Review by Maggie Perkovic 16th October 2008:
Three young women leave Britain in 1928 to visit India. One to marry her almost stranger fiance, one to hopefully find a husband and one as a chaperone to them both, plus a strange and unhappy schoolboy she has been asked to look after on the long sea voyage. It is an interesting and descriptive novel. India is on the brink of breaking away from Britain, or at least of beginning to realise that they should no longer be the servants of the Crown. Ghandi is coming to power and the girls are both overwhelmed and excited by India in the 20's.
I found this a very readable book. However, I was disappointed by the ending, especially concerning the chaperone who had lost her parents in India when she was young and needed to closed that chapter of her life satisfactorily. It didn't satisfy this reader, though I would recommend it for the descriptive passages alone and the story of women whose chief purpose in life was to get married.
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It would be so easy to mistake this book for one of those others, lush, rich people having dramas played out against exotic backgrounds. This one was so much more. It was people of all economic groupings, for a start, and it wasn’t just us, it was the Indians, shown in so many different ways. Everyone commented on everyone else, rightly, wrongly. I understood so much more about the cultures of us in the ‘20s, off on ‘the fishing fleet’ to find husbands; and of what India was like at the time – Gandhi and times changing, us changing [or not in the case of some], the Indians changing towards us, in so many ways large and small. There is so much detailed historical analysis and research clearly done in the writing of this book, and all doled out during the story, so that its so much easier to understand this complicated period, and from so many different points of view.
Characters are wonderful – Viva, the bluestocking author, who wants to learn all about India and be a writer – her road is rough, and all her mysteries come to haunt her until she is healed at the end. Rose who comes to India for the equivalent of an arranged marriage, neither she nor her prospective husband Jack truly understanding that their lives before and after marriage will be utterly different; there was no getting to know each other, no blending…they cut each other’s lives in half and bled through the book until a sort of truce was reached, unhappy but its where they’re left. medico por internet Tor, who is desperate to get away from her controlling mother, and stay in India after accompanying Rose out. She is full of life and enthusiasm and ends up happy, for which I am so glad, with the wonderful boyish Toby, who understood so much – there’s a very affecting story about a small bird he tells.
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