Honourable schoolboys...(more on Le Carre)

I've long thought that The Honourable Schoolboy must be the perfect title for a Le Carre novel. At least it was for that period of his career when he was addressing both the Cold War and the post imperial decline of Britain. When Smiley takes charge of the Circus at the beginning of the second novel of the 'Karla' sequence he's a positive force for change coming in and shaking things up in an institution previously in decline, a metaphor for just what Le Carre imagined the British state then needed (of course, the new broom for the malaise of British politics in the mid-70s eventually turned out to be Thatcher, a solution which I don't imagine Le Carre liked very much).

In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson suggests of the actor James Fox that he 'has mined the uneasy ground on the fringes of the English upper class'. So many of Le Carre's characters seem to come from a similar place, that hinterland between the upper middle class and the actual aristocracy. They're people you only have to look at to know they've been to the right schools, even if it's only a minor public school. The kind of sad and faded institution featured in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, clearly drawn from Le Carre's own experience of teaching at such an institution. It's more than that though, they're also characters marked by their schooldays, the way that some of us are. You could look at most of the cast of Tinker, Tailor and easily slot them into suitably cliched roles at their schools. 'The best days of my life...' is a cliche that conceals as much as it reveals. Perhaps it's a consequence more common for those who have attended public schools, a form of institutionalism.

It's interesting to note that the two characters clearly marked as coming from a different cultural place are Ricki Tarr, a working class thug eventually manipulated by everyone, and Toby Esterhase. Esterhase's name may link him with the real life aristocratic Esterhazy family, but he's still obviously not quite 'one of us', the weak link in the upper circle who run the Circus in Tinker, Tailor. Marked as an outsider because of his foreignness. Ricki Tarr is a character that the new film definitely gets better than the old BBC series, if only because Tom Hardy is just better in the role than Hywel Bennett was back in 1979.

It was the casting of Colin Firth which put me in mind of the David Thomson quote above. Watching the trailor, because I knew the story and characters, I could guess exactly who was cast as who. The casting of Firth as the bisexual, upper class traitor Bill Hayden is almost too obvious. Perhaps you can't associate him with the upper class in quite the same way as Thomson does with James Fox, but coming after I last saw him as King George in The King's Speech, it has a fascinating echo. King George must now rank as one of his defining roles, along with Darcy in the BBC Pride and Prejudice. Both characters are representative of a British establishment, fundamentally honest, patriotic, upstanding. It's fascinating to place this portrait of corrupt Englishness against these two earlier roles, have them echo each other, the contrasting surfaces of the British establishment.

a find at work

And what a wonderful find!

I currently work part time for a bookseller, sometimes packing books, and sometimes cataloguing them. On Wednesday I was mostly working on the category of rural homes and country houses. Most of them are coffee table books really. Stuffed full of pictures of luxury homes you'll never be able to afford. Aspiration-porn. Interiors art-directed to within an inch of their life.

But this? This is a coffee table book with pretensions. It's a tour of the English country house, including the former homes of famous people from history such as Jane Austen. It's littered with literary quotations, many assigned pride of place on their own page.

And the cover? Whoever art-designed this is some kind of genius. The animals sitting down to enjoy their wine and food amid aristocratic squalor. Clutter. It sits somewhere in the same neighbourhood as Lewis Carroll. The Goons. The Beatles when they went psychedelic. The Bonzos. Maurice Richardson's The Exploits of Engelbrecht. English Surrealism.

Quotes...Thomas More

Writing in 1516, Thomas More gets to the heart of one of the major problem with our country's present political life:

So there you have a group of people who are deeply prejudiced against everyone's ideas, or at any rate prefer their own. Suppose, in such company, you suggest a policy you've seen adopted elsewhere, or for which you can quote a historical precedent, what will happen? They'll behave as though their professional reputations were at stake, and they'd look fools for the rest of their lives if they couldn't raise some objection to your proposal....And yet we're quite prepared to reverse [the] most sensible decisions. It's only the less intelligent ones we cling on to like grim death. I've come accross this curious mixture of conceit, stupidity, and stubborness in several different places. On one occaison I even met it in England.

