Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

We are told the end of the story in the first sentence: Olivia runs off with an Indian prince. This is not a book to read for outcome, but for the passage to that outcome, with the heat and the dust of the title serving as the atmospheric determinants that shape the experience of the characters.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's reputation rests largely on her work as screenwriter of Ismail Merchant-James Ivory films. Her collaboration with these filmmakers began in 1963, and she and Ivory and have yet another film in post-production, The City of Your Final Destination, based on the book by Peter Cameron and due for release in 2008. During the Ivory-Merchant years, Jhabvala won numerous accolades for screenwriting, including two Academy Awards for adaptations of E.M. Forster's A Room with a View (1985) and Howards End (1992.

Jhabvala's Booker Prize-winning novel, Heat and Dust (1975), is set in colonial India of the 1920s and in post-colonial India of the 1970s. The action switches back and forth between the story of the bored wife of a colonial administrator and a visitor to India who has obtained the letters of the former, because the colonial had been her grandfather's first wife. The now familiar time traveling narrative has shown up more than once in the historical novels I've been reading over the past few months.

Novelists A. S. Byatt and William Boyd have successfully used the same technique, and now, seeing the structure again, I have become curious about the origins of the form. Tom Stoppard adopted it in his play Arcadia. This keeps popping up, and I'd like to know who first applied the idea. I suspect that an 18th C. epistolary novel will prove to be the original, or perhaps an early 19th C. Gothic, in which the protagonist finds a moldy manuscript, but at the moment my mind is drawing a blank. What are the pre-1975 novels that interleave narratives from different eras?

Heat and Dust is one of those novels that defy easy representation. It is about the history of colonial India, the vivid depiction of place and time, and the situational constraints of imperialism upon the governors as well as the governed. Then modern visitors to India try to submerge themselves in the culture but flounder about, engaging in questionable behaviors. The reader is invited to observe, without ready identification with a single character in the story, and still the ambience takes hold.

The character study of a rather shallow woman, who nevertheless wants more from life than she can derive from her immediate circumstances as a colonial wife in 1923, is oddly compelling, not in the person of the protagonist but in the snapshot of historical moment. The narrator in the present is trying to make sense of her own experience, and her attempts at contextual understanding are naturally influenced by what she is reading in the colonist's letters. The interplay of the two consciousnesses, past and present, appears to the reader as a seamless continuum. The past is present, not a very profound insight, but one profoundly observed and explicated by Jhabvala.

Largely through evocation of setting, Heat and Dust delivers that same psychological realism and saturation of perception that Jhabvala brings to her screenplays for period films. I am now curious to read some of Jhabvala's short stories; several of the early ones were reportedly published in The New Yorker. In 2003, she won an O'Henry Prize for her story "Refuge in London."

Click here for a brief biographical sketch of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala at the Enclopedia Britannica.