3 - Novels of the Early Sixties

Summary

By the end of the fifties, Scott had already written The Chinese Love Pavilion; it was published in the autumn of 1960. Among the works that followed in the next few years, The Birds of Paradise, in which the Indian connection is most strongly maintained, has been most highly rated. But The Bender and The Corrida at San Feliu, the former set in England and the latter inspired largely by Scott's holidays on the Costa Brava, are more striking both technically and for the escalation in them of Scott's struggle with the ‘handicap at love’.

In The Chinese Love Pavilion itself, the female figure in Scott 's growing constellation of important characters is already developed enough to make a real challenge to the dominant, though often absent male ‘other ’. Indeed, the susceptible hero of this novel, Tom Brent, is pulled this way and that between the two.

This is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that Johnnie Sahib and the dead brothers of Scott's last two works pale into insignificance beside the eccentric Brian Saxby. The novel is worth reading for this figure alone. A botanist travelling in the Far East, Saxby is anything but elusive at first: hefty, red-bearded and overbearing, he has a strong physical presence. It seems inevitable that Tom should seek guidance and inspiration from him, because, in proportion as Saxby is more flamboyant than characters playing similar roles in the earlier novels, Tom's identity is even shakier than that of any of Scott's past heroes. An orphan with a family background of colonial service, he has worked his way out to India for the very purpose of trying to establish this identity. Tom's humorous account of his struggles to penetrate the fabric of Indian society is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of Saxby at his cheap boarding-house, appropriately enough during a terrific thunderstorm.

Recognizing Tom's fascination with the land, as he generally recognizes others’ dreams, Saxby encourages him not to give up on India, but to stay and work its soil. Tom follows his advice, and again there is a splendid account of Tom's struggle to farm an infertile valley alongside the old India hand, Greystone – work reminiscent of Tom Gower's at his experimental farm in The Alien Sky, and equally doomed to disappointment