mind within narrow confines, unveils his theory of situational history. Briefly, it's a theory of what Merrick calls situations that are created by the need for inherent distinctions generated by man's contempt for other men, strengthening his racist credentials first offered in the first volume.

We also see a side of Merrick through the interrogation of Hari Kumar as the Raj reopens his case given suspicions about how Merrick conducted the boy's arrest. The interrogation is as brutal, physically and emotionally, as anything we have learned from recent conflicts between East and West in Asia.

History is much batted around. But my favorite pronouncement is by Lady Manners, who while witnessing Kumar's interrogation offers: "We must remember the worst because the worst is the lives we lead, the best is only our history, and between our history and our lives there is this vast dark plain where the rapt and patient shepherds drive their invisible flocks in expectation of God's forgiveness."

There is much myth in these pages as well, although it is less obvious and woven into the narrative to seem fairly seamless.

Keeping with the framework of Siva, the Indian god of creation and destruction, dancing on the dwarf of ignorance, Sarah contemplates the cycle of creation/destruction, but sees it as a mindless, consuming hunger, the hunger being enough in itself.

Susan also enacts a weird sacrificial scene with her child in the middle of a circle of fire, bringing Siva to mind.

by Paul Scott

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Note: The Day of the Scorpion is book two in Scott’s The Raj Quartet, and may contain spoilers for book one, The Jewel in the Crown.]

The Day of the Scorpion is book two in Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet. It continues a key plot line from the previous book, The Jewel in the Crown, namely, the fate of Hari Kumar who was wrongly arrested for an assault on an English woman, Daphne Manners. In fact, Daphne and Hari were lovers before Daphne’s violent sexual assault by five men, and it turns out she was already pregnant with Hari’s child. The child, Parvati, has now been born and is being looked after by Daphne’s aunt, Lady Manners. Daphne died in childbirth, while Hari is still languishing in a prison on a trumped-up charge relating to the Defense of India Act.

While The Day of the Scorpion continues with a backdrop of the last days of the British Raj in India, it also introduces a new family into the story—parents Colonel John and Mildred Layton, and daughters Sarah and Susan. Susan, the younger sister, is somewhat shallow, whimsical, and mostly interested in socializing with soldiers with a view to finding a husband. Sarah is serious, thoughtful, moral, open to discussing sensitive race relations and political issues, and interested in understanding people’s actions and motivations.

A large section of the story consists of a gripping and engrossing debriefing (secretly viewed by Lady Manners) of Hari Kumar in prison, in which it is revealed that Superintendent of Police Ronald Merrick, a sadistic racist, tortured and sexually assaulted Hari at the time of his arrest. Hari’s debriefers, Captain Rowan and civil servant Gopal are horrified at what they hear and, while wanting to keep such information under wraps, feel this will ultimately lead to Hari’s release.

Meanwhile, Susan whimsically marries Teddie Bingham (who first had designs on sister Sarah). Bingham and Merrick get sent to the front (in Burma?) where Teddie is killed in action and Merrick is horribly disfigured trying to save him. Sarah visits Merrick in hospital and, though sympathetic of his condition, still dislikes him intensely. Sarah, who has joined the Women Army Corps, is also wrestling with her feelings for Ahmed Kasim, the handsome young assistant to the Nawab of Mirat. Part of this struggle leads her to temptation with the somewhat heavy-handed seducer, Major James Clark.

As the dramas above unfold, Scott also delves into the Indian political scene at the time as it relates to the growing pains of a country desperate for independence, but with the inevitable infighting of multiple political parties. Scott is also generous to readers by covering numerous side stories to do with the extended Layton family; the arrest of Mohammed Kasim, a Muslim member of the Indian National Congress; the Nawab, princely ruler of the state of Mirat; Count Bronowski, a Russian emigré and the Nawab’s chief minister; and Pandit Baba, a stealthy and influential Indian nationalist.

The Day of the Scorpion is filled with rich atmospheric detail about a significant period of both British and Indian history. While the story moves at a steady pace, the characters are all solidly three-dimensional. This second book of the quartet more than adequately continues all the drama and tension begun in The Jewel in the Crown, further whetting readers’ appetites for the remaining books: The Towers of Silence and A Division of the Spoils.

[LauraT · Rating 4 out of 5]

Again a terribly complex book on so many topics I don't know which one to point to; one of the thing that struck me was the concept of "becoming" invisible of Kumar in his travel from England to INdia, the more invisible the "darker" his skin grew towards India: this book was published almost 10 years after Invisible Man; there Ralph Ellison talked about afroamericans, but it is exactly the same for indians...

