When the sun finally set

I first read the Raj Quartet in the early 1970s, when Paul Scott’s decision to set his novels in the dying days of the British Raj in India seemed an eccentric choice, almost as though he did not want readers. The British were tired of their imperial past. Who wanted to know the names of the long gone empire builders whose statues dotted cities and towns? Only a few students wanted to study imperial history. (I was one, perhaps because Canadians were acutely aware of how being part of a great empire had shaped them.) The empire to most people in Britain was an embarrassment, a joke, and a bore. It must have been galling to Scott that critical recognition of what is an extraordinary contribution to English literature was so slow in coming. It was only in 1977, shortly before he died, that the moving but lesser postscript to the series, Staying On, won the Booker Prize.

He missed most of the huge wave of nostalgia for the British Raj, fuelled in part by the marvellous television series made from the Quartet but also by the more romantic writers such as M. M. Kaye. In the public mind, the British presence in India was not about constitutions, law courts and railways but about rajahs, holy men, tigers, and the sahibs and memsahibs in their clubs. Scott got some of the sheer drama of the small island ruling the huge, complex country but he also asked awkward questions. What were the British doing there anyway? Were they, as several of his characters wondered, doing any good at all? And he insisted on putting power and politics at the centre of his novels, not as some static background for his characters to play against. His India is the one of the second world war, when the power of the European empires in Asia was broken for ever by the Japanese advance.