Heat and Dust

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's new novel is on two planes in time, brilliantly interlocked in the form of a diary of an English girl who goes to India to reconstruct the story of Olivia, her grandfather's first wife. In 1923, Olivia, married to a British I.C.S. officer, scandalized the community by eloping with an Indian prince. The diarist goes to live in the dusty little town in Central India where the scandal was enacted. Unlike Olivia, she does not live sheltered within the compound of a British bungalow, but in a room she has rented over the bazaar and in the home of an Indian clerk and his family. Although she repeats in her own life some of Olivia's adventures, it is as a kind of reverse image, in accordance with changed times and circumstances. Indeed much has changed — the British have gone, so have the Muslims, and the princes; but the same pall of heat and dust still hangs over everything. Through her personal contact with India, she also confronts the same problems as Olivia: how far is it possible for a stranger to penetrate into so strange and different a place, and what happens to those who go further than the others? For the present-day diarist, the answer is to be found not only in following Olivia's life story but also in living her own. The contrasts between the contemporary Indian scene and the India of 1923 are implicit in the vivid reconstruction of Olivia's story and the experiences of the English girl today.