To call Alexander McCall Smith prolific is an understatement. The first No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novel was published in 1998, and in the last 23 years, there have been 23 novels in the series. There have also been 15 novels in his 44 Scotland Street series, 17 Isabel Dalhousie novels, and an astounding 26 novels in various other series. His productivity is certainly to be admired.
McCall Smith’s novels are invariably gentle and soothing, even when they tackle topics such as murder, violence, colonialism or misogyny. There is a peaceful sameness to them. While I found the first dozen Botswana novels delightful, this sameness, and what seemed to me a lack of imagination, resulted in my loss of interest in the series. Still, The Pavilion in the Clouds is his first novel set in South Asia, and I was curious to see what made it like and unlike his other novels.
The Pavilion in the Clouds is set in the tea estates of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) near Nuwara Eliya, just before WWII. Henry and Virginia are the Scottish owners of an estate worked by Tamilians and Sinhalese, and they have a precocious eight-year-old daughter, Bella. She is bright and learns quickly, so to enhance her education, they hire a Scottish governess, Miss White.
To me, this novel seemed slightly more edgy than the No. 1 Ladies series. In those, the unpleasantness happens at a distance: to clients or friends of Mma Ramotswe. Here there is more tension, since the dangerous situations affect the main characters. The pavilion supports fail and Virginia falls almost to her death. A cobra is found in a basket, and could have bitten Bella or Virginia. Miss White had been attacked by a disaffected worker, and now travels armed.
Most of the novel takes place over a few months on the estate, and the novel takes great pains to point out the loneliness and miseries of the colonialists. The tea planters are widely dispersed, each on their own estate. All the housework is done by the local Tamil and Sinhalese, and the women have nothing to do but play tennis at the club, meet for tea, and gossip. The children live isolated lives, brought up largely by servants, until they are sent to school at ‘home’ (the UK). The men drink, run the estates with varying success, and have affairs.
While the novel is pleasantly written, as with all McCall Smith’s writing, the main flaws are that it fails to keep the voices consistent or authentic, and that it breaks no new ground.
Heather, the Scottish chatelaine of a nearby estate, sounds quite like Mma Ramotswe of Botswana at times.
“If he had been…well,carrying on with her, and he then had to get dressed to go back to the house, would he have forgotten to put on his underwear? Surely not. Men just don’t do that. They put their underwear on, and then they get into their trousers. Always, I’d say. Always.”
(This, incidentally, touches on one of McCall Smith’s recurring themes: men and women are just different — in the way they see the world, and in their reactions to events.)
Virginia has incongruously modern views of colonialism, although she is traditional in other ways.
They had no right to order these people about — she, at least, understood that, even if none of the others, none of the planters or their wives, understood that. We are uninvited guests, just as we are uninvited guests in every corner of the globe; and yet we take it upon ourselves to dictate how things should be done.
Why she, brought up in a colonial household, living entirely among colonial expats, should see this any more than the other planters or their wives, is never made clear. She is also suddenly agonized about the treatment of the Jews in far-off Europe:
I feel so sorry for [the Jews in Germany…]. Can you imagine what it feels like to know that other people don’t want you? We’ve never felt that because we’ve always been so fortunate, but sometimes I stop and think about it and I can hardly bear it.
“We’ve never felt that” the residents of a country don’t want them? At various other points in the book, she does show awareness of the South Asian freedom struggles, but at this moment, she seems not to realize that masses of South Asians did not want the English in South Asia, and had been fighting for freedom for decades.
Bella’s ‘voice’ is sometimes very adult for an eight-year-old:
[Bella] did not belong [in Ceylon] — not, at least, not in the way in which the Sinhalese belonged. Home, for them was here in Ceylon, even if their names were van Horst or da Silva or something like that: they were as Sinhalese as the Amerasinghes or Dissanayakes.
A few pages later, she argues with her mother:
“But why do I have to go to school in Scotland or England? Why can’t I stay here?”
Her mother sighed. “Because this isn’t our country. Do you understand that?”
Bella looked puzzled. “But it is. There’s the picture of the King in the Post Office.”
At other times, Bella’s internal monologue is quite appropriately childish:
Imagine having your own trunk and setting off on a ship to England. Imagine that.
A minor oddity, but one that puzzled me nevertheless: at one point there is a cry in the darkness:
Miss White came too, the white sari in which she wrapped herself flapping eerily in the darkness.
Miss White wears saris? This is the first and only time her clothing is mentioned, but it is highly unlikely this ‘punctilious’, authoritarian Scot would wear saris, or that a sari-wearing Scot would be hired to educate a Scottish child. Or did she simply wrap herself in a sari as in a shawl, for warmth? Even odder, given that saris are usually 6 yards of thin fabric, not warm or easy to wrap.
The distance between the barely-educated Virginia, and her employee, the well-educated and rather superior Miss White was perhaps the best angle of the book, and nicely explored.
The novel hinges on the dangerous fallout from a fanciful child’s actions, but that has been better done in other novels: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, for example. As an exploration of loneliness leading to paranoia, suspicion and affairs, Rumer Godden’s novels set in the India of her childhood have a more nuanced portrayal, and so does Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust. Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight is a more powerful depiction of the lives of English-expat colonials.
For all its flaws, I did like the ending: set back in solidly familiar England, thirty years later, the remaining Scots find peace amidst soul-baring explanation of each event that took place in the first half of the book.
For a different take on this book, see Lisa’s review.
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