Francis Henry King (1923–2011)

A fairly simple little novella looking at India before and after independence. Rupert, recently divorced, is travelling around with his elderly father Philip and the latter's new wife, Kirsti, who is Rupert's age. They want to visit the grave of Philip's mother, who died during an earlier family trip to India in the 1930s, when Rupert was still a child. And of course it all leads to a lot of readjusting of perspectives and revising of memories. It's really more an expanded short story than a compressed novel, and King uses the extra space to sketch in minor characters like the group's Indian driver, Rajiv, and the hotel manager Mr Solomon, whose father had worked for Rupert's uncle. Slight, but very nicely done.… (altro)

Penguin have done their best to make it look like a supernatural horror story, which is obviously what they thought would sell in the early 1980s, but in fact this turns out to be a kind of murder mystery, set in a dysfunctional British family in a country house in 1930s colonial India. The actual crime only happens a third of the way into the book, and we discover the who of the crime quite quickly, but the real mystery here is why, and that is only fully unwrapped nearly fifty years on, in a Patrick-Whiteish epilogue set in the Sydney art world.

The mystery aspect of the book is fun, and its digging into ideas about guilt and atonement is interesting too, but the real reason for reading it is its minute and detailed dissection of the complex mix of social, sexual and cultural tensions going on in the Thompson household against the background of the crumbling Raj.

It struck me as a very visually-constructed novel too, I'm sure it would have made a great TV miniseries back in the day, when the Raj was in fashion — but the LGBT plot lines might have been a bit challenging for British TV in the eighties. King's reputation for getting into difficulties with the libel laws would have put producers off as well.… (altro)

Series of three interrelated narratives about middle aged women who have lost important men in their lives to violent deaths and are seeking to reconnect with them through spiritualist/psychical channels. Set in the Thatcher era in England. This was an unusual book because the stories are too interrelated to be short stories, yet aren't really strongly connected to one another as a narrative.

The main theme here is that the dead are not perfect but that doesn't stop us from missing and mourning them. In fact, part of what makes the relationships so complexly envisioned is that the more prickly the relationship between living woman and dead man seemed to be, the more guilt and confusion she felt at his passing. I was really fascinated by the stories of Hugo and Stephen, Hugo most of all. The third portion of the narrative was the weakest (I thought) but was used to tie all the threads together nicely.

On the whole a thought provoking and disturbing book. Very well written and absorbing but also easy to read, not a slog. He has a deft touch for human emotions and expresses them in an understated yet constantly believable way.… (altro)