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Should a man's personal sympathies supersede his professional standards? At what point or on what surety should trust be allowed to banish reserve? On what values should a man base his life? From the very beginning of his career as a novelist, Paul Scott uses a complex play of unusual relationships, symbolic incidents and places, and varying points of view, to explore problems like these – the kind of problems he had faced in the army, and was facing again now as he established himself in the postwar world. Doing no more than hint at possible answers, he exercises a disturbing power over his readers from the start.
As Lines of Communication, the title of the original dramatic version of Johnnie Sahib, indicates, Scott's first published novel builds directly on his experience of helping to keep the ‘lines’ open for the allied troops driving the Japanese ‘back into Burma and then out of Burma’ (p. 9). The details of this operation, as an air supply company advances south from one air-strip to the next (the five parts of the novel take place on five different bases), and as changes are proposed in its organization by Lieutenant-Colonel Baxter from Calcutta, therefore have an almost documentary feel to them. But (as usual in Scott's work) this is misleading. What matters is the deeper sense in which the ‘lines’ have to be kept open. The task of mediating between Baxter and section captains like the eponymous Johnnie Brown falls to the company's major, and it is a tough one. Ironically, it is the dialogue which first indicates the difficulties of communication here:
The Major stared uncomprehendingly at Prabhu, who smiled sadly and shook his head from side to side as if to say, ‘All this is without meaning’.
‘Who the hell is Colonel Baxter?’
‘This I am not knowing, sir ’.
‘Then what is Colonel Baxter coming for?’
‘This I am not knowing either, sir ’.
‘This you are not knowing either!’
‘No, sir. We just had message to meet him at airfield’.
Prabhu wilted under the Major 's steady gaze. (p. 11)
Prabhu, of course, knows exactly what Colonel Baxter has come for – to inspect the company – but he is reluctant to cause a lastminute flap.
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