Utopia, trans. Paul Turner

"...the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin.": John LeCarre & George Smiley

John Le Carre has himself rather given the game away, apparently suggesting that his most famous character, George Smiley, would now be "keeping bees somewhere" in retirement. Smiley may exist at the centre of Le Carre's masterful depiction of the shadowy world of the British Intelligence community, a depiction often praised for it's accuracy and realism, but Smiley's fictional existence seems to owe more to Sherlock Holmes, whose fictional retirement Le Carre consciously alludes to, or Hercule Poirot. Characters who exist somewhere outside of history, subject to revised time lines, never really aging. Although we do finally get that in The Secret Pilgrim, written in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, a fictional summing up of the period, of the kind of spy stories which could be told then, and of the depressing reality which for Le Carre always lies behind any fanciful depiction of the world of espionage. With the Cold War over, critics seemingly thought Le Carre had lost his great subject (and that may be true for all I know), but it was certainly appropriate that it should have marked the final appearance of his signature character, one final performance before the curtains were closed on that moment of history.
Yes, I am a fan, ever since I was dazzled by Alec Guiness in one of the BBC's handful of contributions to the claim of 'Greatest TV Show'. They did a follow up, adapting Smiley's People, when for budget reasons they couldn't make The Honourable Schoolboy, which I've still never seen. No, after seeing Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for the first time, I turned to Le Carre's original novels. Alighting first on a copy of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (in which Smiley only has a cameo), before backtracking to the very beginning and working my way through, concentrating on Smiley and the boys in the Circus, one of Le Carre's wonderful coinages for secret service slang. With my eagerness to read every thing Smiley appears in, I missed that The Russia House is actually a Circus novel too, connected by the character of Ned in The Secret Pilgrim, so I ended up reading those two the wrong way around.

First appearing in two rather conventional whodunits, Smiley has only minor roles in Le Carre's following two novels as he established himself as a major writer of espionage fiction, before eventually reemerging in Tinker, Tailor at the centre of the 'Karla' trilogy. The whodunnit plot is transposed from the quest to catch a murderer to a need to discover the double agent within the service (the 'mole', another Le Carre coinage actually appropriated by the real secret service), 'Karla' the ultimate nemesis, head of the Soviet service, an obvious double for Smiley who haunts the narrative, only occasionally glimpsed. The final novel in the sequence, Smiley's People, like The Secret Pilgrim, always seemed to me to be taking place in a narrative space located somewhere 'after', a belatedness, as if all of the previous conventional narratives of spy fiction have already taken place, leaving only a sense of loss which haunts both novels. The waste of the secretive world.

Given my regard for the TV Tinker, Tailor, it's perhaps not surprising that I wasn't initially overly bothered about seeing the new film. It's not that I resented their making a new version, more that I just couldn't see the point, when we've already got an adaptation which is pretty much perfection. And with seven hour-long episodes in which to elaborate the complex plot, two hours would inevitably squeeze the narrative. But we purposefully took a needed day off on Wednesday and ended up catching an early evening performance. It's a testament to the director and screenwriters that the narrative never feels cramped. Many of the fabulous cast are largely reduced to little more than cameos, yet all manage to impose themselves on the material. It's clear who everyone is from even the smallest scenes. And the set design is immaculate in it's evocation of the vanished post war world of the early seventies.

In fact, I'd suggest it's almost too immaculate. It's a film that almost feels as though it's been directed by its main character. Everything, every lingering camera movement is so precise, the gloomy cinematography just so. Important scenes are often elided, seen only obliquely, the faces of several characters remain hidden from the viewer. Everything feels so very controlled, buttoned down. Compare one adaptation with another, and it's clear that for the TV series, made in 1979 only a few years after the novel was written, it simply can't be nostalgic for the Cold War period since for its makers and audience the Cold War was present day reality. I'm old enough to remember the last years of the Cold War period, born in the same year the TV series was produced, my brother and I were woken up in order to be sat down in front of the TV footage when the Berlin Wall fell. "Watch this! It's History!" we were admonished. The film captures something of my imaginings of the period just before I was born. Growing up there were enough reminders of it around, particularly in official buildings, whereas the TV series just is the time before I was born.

