Stephen Smith’s mother has died. He has inherited the few
things she owned- which include some boxes of her father’s memoirs. His
flatmate, Seamus, talks him into reading them and then using them as the basis
of a screenplay. Turns out Stephen Smith (using the same name for two
characters caused a fair bit of confusion for me), having tired of working in
the jute mills in Dundee, packed it in, moved to Calcutta in 1923…. To work in
the jute factories there. The journals cover a lot of years, and they reveal
the nasty racism that was rife in the white owned factories- and pretty much
everything else the whites ran in India.
A couple of side plots in the current time run alongside
this reading of the past: One is Stephen’s fraught relationship with Julia; the
other is the investigation of Stephen’s mother by Detective McCorquodale. The
detective thinks Stephen’s mother was selling drugs, and wants to go through
every single thing she owned, including tearing out things in her flat. Stephen
learns a lot about his family- and himself- through the novel.
The story was interesting, but it moved very slowly. I got
confused several times, switching between times and characters. There was a lot
of detail in the Calcutta sections, and those were the parts I liked best,
although they were horribly grim. I got bored at times, and even desperately wanted
the story to come to an end a few times. There are good things in the book, but
somehow they just didn’t come together for me. Three stars.
passing this up
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