"Ronald said, ‘That’s the oldest trick in the game, to say colour doesn’t matter. It does matter. It’s basic. It matters like hell.’"

"I wrote to him. I had no talent for self-denial. It’s an Anglo-Saxon failing, I suppose. Constantly we want proof, here and now, proof of our existence, of the mark we’ve made, the sort of mark we can wear round our necks, to label us, to make sure we’re never lost in that awful dark jungle of anonymity."

"People say she was unlike other English people. I do not know what they mean when they are saying that. English people are not mass-produced. They do not come off a factory line all looking, speaking, thinking, acting the same. Neither do we. But we are Indians and they are English. True intimacy is not possible. It is not even desirable. Only it is desirable that there should be peace between us, and this is not possible while the English retain possession of what belongs to us"

"he pompousness of the English without the saving grace of their energy and without that curious tendency to iconoclasm which they called their sense of humour. "

"There must have been several old Chillingburians out here who’d have been willing to help him.’
After a while Mr Gopal said, ‘Do you think so, Captain Rowan? Willing, perhaps. Able – no. He is an English boy with a dark brown skin. The combination is hopeless.’
‘Yes,’ Rowan said after a while. ‘Perhaps it is.’

"And at home we’ll pretend we’ve fulfilled a moral obligation by giving it back to them. But that won’t be the reason. We’ll get rid of it because it doesn’t pay and it’s too late to make it pay."

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second book in this series has proven to be just as layered as the first book, The Jewel in the Crown. The characters are so well developed and involving and I found myself "living" the novel in my head throughout reading it, a sure sign (to me) of a great book.

About a quarter of this book is told through the interrogation of Hari Kumar, a character from the first book, and I thought it was a masterful example of using the perspectives of at least 3 different characters to play out the unknowns we were left with at the end of the first book. Much of the book feels like you're following a mystery, but you get to follow the lines of logic and conclusions from various characters' understandings, not from just one point of view.

I'm so glad I was introduced to this series through the History Book Club on Goodreads. The author has created a portrait of India as it struggles to become independent; a fictional picture but so authentic and personal that I feel engaged in knowing and *caring* about India as a culture and a country today.

[Lukerik · Rating 3 out of 5]

The opening of this novel could do with a bit of trimming. It's a little diffuse. I'm not saying cut it all out. It's beautifully written. Scott writes a high-capacity, multi-claused sentence that picks you up and takes you somewhere else. And there's a fair bit of set-up. And obviously we need to be introduced to the protagonist, Sarah Layton, who carries the novel so well. But I got the impression the author was drifting and had taken his eye off the story.

But about the two hundred page mark Paul Scott spins round with his eyes aflame and punches you twice really hard in the face with these two intense interrogation scenes. Thereafter the novel does improve, or perhaps I was simply engaged for the first time. There's no doubt that it does suffer in comparison with The Jewel in the Crown being so rich and intense.

[Cindy Rollins · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been reading the Raj series by Paul Scott for 3 years and have just finished book 2. It is a historically significant, beautifully written book if not enjoyable as a novel in the usual sense. As these books are about the painful birth of modern India out of its old form British rule almost all of the characters are living in confusion.
The story of Daphne Manners from Book 1 is clearly reiterated here which was helpful as I tried to remember what I had read earlier.

I will most certainly pick up book three immediately. My 3 stars are really 3.5 but I hesitated to give the book 4 stars as I can't see it having wide appeal. Still it is vastly superior to almost any recent novel.

[Doris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favourite volume It is a struggle between two races one love and two parties and of their fruit It is a doom This love is India and England themselves It reminds me a little of Passage to India by Forster in the way that Englishness is dazzled by India Lucy, and maleness by an Indiqn doctor Aziz, here is is epitmised hb Da;+pne et and Kumar on the point of achieving their union where they have to keep the;selves in te distance Moving tale zith host of other characters British and Indian
on the point of taking sides about Anglo-Indian union It is like a chroniaue of one's leave or depart. Summing-up This is q chronique like more shattering I think

[AJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I continue to be in awe of the layers and capability of this masterful writer. He is at the top of his craft, both in the insight and perspectives he provides between Indians, Brits, men and women, high class and low, soldiers and peacekeepers, protestants-muslims-hindus, rebels and loyalists, politicans and insurrectionists, servants and kings. How can someone be this good?