Francis King (2) (1923–2011)

A fairly simple little novella looking at India before and after independence. Rupert, recently divorced, is travelling around with his elderly father Philip and the latter's new wife, Kirsti, who is Rupert's age. They want to visit the grave of Philip's mother, who died during an earlier family trip to India in the 1930s, when Rupert was still a child. And of course it all leads to a lot of readjusting of perspectives and revising of memories. It's really more an expanded short story than a compressed novel, and King uses the extra space to sketch in minor characters like the group's Indian driver, Rajiv, and the hotel manager Mr Solomon, whose father had worked for Rupert's uncle. Slight, but very nicely done.… (mehr)

Penguin have done their best to make it look like a supernatural horror story, which is obviously what they thought would sell in the early 1980s, but in fact this turns out to be a kind of murder mystery, set in a dysfunctional British family in a country house in 1930s colonial India. The actual crime only happens a third of the way into the book, and we discover the who of the crime quite quickly, but the real mystery here is why, and that is only fully unwrapped nearly fifty years on, in a Patrick-Whiteish epilogue set in the Sydney art world.

The mystery aspect of the book is fun, and its digging into ideas about guilt and atonement is interesting too, but the real reason for reading it is its minute and detailed dissection of the complex mix of social, sexual and cultural tensions going on in the Thompson household against the background of the crumbling Raj.

It struck me as a very visually-constructed novel too, I'm sure it would have made a great TV miniseries back in the day, when the Raj was in fashion — but the LGBT plot lines might have been a bit challenging for British TV in the eighties. King's reputation for getting into difficulties with the libel laws would have put producers off as well.… (mehr)

Lorna Martin has always had an extremely - almost unhealthily - close relationship with her brother, Bob. But now Bob has returned home from living in Malaya, mysteriously closed-off and listless, and he is no longer telling Lorna his secrets. He keeps odd hours, he refuses to tell her where he's been, and gradually Lorna begins to suspect he has a terrible secret.

It wasn't just the main subject matter of the book that was disturbing. Lorna and Bob are mirrored by other dependent relationships, and the book is full of foul smells, filthy houses, disgusting food and sickly patients (Lorna is a doctor). I found this, in the end, overkill - it's one thing to have an atmosphere of menace or of decay, but there was just too much that was disgusting.… (mehr)