In fact, the film is haunted by that earlier adaptation (really, how could it not be?). It borrows some of the alterations to the novel's plotting, whilst adding a few of it's own. As good as Gary Oldman is as Smiley (and he is excellent), he's not who I would have chosen for the role. It's a trivial thing, but he's just too tall, whereas the character of the novels and Alec Guiness's performance is short and a little fat, dressed in clothes which never quite fit him. Oldman looks a little outsize at several points, where Alec Guinness' Smiley disappears into himself, rather like a mole (the animal) at times. And Oldman surely borrows from Guinness for aspects of his performance and speech patterns. Which is not to say that he doesn't bring things to the character which are absent from Guiness's earlier performance. I read somewhere that Le Carre himself has observed that he gives a much clearer sense of the cruelty Smiley is capable of, his rather passive aggressive nature.

What I love about Smiley is that sense of buttoned down emotion. It's that peculiar kind of Englishness which celebrates failure and buried feelings. Which is also what elevates him slightly into the realms of the fantastic: his complete devotion to his work, the contradiction of a person who is brilliant in one aspect of their life and a failure in another. For The Spectator Smiley is a "brilliant spy and totally inadequate man", an obvious allusion to the infidelities of his beautiful, aristocratic wife Anne. It's a rather reductive and stereotypical evaluation of masculinity, indicative of a stereotypical heterosexual panic about definitions of maleness. And Smiley is a very unsexual character, contrasted with the predatory and bisexual Bill Hayden, modeled on Kim Philby, who cuckolds Smiley. Arguably, in their different ways, the sexuality of both characters is threatening to the sort of rhetoric the Spectator is displaying.

A more charitable reading of the Spectator quote would be that the secretive world of espionage is destructive of any human relationship. It's a theme which runs through much of Le Carre's Cold War fiction, and interestingly it's also what the film adaptation plays up. That it is more explicit about the homosexuality of several characters is no doubt a sign of the respective eras in which their adaptations were made. But the film's makers go further, portraying Smiley's trusted Lieutenant Peter Guillam as a gay man who late in the narrative brakes off what appears to be a loving relationship in order to protect himself in the secretive world in which he opperates. It's certainly in keeping with what little I know of the world of British intelligence which, like the theatre, appears to have been something of a haven for gay men pre-Wolfenden and legalisation. But it also makes the narrative focus much more about the spy's personal lives.

In the TV series, Smiley's cuckoldry is an open secret, everyone eludes to it, but nothing is stated. Nothing is even seen until Ann returns to him for a final scene in which Smiley attempts to confront his wife with her infidelity with Bill Hayden. In the film we have several flashbacks to a perfectly tacky early 1970s works Christmas party, in which Smiley spy's as a peeping tom on Ann and Hayden. Another flashback gives him a near confrontation with Hayden in which Smiley arrives back from Germany to find Hayden in his home, almost catching the erring pair. Far more emphasis is laid on the friendship between Hayden and Jim Prideaux through the repeated appearance of a photograph of the two of them in younger days that by the end it almost feels more like a love story which dare not speak its name than a spy story.

It's interesting. This is one of the great English Cold War novels, and I can't help but feel that the film subtly depoliticizes it. Whilst the earlier TV adaptation can't be nostalgic for the Cold War, that isn't to say that it isn't nostalgic for another earlier period of Britain's history. When Smiley visits Connie Sachs in the TV series Beryl Reid has a line where she laments her 'boys' who were raised to rule an empire. The TV series is in part an imperial lament, if far from an uncritical one, since these are real live 'boys' who are getting hurt as a consequence. In the film, Kathy Burke does suggest things were simpler during the Second World War, but the empire goes unmentioned. Her most memorable line is when she mischievously suggests to Smiley that she feels rather 'unfucked' whilst two undergraduates are making out on a sofa in the room next door. More sex, and less politics.

