Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Paul Scott (1)

The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott

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“Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of standing where a lane ended and cultivation began: a different landscape but also in the alluvial plain between the mountains of the north and the plateau of the south.” The beginning of A Passage to India begins with an […]

. I mean everyone else gone and just Tusker and me, peering out into the dark waiting for transport that never turned up.

Staying On by Paul Scott

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This is less a sequel to and more a coda to The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott. Those novels, which average 450 pages, and both expansive in detail, rich in structural choices, and narrowly focused, deal with the waning days of the British Raj in India in the years surrounding the Second World War. They were published from the late 1960s through the early 1970s. They are impressive and brilliant. This novel is a slim sequel that was published in 1978, a year before the […]

The calendar was a mathematical progression with arbitrary surprises.

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The Towers of Silence This is the fourth and shortest of the four main volumes of the Raj Quartet. I plan on reading and reviewing the final work, which is a connected, but not direct volume, which is also short. This novels spends the bulk of its time focusing on the Laytons and their various connections. The Laytons are a blend of educators and military officials and the plot of the novel centers around the love affair of Teddy Bingham ( a military officer) and […]

If there are things you don’t know, you call the gap in your knowledge a mystery and fill it in with a wholly emotional answer

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I am bummed because there’s apparently only one picture of Paul Scotte available online. I keep finding a lot of pictures associated with him…especially a picture of Galway Kinnell…but also like Paul Ryan. Anyway, this is the second novel in the Raj Quartet. And I am curious to know how far ahead he planned these novels, because this is both the continuation of the story, but also not. And in some ways it’s a deconstruction of how novels continue on stories. So the first novel […]

Rumours began with the whispered gossip of native servants and spread quickly to the rest of the population

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This is an utterly brilliant novel that almost has no business being this good. On the surface it looks to be a sweeping historical epic in the vein of James Michener or MM Kaye, and to some small degree it is. It’s a novel of the closing days of the British Raj, written by a former colonial official. So on the one hand, it’s potentially a kind of wistful nostalgic novel of a lost past. But luckily it’s way more Orwell and Graham Greene than […]



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