The four novels of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet present mostly imaginary characters in mostly real places against the backdrop of actual historical events.  While each novel (arguably) stands alone, the four novels taken together are "thick with connected people and interwoven events," transpiring in different places--fictional but realistic "places like Pankot and Mirat" and "really real places like New Delhi and Bombay" (Brann 183, 185).  An unnamed narrator (variously referred to as the "traveler" or "stranger") "has objective oversight" of various characters' "retellings that scramble time and multiply perspectival accounts" (Brann 185).  Eva Brann likens the structure of the Raj Quartet to the fractal, a concept from mathematics and physics:  "A fractal is a geometric pattern whose smaller parts . . . mirror the whole, so that the large picture descends into all its detail, while each part repeats the whole on an ever-increasing scale.  Thus the 'imperial embrace' of England and India recurs in the strained intercourse between Mayapore's British cantonment and Indian native quarter, and again in Daphne [Manners]'s and Hari [Kumar]'s impediment-ridden love, and, at its basest, reappears in [Ronald] Merrick's attempt at an intimate domination of his prisoner [Hari Kumar].  These configurations in the Jewel [in the Crown] repeat themselves in the subsequent novels [of the Raj Quartet], the historical situation and the people reflecting each other . . ." (185).  Eva Brann maintains that the "Raj novels are among the greatest prose fictions of this and of the nineteenth century" known for its "many fine realistic novels" (187).

The 15-hour Granada television adaptation Jewel in the Crown tells the interlocked stories of the Raj Quartet in chronological order and achieves a fascinating dramatization by focusing on key “characters, the tensions between them and their developing situations.  The historical context is brilliantly conveyed by newsreel clips so patently pro-British that they serve as a parodic commentary . . .” (Moore 211). But it is well to emphasize what is “largely lost in the process of adaptation”:  “the texture of testimony,  its intimation of character, the doubts about the truth and reality of observations” (Moore 211) central to the experience of reading Paul Scott’s novels. 

See The Making of The Jewel in the Crown
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng339/coursepack/makingJewel.htm

Vol. 1:  Jewel in the Crown (1966) focuses on "an interracial love affair between Daphne Manners and Hari Kumar [AKA: Harry Coomer], and the repercussions of the rape of Daphne in the Bibighar Gardens in Mayapore [fictional city in India] on August 9, 1942.  It is a moment when the [British] Raj feels (once again) threatened by the disturbances consequent on Gandhi's 'Quit India' campaign.  Hari Kumar is arrested . . . and interrogated by a personage who will haunt the [Raj] Quartet, District Superintendent of Police Ronald Merrick.  The 'imperial embrace' in which Britain and India are locked has become personal" (Brann 182).  

Vol. 2:  The Day of the Scorpion (1968):  "In this novel an old Raj family comes newly on the scene, the Laytons of Pankot, an imaginary hill station [in India].  Now an army captain, [Ronald] Merrick, a self-made man of the lower middle class, begins to insinuate himself subtly and fatally into the [Layton] family.  We learn in a searing session with the incarcerated Hari [Kumar] what [the Laytons] do not know, that Merrick has tortured and molested him.  Susan, the younger Layton sister, driven by a sense of her own nothingness, marries one Teddie Bingham, a colorless and conventional officer in the prestigious Pankot Rifles.  Merrick, though he loses . . . [his left arm above the elbow] in trying, unsuccessfully, to save Teddie's life, is indirectly the cause of Teddie's death in the jungle.  Sarah Layton, the older sister, comes to the fore as the morally fine-tuned mainstay of the family" (Brann 182).  

Vol. 3:  The Towers of Silence (1971)  "takes its name from the Parsee towers where the bodies of the dead are left to be picked clean by vultures. . . . These towers are in Ranpur, [India,] where Barbie Batchelor is confined to a sanitarium in her final madness.  This torrentially loquacious, inwardly silent, awkwardly illumined old missionary is the principal figure of the third book.  She is locked in grotesque and unequal battle with the local Anglo-Indian society which is growing brittle under the firestorm of troubles, the absence of its men [fighting in World War II], the danger of Japanese invasion [of India], the indifference of the home island [England], and above all the withdrawal of the spirit of the 'time-expired' Raj they are doomed always to represent.  At the end of the book, Barbie and [Ronald] Merrick meet, and Barbie goes mad" (Brann 182-183).  Barbie dies in August 1945, as the atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima.

Vol. 4: A Division of the Spoils (1975)  derives its title from Isaiah 53.12 and Proverbs 16. 18-19.  "A Division is by far the longest book because in it, as the Raj winds down, all the pending affairs, personal and political, are wound up.  It recounts in personal terms the humbling and hasty decamping of the British: the precipitant demission of power to a country fiercely bent on division; the travails of an honorable Muslim Congressman, Mohammed Ali Kasim, and his sons, one of whom has deserted to the Berlin-directed Indian National Army; the quandary of the Nawab of the small fictive princely state of Mirat, left in the lurch by the lapse of British Paramountcy; the suicide of a dysentery-debilitated and maladapted British officer; the prowling of the haunted [Ronald] Merrick . . . . The new man on the scene is Sergeant [Guy] Perron, an alumnus of a posh public school called Chillingborough [which Hari Kumar--as Harry Coomer--also attended when he lived in England] . . . . it was he who returned in 1945 . . . to be an observer of India on the eve of Independence; this assignment soon turns into a personal inquiry into the truth behind the hushed-up story of Lieutenant-Colonel [Ronald] Merrick's death in Mirat" (Brann 183).  The tragic consequences of India-Pakistan Partition are dramatized in a horrific train massacre.

Post-Raj Quartet: Staying On (1978), featuring "Tusker" and Lucy Smalley (minor characters in the Raj Quartet), won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1977.  This "melancholy comedy . . . . takes place exactly a quarter century after Independence and the end of A Division [of the Spoils]" as "both a complement and a sort of comic culmination.  Raj arrogance has now been replaced with Indian corruption in the shape of Mrs. Bhoolaboy, the man-mountain of peccancy, manager-proprietor of the old Smith's Hotel in Pankot" (Brann 186).  The Smalleys, "unpromising nobodies" in the Raj Quartet, "'stay on,' hang on, in Pankot and as their circumstances decline, they themselves gain in human poignancy."  "The afterlife of the Laytons," including Guy Perron and Sarah Layton, is also told (Brann 186). 

Works Cited & Related WWW Links

Brann, Eva.  "Tapestry with Images: Paul Scott's Raj Novels."  [Critical Discussions.]  Philosophy and Literature 23 (1999): 181-196. 

John Lennard on Scott's Jewel in the Crown
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng339/coursepack/LennardJewel.htm

Moore, Robin.  Paul Scott's Raj.  London: Heinemann, 1990.