One of the changes I really liked was the scene where Smiley tells Guillam about his one meeting with their ultimate enemy, the Soviet spy chief Karla years previously in Delhi. In the TV series we get yet another flashback, with Karla played by a silent and impassive Patrick Stewart. In fairness, this was some years before he was Jean-Luc Pickard, but I never quite understood why they had such a major Shakespearean actor in such a tiny role. I think I understand it now. It's a tiny role, so it needs a well known actor than at least many of the audience will be familiar with in order to give the character solidity. In the film, Karla is an absent ghost, haunting the narrative. Oldman however narrates Smiley's slightly drunken account of his meeting with Karla in a powerful scene, but we remain in the narrative's present, the camera fixed on his attempt to act out their absent encounter. There is a flashback, but it only gratuitously reveals to the audience something hidden from the characters, that Karla was present at the shooting and capture of Jim Prideaux with which the story opens, revealed only through his still possessing the lighter which Ann once gave to Smiley. It heightens the doubling of Smiley and Karla which is present in the novel, but still denies him any real presence.

I don't think any of this is wrong. The destruction of human relationships which Le Carre's fiction finds the world of espionage guilty of is ultimately a criticism of that world. For Le Carre, politics often feels like little more than an excuse for people to behave wickedly. The makers of the film aren't betraying the novel. It's just an interesting change of emphasis, reflective perhaps that now we are more nostalgic for the supposed moral certainties of the Cold War (not that Le Carre's depiction of the Circus ever really gives us moral certainties), than we are for a lost empire. But it also reflects a modern tendency to privilege personality and personal feelings over politics. The only real misstep in the film is the final scene where Smiley finally sits down triumphantly as the new Control, contrasted with a montage of the film's minor characters who have all lost something. Where in the TV series it was nothing more than an administrative meeting in which Smiley softly informs his chastened colleagues that he will now be taking over as 'acting head' of the Circus, here it's transformed into a victory. This is a subtle betrayal of Le Carre's fictional world, where any victory ultimately feels like failure.

If I compare the two adaptations and still come out thinking that the one is a masterpiece whilst the other is just a really well made film, then that's also because I think that it gets the balance between the personal and political right. Perhaps at the end of the day it only comes down to the fact that I saw the TV series first. Still, I'm glad I saw the film, and I'll be delighted if it's success means we get adaptations of the other two volumes of the trilogy. The BBC couldn't afford the cost of filming in Hong Kong for the The Honourable Schoolboy. And I really must get around some day to watching the BBC's Smiley's People. I've read a few of Le Carre's non-Circus novels. His most autobiographical, A Perfect Spy, is as good as if not better than the 'Karla trilogy'. It's themes of nostalgia and betrayal are in a similar orbit. I've not yet read enough of his post-Cold War fiction to know if Le Carre lost his great subject with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even if he did, then he still created one of the great fictional characters reflective of that era. I think that's more than most writers manage.

Mum's Books...Ian McEwan's 'On Chesil Beach'

I know that Mum did read this one because it was for her book group. I vaguely remember her talking about the group's reactions, although not much of what she actually said. It was a group of women who could all remember what 1962 was actually like. I think that Mum liked it, although with a few reservations.

At that point I think I was feeling pretty disillusioned about Ian McEwan's work. I love some of it. The first collection of short stories, The Cement Garden (also an excellent film, which I saw several years before I'd read a word of McEwan's writing), The Innocent, and Enduring Love are all worth reading. The Child in Time is inconsistent, but still has excellent individual scenes (I'd also already encountered an exploration of David Bohm's ideas of the implicate order in Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man which made it feel somewhat less impressive). That's just it though. Taken as a whole, despite his reputation as one of English literary fiction's great talents, he's just a wildly inconsistent writer. Amsterdam starts fairly impressively but then descends into silliness after about two thirds of the way through. That it's just about the worst prize-winning novel I've ever read was useful in that it helped me finally see the extent to which literary prizes have rather less to do with celebrating quality than with selling books. And Saturday was such a bad book that even the positive reviews put me off reading it. Atonement was better, but also felt a little like McEwan retreating into a kind of greatest-hits of Englishness: the country-house narrative, the blitz, retreat in the Second World War.

