Get Ready for Battle

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's portrait of an Indian family, circa 1960, is elegant and wise with a dash of humor. The characters in Jhabvala's book are characters, somehow bigger than life but firmly circumscribed by reality. She also makes use, sparingly and therefore effectively, of overlapping dialogue when people talk around and past one another, giving these scenes a dramatic and comic intensity. And she simply writes beautifully, as here: "The shops were all lit up with electric bulbs and the barrows with flares of naphtha light, and there was music blaring out of various radios, sweet-sad music played at top volume, and horse-drawn carriages came trotting through with a merry jingle of bells from the harness of underfed but bravely plumed horses."