The Raj Quartet (Hardcover)

The story starts out with a love affair between Daphne Manners, an English girl and a young English-educated Hindu man, Hari Kumar; a relationship forbidden by the mores of the times and the ingrained British sense of their own superiority. Complicating the situation is a young British officer named Ronald Merrick, whose attentions towards Daphne are rejected out of hand. Merrick is at once contemptuous and resentful of Hari; despising his dark skin, he hates Hari for attracting the girl he wants for himself, for being better educated, and for being the product of a prosperous Indian family better than his own. Merrick is the product and the victim of the British class system; coming from the lower classes, the only way he can better himself is through military service, where he will have the opportunity to treat dark-skinned British subjects like dirt. When Daphne is raped at the Bibighar Gardens, Merrick has no problem believing Hari is to blame and has him arrested for the crime.

Merrick is a swine, but through brown-nosing the proper people, he manages to rise through the army ranks and ingratiates himself into the Layton family, who belong to the class he has secretly aspired to join. He takes advantage of the tenuous emotional health of the younger sister to get her to marry him. He is thus secure in his new caste -- or so he thinks. But his fundamental, underlying sense of insecurity causes him to bully everybody under him -- his men, the natives he hates, and occasionally his wife. Meanwhile, Hari has been released from jail and simply bides his time.

The end of the second world war finds Merrick a wounded war hero, but his prospects are far from certain. His life is bound up with British India, and British India is on its last legs. The Laytons can return to England, where they will live a comfortable upper-middle-class existence; Merrick's wife is dead, her death has disconnected him from her family who want nothing to do with him, and in England he will once again be the nobody he was before he joined the military. As despicable as he is, he's a tragic figure with nowhere to go; he'll almost certainly be persona non grata in an independent India whose citizens have long memories concerning British soldiers who mistreated the natives. But before Merrick can decide whether or not to offer himself as a soldier of fortune to Pakistan, the question is decided for him; his lifeless body is found in the middle of a ransacked room with "Bibighar", the site of Daphne Manner's rape, scrawled in blood all over the walls. Did Hari Kumar engineer this ultimate revenge for being falsely arrested and brutally questioned years before? Nobody in the book knows for sure, and neither do we. All we know for certain is that fortune is a wheel and what goes around comes around.

In four exquisitely written and totally compelling novels, Paul Scott has written the intimate history of two young lovers, a British family, and a malevolent army officer in 1940's India, and through them, the larger story of the turbulent decade that saw the beginning of the end of the British Empire. It's history up close and personal. The excellent plot development and writing is sustained through all four books. "The Raj Quartet" is a towering achievement and make up a collection of some of the best contemporary historical novels ever written.