"This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing."

McEwan's fiction has often concerned itself with a single unexpected life-changing event. A very short novel On Chesil Beach narrates in at times minute detail the wedding night of young couple Edward and Florence and the lives which have brought them to this moment. It's set seemingly very deliberately in 1962, the year before sexual intercourse began. A strategy which reminds me of Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring, set in Moscow in 1913, a time similarly on the brink of transformation, one which will completely eradicate the world which the novel's characters take for granted. Their approaches are very different though. Fitzgerald's narrative voice is suffused with the commonplace, illuminating the society of pre-revolutionary Russia through rapid accumulation of small details and the tragi-comic story of English printer Frank Reid and his domestic troubles. Everything is implicit. The Russian Revolution is never mentioned, but for the reader it looms over the novel's action. We know that nothing of this will last, soon to be obliterated by the larger historical forces.

By contrast McEwan's narrative voice is always at a distance from the characters, constantly placing their story in ironic relationship to history. From the novel's opening line, their sexual difficulties are placed squarely in the context of their time, which is contrasted with the cultural changes which are about to overwhelm the world that has formed them. I can't help but feel that this risks being a little condescending. They're described as being 'trapped' by history at one point, but surely, isn't everyone? Certainly some of the difficulties between these two fictional newlyweds and their inability to communicate properly with each other - they're essentially strangers to each other despite clearly being 'in love' and intimate - seem to lie in the fact that they grew up in the immediate post war period. Their lives would undoubtedly be different if they'd been born later, but again, isn't that true for everyone? We may now live in a period which is bombarded with sexual imagery, sometimes enough to give one the impression that everyone else must be having sex all the time. There surely must be something inherently wrong with you if you're at a period of your life when you aren't having sex, or if you're one of those people who just isn't interested in it. Even so, I'm sure it's still quite easy to reach one's early twenties still as a virgin, as Edward and Florence do. And although we might think of our culture as more liberated now, I wonder if it can't be just as repressive. At least in some ways. I'm sure that sexless marriages existed in the past, and I see no reason to assume that they would necessarily have been unhappy ones. I think the pressures exerted by our culture would actually make it far less likely for such a marriage to be successful now. Although at least asexual people must now be able to find likeminded souls via the internet. Honestly, I sincerely wish such people every happiness.

Which meandering has all rather taken me rather far from McEwan's novel. It's probably the best thing he's written since Enduring Love. The distanced narrative voice never gets in the way of the emotional kick that his brief fiction provides. There's something delightful in his description of their 'innocent' courtship. The secrets they're both hiding from each mean that neither one is entirely innocent as their disastrous wedding night unfolds. You want to forgive them both for what happens and the sadness which results. The brief sketch of the lives which follow their wedding night suggests that while they are both fairly successful professionally, but also somehow unfulfilled. I don't really see how this means that they have 'dropped out of history' as McEwan's sonorous narrative voice seems to suggest. Possibly he intended their disastrous night to be somehow emblematic of that moment before the 60s began, but they seem rather more particular to me. Their conflicts and difficulties occur within a sharply realised post war Britain, but then so did so many other lives. We don't make the historical moment we find ourselves within, and our lives aren't emblematic of anything. They're just our lives. In my experience life-changing experiences are usually far more gradual than McEwan's fiction often suggests, but that doesn't mean that our lives don't alter in ways we could never have predicted. But they're also our lives, lives that no one living before or coming after us could have lived. And McEwan is quite right, they can always be changed by simply doing nothing.

