A Bit Much

I've decided, now I've finished the book, that I was a bit harsh in my comments about Meira Chand's A Different Sky the other day. I was writing as if the models for her work were the great panoramic European novels of the 19th century. Actually, she's writing for what was once termed a middlebrow audience, and doing that really well. Once you've accepted that she's providing readers with what they want, a well-told tale with lots of historical insight, but nothing too destabilising, then A Different Sky is entirely successful. Indeed, her readiness to look at the intensely dark side of wilful cruelty and dreadful suffering in the war years is audacious in its way.

The problem is that by its very nature this kind of historical saga/romance is always undone by the weight of its ambition when subjecting the genre to the highest scrutiny. There is no way the writer can pull off the sheer range of characters necessarily involved without resorting to types, unless we're dealing with a writer at the level of Hilary Mantel (or Tolstoy!), and that's a big ask, as they say these days. And the conventionally middlebrow writer is more than likely going to create types that fall neatly into a safe reading of history in which the outcomes of which we are aware guide the confusions of the past. Mind you, it's very much to Ms Chand's credit that she conveys something more rawly real than simply a general sense of the injustices of colonialism. And there are moments in her novel when the messy uncertainty of history takes over from a comfortable narrative of post-colonial success.