Book review: Death In The East, by Abir Mukherjee
There is something about the Raj that attracts novelists, particularly British ones. I am thinking of, say, Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet, best known for The Jewel In The Crown, or JG Farrell’s The Siege Of Krishnapur or The Far Pavilions by MM Kaye, or even a masterpiece like EM Forster’s A Passage To India. It is a curious phenomenon, since it manages to combine a queasy nostalgia for tiffin and manners and kedgeree with a confessional tone at the abuses of the Indian population during the Raj. It manages to have the glamour of a Merchant Ivory film spliced with the horrors of what colonial subjection really involved. Think of it as part pearl-clutching and part diamond-thieving and part hand-wringing, all in sepia.