India...R.K. Narayan

R.K.Narayan - The Painter of Signs

Another amazon review:

A beautiful, simply told story that conjures up the sights and sounds of a small town in the midst of change. Ah Raman! What a wonderful character! Torn between the competing demands of his traditional mother and the progressive, demanding Daisy. It might seem perverse to compare him to Dostoevsky's unnamed Underground man, but he really does seem to be part of the same dynamic. A passionate, intelligent man whose education has separated him from the social world within which he finds himself within. Where Dostoevsky is trapped by his circumstances, living within a heightened expressionistic world, Narayan's subtle comedy finds a solution for Raman by, as Monica Ali's helpful and perceptive introduction makes clear, opening him out to a reception of the world where he is no longer able to judge, but must accept and can be a part of. It's a subtle and hopeful celebration of the communal world, as represented by the small town of Malgudi. A wonderful little book.

I came across this is in the Blakehead, a vegetarian cafe and discount bookshop, one of many businesses which is now no longer with us thanks to the combined incompetence of the banking industry and our elected politicians. I'd been discussing Narayan with my wife an evening or so before, so it was a synchronicity which I appreciated (it's not the first such experience I've had where I have a particular author in my head whose work I then unexpectedly find in a charity or discount bookshop).

If I'm gradually becoming more interested in reading more Indian literature (whether that's in translation or an Indian English langauge writer), then obviously that's because I'm now a part of an Indian family through my marriage. Before I met my wife, apart from Rushdie I think I'd read no more than a few novels by Anita Desai and The God of Small Things (which it turns out we both disliked!). Some Rudyard Kipling and Forster's A Passage to India and William Dalrymple's White Mughals, although obviously that's all coming at India from the 'other side' so to speak. The former colonial rulers. I'd seen a few films directed by Satyajit Ray. Black Narcissus. India and Indians must have been a presence within some of the fiction I read and had read to me when I was younger, much of which I've doubtless forgotten. At least one of Willard Price's Adventure series of novels is set in India as are a few of George MacDonnald Fraser's Flashman novels. Tintin? That cartoon version of Around the World in Eighty Days with animals, definitely. Willy Fogg marries an Indian princess, doesn't he? Well, as far as I'm concerned, so did I!

I can still remember a scene in an episode from Jimmy McGovern's Cracker where Robbie Coltrane is questioning a young black girl. I'm paraphrasing the dialogue from long-a-go memory, but it's something like, "You tried to go out with white boys, didn't you? But they just wanted to talk about the 'Black experience', and what it means to be 'Black' in England, whereas you just wanted to talk about David Beckham and music and clothes" The ever tactful Fitz. I understand the point he's making though. And I know that my wife has had at least one well-meaning but ultimately incredibly patronising middle class white male flatmate who somehow felt that he had to apologise for the British Empire. Well, we are in academia... I would certainly hope that I've never been guilty of such a patronising attitude, although of course we've had our conversations about India, colonialism, imperialism and all the rest of it. Well, we're academics aren't we! But one never knows.

Graham Greene famously said about Narayan's work that, "Without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian." It's quoted on the back of plenty of editions of his novels. Undoubtedly he was being sincere, and he did a lot to assist Narayan in acquiring publishers at the beginning of his career. For me though, what I found with this novel at least is how being an Indian doesn't feel all that different from being an Englishman. The feelings of Raman are entirely explicable to me. He's a character with whom I found it almost too easy to identify with. Of course, the cultures which formed us are very different, but I wonder if what it means to be a human in any culture might ultimately be very similar.

Toru Dutt...The Diary of Mademoiselle D’Avers

Judging a book by its cover

One of a number of books I picked up during the extended death rattle of our local Borders. I'm not sure what it was that attracted me to this exactly. Turu Dutt is not a writer I'd ever heard of before. Something about the cover, Renoir's Two Girls Reading in the Garden. There are whole swathes of art history about which I know little, so I'm actually more familiar with some of the films of his son, but this is a lovely picture. Idealised certainly. A picture of how we want to imagine reading. I like that there are two of them pictured, an act which is often seen as solitary (and usually is in my experience) becoming a communal one.

