The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown; The Day of the Scorpion
by Paul Scott
The Raj Quartet (Collections and Selections — Books 1 & 2)
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Paul Scott's epic study of British India in its final years has no equal. Tolstoyan in scope and Proustian in detail but completely individual in effect, it records the encounter between East and West through the experiences of a dozen people caught up in the upheavals of the Second World War and the growing campaign for Indian independence. Book one, The Jewel in the Crown, describes the doomed love between an English girl and an Indian boy, Daphne Manners and Hari Kumar. This affair show more touches the lives of other characters in three subsequent books, most of them unknown to Hari and Daphne but involved in the larger social and political conflicts which destroy the lovers. On occasions unsparing in its study of personal dramas and racial differences, the Raj Quartet is at all times profoundly humane, not least in the author's capacity to identify with a huge range of characters. It is also illuminated by delicate social comedy and wonderful evocations of the Indian scene, all narrated in luminous prose. show lessTags
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FemmeNoiresque Scott's The Raj Quartet, and particularly the relationship between Daphne Manners and Hari Kumar in the first novel, The Jewel In The Crown, is a revisioning of the charge of rape made by Adela Quested to Dr Aziz. Race, class and empire are explored in the aftermath of this event, in WWII India.
Member Reviews
What a wonderful book - I'm still on the Jewel on the Crown. I'd expected it to be mostly narrative, and expected it, God knows why, to be frankly sentimental. Instead of which a far more complex book with some excellent characterization and very well written. A few lumpy lines, fragments of prose that don't quite come off, that just underline the excellence of the rest. Theres an obvious linkage to Forster's A Passage to India, but Scott seems the more impressive writer to me. Very impressed so far.
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Author Information
27+ Works 6,914 Members
Author Paul Scott was born in England on March 25, 1920. At the age of 16, he left the Winchmore Hill Collegiate School because of financial difficulties and started a career as an accountant. In 1940, he joined the army and was sent to India. After World War II, he worked as an accountant for two small publishing houses and then as a literary show more agent. In 1952, he published his first novel Johnny Sahib and in 1960, he decided to become a full-time author. He is best-known for his series the Raj Quartet and his novel Staying On won the 1977 Booker Prize. He also wrote reviews and was a visiting professor at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. He died on March 1, 1978. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Canonical title
- The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown; The Day of the Scorpion
- Important places
- India
- Dedication
- To Dorothy Ganapathy with love
- First words
- Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar Gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Cr... (show all)ane had been conscious of standing where a lane ended and cultivation began: a different landscape but also in the alluvial plain between the mountains of the north and the plateau of the south.
- Blurbers
- Beloff, Max
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- Members
- 247
- Popularity
- 131,175
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (4.46)
- Languages
- English, French
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook
- ISBNs
- 4
- ASINs
- 2
