Books in Brief: Heat and Dust

Heat and Dust, by Ruth Prawer Jhablava (Harper, 181 pp., $7.95).

This volume won Britain’s 1975 Booker Award: it is a first-rate novel from the ranks of minor league fiction. A fatuously earnest young woman —an om-sayer—determines to cut loose from the corporeal West and travel to the disembodied East, to which her paternal grandfather and his first wife, Olivia, had repaired after their marriage in the 1920s. The granddaughter has brought with her to India letters that Olivia wrote, while on the subcontinent, to her sister: letters that record the seduction of the British civil servant’s wife by the spirit of India and by, as well, the charms of a neighboring Nawab, who drives a Rolls-Royce and with whom she absconds. The hippie is fascinated by Olivia’s peregrinations of half a century ago; she sleeps in courtyards, takes a native lover, and finally mounts a high peak to deliver herself up to the swamis, just as Olivia had retreated to a mountain aerie provided for her by the Nawab. Mrs. Jhablava presents an ironic and effective contrast between colonial India and “free” India; between the East’s desire for Westernization and the West’s desire for Easternization. She writes beautifully and with sensuous economy; her dialogue is shaped by an excellent ear; and her characterization is exceedingly skillful. You can forget the om-sayer and her swamis, but Olivia is really quite something: a sort of Fran Dodsworth in India.

CW

About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Heat and Dust, by Ruth Prawer Jhablava (Harper, 181 pp., $7.95).

This volume won Britain’s 1975 Booker Award: it is a first-rate novel from the ranks of minor league fiction. A fatuously earnest young woman —an om-sayer—determines to cut loose from the corporeal West and travel to the disembodied East, to which her paternal grandfather and his first wife, Olivia, had repaired after their marriage in the 1920s. The granddaughter has brought with her to India letters that Olivia wrote, while on the subcontinent, to her sister: letters that record the seduction of the British civil servant’s wife by the spirit of India and by, as well, the charms of a neighboring Nawab, who drives a Rolls-Royce and with whom she absconds. The hippie is fascinated by Olivia’s peregrinations of half a century ago; she sleeps in courtyards, takes a native lover, and finally mounts a high peak to deliver herself up to the swamis, just as Olivia had retreated to a mountain aerie provided for her by the Nawab. Mrs. Jhablava presents an ironic and effective contrast between colonial India and “free” India; between the East’s desire for Westernization and the West’s desire for Easternization. She writes beautifully and with sensuous economy; her dialogue is shaped by an excellent ear; and her characterization is exceedingly skillful. You can forget the om-sayer and her swamis, but Olivia is really quite something: a sort of Fran Dodsworth in India.