BOOKS
311
Jhabvala's strategy in
Heat and Dust-as
it was in the immediately
preceding
Travelers-is
to confront the Fosterian ghost boldly and, if
not to exorcise it, to weaken its influence by public exposure. One of
the two stories which constitute the novel-that of the young English
woman Olivia who flees her handsome, stiff, and upright husband to
seek refuge with a disreputable awab-is set in 1923, the exact period
of
A Passage to India.
The Medical Superintendant, Dr. Saunders, who
discovers that Olivia's miscarriage is really an abortion , is practically a
twin of Major Callendar, the stupid and sadistic doctor in the earlier
novel. And the Nawab himself, with his entourage, definitely echoes
Forster's subtle portrayal of the Maharajah in
The Hill of Devi.
The
other story, counterpointed with the first, does not 'compel the reader
into Fosterian comparisons, though they are there to be made–
especially in Jhabvala's handling of the relationship between the
impulsive, sexually free narrator and her Indian landlord, a minor
government official-conventional, reticent, and easily shamed-who
is trapped in an arranged and miserable marriage.
The counterpointing itself is one of the major pleasures of this
swift novel. The parallels between the history of Olivia and that of her
husband's granddaughter, the unnamed narrator, are teasingly inexact,
suggesting the patterns of recurrence, metamorphosis, and perhaps
reincarnation to be discerned in India (and in England) over a fifty-year
span. Olivia's baby (probab ly fathered by the Nawab) is aborted; the
modern girl, after the ministrations of a Hindu wise woman named
Maji, decides to keep hers, to bear it in an ashram high above the
Himalayan hill station where Olivia lived out the rest of her life in a
house provided by the Nawab. Jhabvala's narrat.ive ski ll , her meaning–
ful brevity, her power of selecting each episode as if it were a special
gift-these qualities enable the reader to move back and forth between
the two stories with no sense of strain-and with repeated surprise and
delight. Seduced, one glides happily over certain improbabilities and
defers the recognition that the author is temperamentally far more at
home with Olivia and her contemporaries than with the late hippie
world of guru-seekers and defiantly unwed mothers. And only in
retrospect does one feel slightly cheated by the fact that Jhabvala, like
the girl herself, has been unable to imagine the content or quality of
Olivia's long years on the mountainside.
Nadine Gordimer has written several impressive novels (among
them the recent and insufficiently celebrated
Guest of Honour),
but she
is chiefly known to American readers for her stories in
The New
Yorker.
Her present selection includes work written over a thirty-year
