Susan Kurosawa
CORONATION TALKIES
Viking, $29.95pb, 488pp, 0 670 04279 X

‘THE BRITISH OCCUPY our imagination as well as our country,’ protests the dissident politician, Jaya, in Michelle de Kretser’s recent prizewinning novel, The Hamilton Case, set in Ceylon in the 1930s. Beginning with its title, there’s abundant confirmation of this sentiment in Susan Kurosawa’s new novel set in a ‘mythical’ Indian hill station, Chalaili, during the same decade. Coronation Talkies is the name of the local picture theatre and is chosen by its proprietor, Mrs Banerjee, ‘to celebrate the ascension of King George VI’. While no one, British or otherwise, would dare try to cross this formidable Indian businesswoman — she’s a classic termagant, in a direct line of succession from the Wife of Bath — there’s no sign that she has any quarrel with British imperial rule, in either its political or cultural manifestations.

Nothing, however, about this strangely transplanted English world is quite as it first appears. In several respects, Chalaili may seem to be in a direct line of succession from Chawton, the village in England where Jane Austen wrote — and on which she partly based the settings of — much of her major work. Lydia Burnett, Kurosawa’s very English heroine, expressly reflects at one point on her ‘tedious Jane Austen kind of name’, and another of Mrs Banerjee’s literary predecessors may be the formidable dowager from Pride and Prejudice, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. But there are also all manner of complicating and competing influences at work, and portents of radical change. Coronation Talkies shows Hollywood, not British, movies. One of the other major businesses in the town sticks to an Indian name and has an openly interracial identity: ‘At Lakshmi Hair and Beauty Studio, white and brown mixed freely.’ Within a few years, as several of the characters in this book all too knowingly predict, imperial rule will be gone with the wind — or the monsoons, on which subject the suitably drippy English hero, William, happens to be an expert. In fact, no one in the 1930s (certainly no Britisher, and probably not even the most hopeful Indian nationalist) would have forecast as speedy and definitive a withdrawal.

Kurosawa, a noted Sydney journalist and travel writer, has the benefit of some sixty years’ hindsight on these events — and of nearly thirty visits to post-Independence India on her hops between England, Japan and Australia. Partly reversing Jaya’s observation on Ceylon in the de Kretser novel, Kurosawa’s obsession with the Raj and its aftermath confirms the remarkable power of India to occupy the British and Australian imagination. Perhaps as a reflection of, or exotic deflection from, Australia’s own ‘postcolonial’ situation, this power has been on the increase here since the hippy 1960s, and enjoyed a further surge in just the last year or so. (The recent début novels of Melbourne-based Sophie Cunningham and Gregory David Roberts are both set partly in India, and have been accorded at least as much attention from publicists and local critics as The Hamilton Case.) In Great Britain, this power can be traced back centuries to the beginnings of colonial rule in India (even earlier, if we count such obsessions as Oberon and Titania’s for their beauteous Indian boy).

In the realms of literary Indomania, how does Kurosawa’s novel measure up? As one might expect from a seasoned travel writer, her backdrops and her dialogue show a good feel for period and place — or is it more a case of feel-good nostalgia? There is a growing sense that we are involved in a form of tourism here, providing a temporary, ‘virtual’ retreat from our jaded postmodern selves without in anyway undermining our complacency that we are somehow smarter now. The odd anachronism or solecism (‘serviette’, ‘finger food’, ‘everything is now sorted’) gives the game away — for better or worse, this is a pseudo-authentic world. The author cannot resist lapsing into caricature and parody, well-observed and good-natured enough on the whole but pandering all too easily to our stereotypes, both of Britishers and Indians and even more (though she acknowledges the category is ‘ambiguous’) of Anglo-Indians.

There are some poignant, even tragic, moments in Kurosawa’s narrative and characterisation that seem to suggest some aspirations to greater psychological complexity and historical depth. One of the recurrent themes of Elizabeth Buettner’s recent scholarly study, Empire Families (2004) is that the lives of the British ruling and administrative classes in India were as susceptible to emotional damage as those of their subjects; and the mysterious destruction of William at the end of Kurosawa’s novel, after his entanglement with Mrs Banerjee, serves as a haunting illustration of this. Accepting the circumstances, however, through which he first comes to land in such a lethal pickle rather stretches the bounds of historical or psychological credibility, and it’s probably advisable for the reader just to succumb, as William does: ‘He fell back in his seat as she tore aside her heavily brocaded harem-girl brassiere and unleashed her stupendous breasts into his upturned face.’

To be fair, this bodice-ripper style — and content — is not typical of the whole book; but its more abiding literary qualities hardly match its Jane Austenish names or settings either. A likelier contender for the Austen mantle is Paul Scott in his wryly observed and immensely moving vignette of hill-station life, Staying On, published in 1977. (That book features a similar, or similarly named, termagant: Mrs Bhoolabhoy.) Kurosawa’s novel is perhaps more in the league of Georgette Heyer, and could there be any higher commendation for a retro-romp of this kind? It prompts you to wonder, too, in the additional light of Mira Nair’s ‘Indianised’ version of Vanity Fair currently doing the rounds of our cinemas: is the Raj the new Regency?