The growing affection between Anne and Ritwik is moving, surprising and entirely believable.
The shift in the novel from uneven to assured takes place at the start of Part II when Ritwik, faced with the expiry of his UK visa, moves to London and becomes caretaker to the elderly Anne Cameron in exchange for a room. It makes for fine reading on its own – and works even better as an insight into Ritwik's inverted position as an Indian outsider in an English world, alienated yet excited by new possibilities, with a dawning awareness of the larger political context. Interspersed with Ritwik's past and present we are given, chapter by chapter, his version of Miss Gilby's story, set in Bengal in the politically turbulent early 1900s as she teaches English in a Bengali household. As it is, Calcutta in particular seems merely a collection of grotesque people and incidents.īut there is one storyline that works from the start: that of the novel Ritwik is writing about Miss Gilby, a minor English character in a Tagore novel. If we were simply dropped into Ritwik's world and made to understand it through observation it would make for far more engaged reading. A great deal of explaining goes on, whether of social rules in Bengal or the rituals of cottaging in Oxford's public loos, and while the intention may be to show Ritwik's outsider status, the actual effect is distancing. The story moves between Ritwik's life in Oxford, which consists of studying and cruising, and memories of his traumatic childhood in Calcutta.
But this first section is uneven in tone and control.
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