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    Staying On: A Novel
    Staying On: A Novel
    Staying On: A Novel
    Ebook317 pages5 hours

    Staying On: A Novel

    By Paul Scott

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    In this sequel to The Raj Quartet, Colonel Tusker and Lucy Smalley stay on in the hills of Pankot after Indian independence deprives them of their colonial status. Finally fed up with accommodating her husband, Lucy claims a degree of independence herself. Eloquent and hilarious, she and Tusker act out class tensions among the British of the Raj and give voice to the loneliness, rage, and stubborn affection in their marriage. Staying On won the Booker Prize in 1977 and was made into a motion picture starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in 1979.

    "Staying On far transcends the events of its central action. . . . [The work] should help win for Scott . . . the reputation he deserves—as one of the best novelists to emerge from Britain's silver age."—Robert Towers, Newsweek

    "Scott's vision is both precise and painterly. Like an engraver cross-hatching in the illusion of fullness, he selects nuances that will make his characters take on depth and poignancy."—Jean G. Zorn, New York Times Book Review

    "A graceful comic coda to the earlier song of India. . . . No one writing knows or can evoke an Anglo-Indian setting better than Scott."—Paul Gray, Time

    "Staying On provides a sort of postscript to [Scott's] deservedly acclaimed The Raj Quartet. . . . He has, as it were, summoned up the Raj's ghost in Staying On. . . . It is the story of the living death, in retirement, and the final end of a walk-on character from the quartet. . . . Scott has completed the task of covering in the form of a fictional narrative the events leading up to India's partition and the achievement of independence in 1947. It is, on any showing, a creditable achievement."—Malcolm Muggeridge, New York Times Book Review
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateFeb 11, 2013
    ISBN9780226068176
    Staying On: A Novel
    Author

    Paul Scott

    Paul Scott is a recognised expert on Robbie Williams and Take That. His 2003 biography, Robbie Williams: Angels and Demons, was a Sunday Times bestseller and has been translated into eleven languages. He is a regular contributor to the Daily Mail.

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    Reviews for Staying On

    3.5/5

    153 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Story of a couple who decide to stay on in India after the British leave and India takes over. The characters are interesting but what I liked most was the look at this aging couple and the wife's sudden realization that she is going to be left a widow in India and doesn't even know what she'll have to live on and what she will do. There is also the examining of culture. Lucy left England, she was never quite good enough in British circles in India. In Lucy's thoughts we learn all this background story. It's a story of looking back, of reflection. A symbol of this retrospection is that their preferred conveyance is the Tonga, a horse-drawn carriage in which they choose to sit facing backwards, "looking back at what we're leaving behind". I like themes of aging and this book really captures it well.
    • 5/5
      A standalone novel but truly a sequel to Scott's Raj Quartet, chock full of spoilers from those novels and with teasing glimpses of what happened to some of its characters. Colonel Smalley and his wife Lucie figured as minor characters in that saga. Where most of the British opted to return home when India won its independence in 1947, the Smalleys "stayed on" in India and became anomalies in the otherwise Indian society that grew up around them, albeit thick with British legacy. The Quartet had a fine finish, but you won't want to miss out on this fifth foray which is like a fine dessert after a four-course meal. It mostly sheds the quartet's complexity, with a focus on far fewer characters and with more comedic flourishes, but it also features Scott's masterful dalliance with chronology and his brilliant shifts among different perspectives. Like some other favourite epics, I've arrived at the very end of this enormous one only feeling regret that there isn't more.
    • 3/5
      A wonderful little off-center coda to the Raj Quartet. Takes up the lives of a minor couple, the Smalleys, who stayed on after independence. Brings in the other stories obliquely through correspondence with Sarah. Am still very much a fan of Scott. These are books I definitely recommend.
    • 5/5
      A wry tale of a sad & fading English elderly couple who decide to stay on in postcolonial India. Tusker & his wife are neatly counter posed by the Indian couple running the down at heel hotel. An excellently told tale of the displacement of the Raj with corporate capitalism in 1950s India along with the rise of middle class Indians & the demise of English ex pats; a fitting epilogue to the Raj Quartet.
    • 5/5
      The somewhat tepid reviews of this book here don't do justice to its wonderful mixture of comedy and sadness. It's a virtuoso performance in writerly terms as well, because Scott, writing more freely here than in the Raj Quartet, slips between distant and close-up views, changes voice and tone, moves in and out of internal dialogue, and is able to give a voice to both English and Indian characters in a way that seems convincing, at least to a westerner. The book is very funny, too, as I suggested, especially in its portrayal of the ongoing battle between Mr and Mrs Bhoolaboy, as she tries to get rid of their old tenants the Tuskers, while he tries to save them.
    • 3/5
      A very interesting book that I found appealed to me more and more as I read through it.
    • 3/5
      Staying On, Paul Scott's last novel, was published in 1977 after the novels that made up The Raj Quartet and just before he was diagnosed with colon cancer, which would claim his life the following year. It is set in the small Indian hill town of Pangkot in 1972, where Colonel Tusker and Lucy Smalley, the town's only remaining British residents, live in an annex of a colonial hotel managed by Francis Bhoolabhoy, a thin and meek practicing Christian who shares drinks and stories with the Colonel, and owned by his wife Lila, whose greed and ambition is exceeded only by her girth. The Smalleys are retired, childless, and attempt to preserve the old order, although their meager income and old age limit their influence and relevance. The Colonel is tormented by poor health, a wife who no longer respects him after he decided to spend his remaining years in India without considering her, and the inhospitable Mrs Bhoolabhoy, who wants the Smalleys to leave her property, by any means necessary.I enjoyed the first 50 or so pages of Staying On, with its descriptions of the different elements of postcolonial Indian society, but I began to lose interest after that, as the characters became less likable and their accounts and lives became more tiresome and less amusing. The denouement of the novel was disclosed in the book's first paragraph, which also limited its effectiveness and interest to this reader. This novel would be of interest to those who have read The Raj Quartet, but it is not recommended as a first book to read by Paul Scott.

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    Staying On - Paul Scott

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