Present Of Books The Towers of Silence (The Raj Quartet #3)
| Title | : | The Towers of Silence (The Raj Quartet #3) |
| Author | : | Paul Scott |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 399 pages |
| Published | : | May 22nd 1998 by University of Chicago Press (first published 1971) |
| Categories | : | Historical. Historical Fiction. Fiction. Cultural. India. Literature |
Paul Scott
Paperback | Pages: 399 pages Rating: 4.29 | 1185 Users | 85 Reviews
Rendition Concering Books The Towers of Silence (The Raj Quartet #3)
India, 1943: In a regimental hill station, the ladies of Pankot struggle to preserve the genteel façade of British society amid the debris of a vanishing empire and World War II. A retired missionary, Barbara Batchelor, bears witness to the connections between many human dramas; the love between Daphne Manner and Hari Kumar; the desperate grief an old teacher feels for an India she cannot rescue; and the cruelty of Captain Ronald Merrick.Identify Books Supposing The Towers of Silence (The Raj Quartet #3)
| Original Title: | The Towers of Silence |
| ISBN: | 0226743438 (ISBN13: 9780226743431) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Series: | The Raj Quartet #3 |
| Characters: | Mohammed Ali Kasim, Count Bronowsky, Mabel Layton, Barbie Batchelor, Sarah Layton, Susan Layton, Mildred Layton, Ronald Merrick, Ahmed Kasim, Fenella Grace, Arthur Grace, Kevin Coley |
| Setting: | India,1943 |
Rating Of Books The Towers of Silence (The Raj Quartet #3)
Ratings: 4.29 From 1185 Users | 85 ReviewsWeigh Up Of Books The Towers of Silence (The Raj Quartet #3)
This is the third book in The Raj Quartet, and I found it the most complex so far. It does not pick up where the last one left off, but begins at a point in time even before the first book. More importantly, theres a shift in perspective: were now in the life of Barbie Batchelor, a peripheral character in The Day of the Scorpion. The Quartet has been told from multiple perspectives from the very beginning, but Paul Scotts mastery particularly shines through with Barbie. Usually when books haveThe clouds of the southwest monsoon, thinned by the overland journey across the parched, open-mouthed, plain, appeared in the Pankot sky, and spilt what moisture they had left, establishing the wet-season pattern of sudden short showers, of morning mist which could be dispersed by the sunshine or give way to a light persistent drizzle. When the sun came out there was a strange mountain chill that did not make itself felt upon the flesh but in the nostrils, mingling there with the pervading
The girl came the following morning. She said, 'The birds belong to the towers of silence. For the Ranpur Parsees.' That 'towers of silence' is a neologism coined by the British colonial government in India in the nineteenth century, and that they're structures than enable the excarnation or picking apart of polluted dead bodies by vultures (according to Zoroastrian principle), and that these words are spoken to a woman who has chosen voluntary muteness (I think?) in the face of her inability
The Parsis - members of the Zoroastrian faith, who have immigrated to India from Iran - do not bury or cremate their dead. The corpses are hung upon huge wooden structures to be picked clean by vultures. (I have seen this place in Mumbai from the outside. No outsiders can enter.)An apt metaphor for a dead empire, being slowly devoured by the vultures of history - seen mostly through the eyes of Barbie Batchelor, a retired missionary schoolteacher: herself an anachronism.Another winner from Paul
"The Raj Quartet" is basically an updating of the kind of sprawling, society-describing epic 19th century writers were so fond of: the Palliser novels, say. The difference is that Scott, influenced by the modernist trends of the 20th century, is far less concerned about plot than the Thackerays and Trollopes were. When Trollope describes the state of English politics, he does it through the plot arcs of his characters, MPs, ministers, and PMs who rise on Reform and fall on the Irish question. By
The Towers Of Silence, the third of Paul Scotts Raj Quartet, is very much a novel about women. Set in India in the 1940s, the war impinges on almost every aspect of their lives, but they experience conflict largely second hand via the consequences for their male associates. Their lives are changed because those of their men folk have been affected. But it is the internal conflicts, as these women strive to maintain normality within the abnormal, that provide the book with its real substance, its
Merrick is one of the best antagonists I have read. He is deeply flawed, incredibly human and the depravity of his thoughts spark the saga of this quartet. The morality that he portrays comes from his prejudice, disproportional distribution of wealth, the jealousy complex that he has nurtured all through his life that in the end becomes triggering factors in many a lives and irrevocably changing destinies of many people around him. Scott's characters are incredibly grounded - one of them who is
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