It's not a bad choice of cover for the novel, since it's a picture which is French and also one that was painted in 1890, about a decade after the novel's composition. Mademoiselle D’Avers, whose diary and narrative voice constitute the bulk of the novel apart from a final epilogue which switches to an omniscient narrator, is hardly solitary - she interests herself in everyone around her - but the form of a diary isolates her for the reader. Her simple language is very effective in creating a gentle narrative flow which carries you along. It's an novel of adolescence, frequently rooting it's scenes in a lucidly described natural world. Mademoiselle D'Avers is a kind hearted person, deeply pious, and perhaps as a consequence misses important information about the web of relationships in which she finds herself when it's all fairly obvious to the reader. Her rural idyll also encompasses madness, jealousy, murder, sickness and death. Which is not to say that isn't an optimistic book, suffused as it is with a gentle and kindly Christian faith.

It's also one of those books which is interesting as much for its author as for its story. Toru Dutt as her name implies, was not French, like every character who appears in her novel, but Indian. Its funny to imagine how this book ended up in our Borders, published by Penguin India and with a price in rupees on the back cover. Both of the novel's introductions (there are two, one for this edition, and one which was attached to the novel on it's original publication in France in 1878) push for a biographical reading, a reading which is not unconvincing. Toru Dutt set her fiction in France, and her other possibly uncompleted novel written in English in England, because it was only in the West that she could imagine the freedom for her heroines to choose who they loved. Even in a liberal family such as the one to which she belonged, the women where prevented from going into society in contrast to what they experienced in the West. Written in secret, her novels were only discovered after her early death at the age of 21, prepared for posthumous publication by her loving father.

The more you read about Toru Dutt, the more romantic a figure she becomes. Both of her siblings died young, with all of her literary work (she was also a poet, translater and writer of critical essays) produced within only a few short years before her own young death. Her family apparently lived for a time in both France and England, her father only deciding against settling there because of the illness of his children. Judging by the quotes from her letters included in the novel's 1878 edition she appears to have strongly identified herself with France and the French nation. She's clearly significant as an author simply because she came first. Author of one of the first Indian English poems, the first novel in English by an Indian woman, and the first novel in French by an Indian of either gender. The latter, The Diary of Mademoiselle D’Avers, is particularly fascinating because she wasn't the product of French colonization, but of English. G.J.V. Prasad, author of the novel's modern introduction, sums it up well when he describes it as a 'unique product of the colonial encounter', written in French during British dominance of India, a Christian novel written by an author who was born as a Hindu (Toru's family converted when she was 6), a French novel that her father dedicated to the English Viceroy of India. The many layers here are fascinating for the way it inevitably complicates the idea of the colonial encounter. Here in the West (and in academia!) it's routinely imagined as the simple encounter between a single self and other. An author such as Toru Dutt and her various imaginative identifications complicates that rather naive assumption.

What's most fascinating to me is how utterly she seems to vanish into France in her novel. There's the odd wrong note, such as when Mademoiselle D’Avers comments that the count, the man with whom she is in love with for the first half of the novel, is clearly of noble birth because of his pale skin, a sentiment more pertinent to the society Toru Dutt was imaginatively trying to leave. Otherwise it feels entirely of France to me. The novel it brings to my mind is one written more than thirty years later, Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes. It's a unfair comparison really, since I don't think it's nearly as good as that French classic, but both novels are stories of adolescence. They both present the reader with a seemingly idyllic, placid surface which obscures a more troubling reality. Perhaps that's a good description of the move from childhood to adolescence?

I suppose that I'm fortunate that those two girls caught my eye! Partly perhaps because the novel borrows the form of a diary, I found myself reading it mostly as a few pages a time in between attending to other things. It creates a real sense of intimacy. Toru Dutt is clearly more knowing than her protagonist, which might give pause for too much enthusiasm for any biographical reading. Despite the sometimes dark events which surround the protagonist, and its tragic ending, what the novel leaves behind is a feeling of Mademoiselle D'Avers' kindness.