Books: Passage from India

THE BIRDS OF PARADISE (280 pp.)—Paul Scott—William Morrow ($3.95).

For Englishmen who knew it. suggests English Writer Paul Scott. India was not so much a political territory abandoned in 1947 as a continuing province of the heart—where seasons of love and hate are often slow to change. Exploring the life of one Englishman so smitten, Scott has turned out a strange novel, the kind of far-flung romantic British tale that might have been accused of Maughamism if its hero did not suffer so monumentally from an Oedipus complex. The lady in question is not his parent, who died when he was four, but Mother India.

Lepers & Straitjackets. William Conway is not an easy case to diagnose. His adult life has shown only the characteristic dislocations of his age and time: the shock of World War II. a defunct marriage, a lucrative brokerage business to which he has become partly committed without any particular conviction. “It was a life,” Conway sums it up. “one did not for instance interrupt in order to go out and nurse lepers. You knew the odds were you would get leprosy and become a burden to the nuns.” At 41, Conway does not know where he is heading. He is troubled by the spreading middle-aged need to know, at least, where he has been. Yet his turning back to boyhood memories of India—and his personal trip out East during a long leave from his business—do not seem to be triggered by any Blimpish nostalgia for the good old days. In recollection, his early existence as the only son of the British adviser to a maharaja of the 19203 is outwardly pure pukka sahib, inwardly the struggle of a lonely boy to live up to what he thought was expected of him.

In the skillful interplay between distant memory and recent reflection upon it, Author Scott makes clear that Conway the man has become as predictably modern as Conway the boy was dutifully post-Victorian. He has long since rejected not only his icy. withdrawn father but Mother India as well.

Angrily he notes his escape (to an English school at age ten) from “the prison of my Indian boyhood . . . [that] strait-jacket of 19th century compensation fantasies” where “tokens of love, honour, courage” masqueraded “as rules instead of exceptions.” Even years later, when he and his men are caught and tortured by the Japanese in Malaya, he counsels them, ”Hang on to your lives,” wondering as he does so if he should have said “courage,” then swiftly dismissing the thought with a snappish phrase: “But that is all fable.” Stuffed Symbols. Despite this, Conway finds himself teased, almost obsessed, by his childhood’s most sensual memory—the vision of an Indian summerhouse full of perfectly stuffed birds of paradise, those rare and fabulous creatures about which it was once believed that because they were too beautiful for earth, they had no feet and so must fly steadily until the moment of their deaths. The birds—which, among other things, represent the hollow, doomed magnificence of British India—are the kind of florid symbol delighted in by artful writers but often ruinous to a novel; the reader is so taken with the symbolic whipped cream on top that he leaves the nourishing narrative jello beneath untasted. Skillfully, Author Scott mixes the two richly and inextricably together.

At the story’s end, Conway glimpses the fact that his inheritance is not all debilitating humbug. From father he has at least unwittingly acquired an urge to be of service. And, in a world of increasingly measured motives and sternly allotted psychological pigeonholes, he can not shake off an India-given sense of the mystery and the marvelous confusion of the world. The Birds of Paradise is a rare literary bird, a novel that in a short space re-creates a man’s lifetime. Using exotic backgrounds, it manages to say something useful about growing up—a process that only children believe takes place mainly in childhood.