Eve of Empire

By John Skow

THE TOWERS OF SILENCE

by PAUL SCOTT

392 pages. William Morrow. $8.95.

An unintentional irony of Paul Scott's vast and impressive novel about the last days of the British raj in India is that, although Scott flays the British for the rigidities of their rule, the architectural scheme of his work is serenely imperial. It suggests croquet lawns and carriage drives and a degree of surface certitude that is distinctly viceregal. The Towers of Silence is the third volume of a series; a fourth book is promised to conclude the work.

Construction on this scale, even when it is done with Scott's skill, stirs an obvious question: How many novels must be written about the same 15 or 20 characters, moving through the same set of events? "At most, one," is the generous guess. Indeed, a single incident is the work's focus: the gang rape of a young Englishwoman, Daphne Manners, who is attacked by Indians in the Bibighar Gardens in Mayapore in 1942. The wrong men are arrested, including Hari Kumar, Miss Manners' lover, a displaced and dispossessed youth whose brown face makes him invisible to English society, but whose English public school education and accent set him apart from the Indian culture. To the colonial English, Kumar's association with Daphne Manners is intolerable; it is especially painful to the district superintendent of police, Ronald Merrick, who has himself proposed marriage to the girl. Merrick conducts his interrogation with a cruelty compounded by racism and rancid sex.

The background is an unstable mixture of war and political unrest. Gandhi has just declared a policy of noncooperation with the British war effort. Now the Japanese are invading India, assisted by an Indian army formed of turncoat prisoners of war.

The substance of The Towers of Silence is reminiscent of the first novel, The Jewel in the Crown (1966), and of its successor, The Day of the Scorpion (1968). The rape is reinvestigated, and there is a restaging of a wedding already seen in the second novel. The bride, apparently a pukka Englishwoman, senses the unsolidity and perhaps the immorality of the English presence in India, and goes temporarily mad.

Part of the justification for retelling all this is Scott's presentation of three exceptional women characters. It seems clear that for the author they are England. One is a tough elderly widow, Maybel Layton, who has foreseen the end of British India for years and feels that it is richly deserved. The second is Mildred, the wife of Colonel Layton, Maybel's stepson. The third is the book's major figure, a retired mission schoolteacher named Barbie Batchelor. She is a good, decent person, not very bright, and downright foolish about matters of practicality and self-interest. For 40 years she has tried to bring little Indian schoolchildren to Jesus, and now she doubts whether she did any good. At the end of the book, from her hospital window, Miss Batchelor sees the wheeling carrion birds of a Parsi tower of silence. The birds, she says, have picked her mind clean. She is finished. So is British India.

For all the books' combined mass, their bulk is somehow not troublesome. The author finds more to say, and again more, as he sifts and resifts portents and motivations. The fourth and concluding novel, A Division of the Spoils, when it appears, should be a literary event of importance.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.