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The Raj Quartet - Vol 2 by Paul Scott (Hardcover, 2007)

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The Division of Spoils ~ The fourth and final title is a moving conclusion to The Raj Quartet. Scott's boyhood hobby of producing amateur films led him to invent dialogue - verbal images would always provide essential starting-points for his writing.

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The Raj Quartet Volume 2 contains The Towers of Silence and A Division of SpoilsThe Towers of Silence -India, 1943- In a regimental hill station, the ladies of Pankot struggle to preserve the genteel fa ade 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, Susan Layton's future husband.The Division of Spoils -The fourth and final title is a moving conclusion to The Raj Quartet. As the British presence moves inexorably into its last days, the fall of the Empire signals the end of an era, and a new beginning. For the Hindus and Muslims, the political reality signals inevitable post-war recrimination and future territorial wrangles. And for the British - for the Laytons, Merrick and Guy Perron - the final partings are swallowed into the great upheaval. Paul Scott's epic study of British India in its final years has no equal. Tolstoyan in scope and Proustian in detail but completely individual in effect, it records the encounter between East and West through the experiences of a dozen people caught up in the upheavals of the Second World War and the growing campaign for Indian independence. Book one, The Jewel in the Crown, describes the doomed love between an English girl and an Indian boy, Daphne Manners and Hari Kumar. This affair touches the lives of other characters in three subsequent books, most of them unknown to Hari and Daphne but involved in the larger social and political conflicts which destroy the lovers.On occasions unsparing in its study of personal dramas and racial differences, the Raj Quartet is at all times profoundly humane, not least in the author's capacity to identify with a huge range of characters. It is also illuminated by delicate social comedy and wonderful evocations of the Indian scene, all narrated in luminous prose.