Multiple POV’s are employed by Scott, both first person and third person. And, ultimately, of the quartet itself, which becomes, in a way, a forensic examination of the crime, as a way of explaining the end of colonialism in India. Forster, because in this first book, like in A Passage to India, the rape of an English woman, Daphne, provides the central event of the book. Scott may have been taking his cues from E.M. They embark on a relationship which proves the downfall of both of them, both at the hands of their culture(s), generally, and, more directly in the case of Hari, at the hands of Ronald Merrick. Daphne falls in love with Hari Kumar (or Harry Coomer, as his name is Anglicized during the years of his education).

This relationship doesn’t just inform the first book, it provides a thread, a through-line, for the entire series. The series starts, in the first book, with the triangular relationship between a British woman, Daphne Mannering, an Indian man who was educated in England, Hari Kumar, and a British police officer, Ronald Merrick. There is also, actually, a Booker Prize winning 5th novel, which isn’t part of the quartet, but which is nominally attached to the first four books and which focuses on a married couple who stay in India after independence, called Staying On. The total length of the quartet is in the neighborhood of 2000 pages. I think they may be a tie-in for the 1984 BBC television series which I have not seen) from a UBS in 2013. I bought the four matching fat paperbacks (not the editions I used for the review information – mine all have the same cover and they are pretty ugly, actually. When I pulled the first book, A Jewel in the Crown, off of my TBR cart to begin reading, I found the receipt from my purchase of the quartet. I started this quartet of books on May 9 and finished the fourth book, A Division of the Spoils, two months later on July 9.

Against the backdrop of the violent partition of India and Pakistan, A Division of the Spoils illuminates one last bittersweet romance, revealing the divided loyalties of the British as they flee, retreat from, or cling to India. After exploiting India's divisions for years, the British depart in such haste that no one is prepared for the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1947.

The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott