The Birds of Paradise

by Paul Scott

William Conway, half English and half Indian, reflects on his Indian childhood, education in England, and ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during World War II

Genres: Fiction, India, Historical

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Paul Mark Scott was an English novelist best known for his tetralogy The Raj Quartet. In the last years of his life, his novel Staying On won the Booker Prize (1977). The series of books was dramatised by Granada Television during the 1980s and won Scott the public and critical acclaim that he had not received during his lifetime.
Born in suburban London, Scott was posted to India, Burma and Malaya during World War II. On return to London he worked as a notable literary agent, before deciding to write full time from 1960. In 1964 he returned to India for a research trip, though he was struggling with ill health and alcoholism. From the material gathered he created the novels that would become The Raj Quartet. In the final years of his life he accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Tulsa, where much of his private archive is held.

Reviews

[Nandakishore Mridula · Rating 3 out of 5]

"They are styled Birds of Paradise because when discovered various and most extravagant fables were reported concerning them; amongst which, it was long generally believed, that whence they came, or whither they went was unknown; that they lived on celestial dew; that they were perpetually on the wing, taking no rest but in the air; were never taken alive, and consequently could only be obtained when they fell dead upon the earth; so that the vulgar imagining them to drop out of Heaven or Paradise, and being struck with the beauty of their shape and plumage, bestowed on them the singular name by which they are still distinguished.”

- C. Wrey Gardiner, ‘The Flowering Moment’

The ‘Bird of Paradise’ of the above passage is a myth: however, there exists a certain variety of bird by that name in the tropical jungles of Indonesia and New Guinea which boasts of exotic plumage, which is the only correct zoological facet of the legend. Of such fables is our collective race memory composed, which gives us sustenance in this drab, mundane and dispiriting universe.

Paul Scott writes in metaphors. Not only is his prose cloyingly rich with them, but his characters, situations and even whole novels are metaphors for a past which existed only in the imagination of the privileged few who lived through it – the vanished splendour of the British Raj in India. India was a hell-hole of poverty, deprivation and daily violence for the majority of Indians: the brilliant colours of the decadent aristocracy that most colonial gentlemen fondly remember belonged to a miniscule segment of the population. This was the India that Britain was trying to preserve, and this was why they lost.

William Conway, the narrator of this novel, is the son of a former political agent and resident of the British Empire, Sir Robert Conway. William has been forcibly removed from his beloved India at the age of ten and compelled to join his uncle’s business (most probably because his father sensed that his son won’t have a future in India, with the winds changing); an action for which he has not forgiven his father. War cuts short his commercial career, and after a horrendous interval in a Japanese POW camp and a disastrous marriage and a divorce, William sets out to chase his childhood dream – to discover the famed bird of paradise.

For this, he journeys to India, where he had seen the birds first, stuffed and hung lifeless in a cage in the palace of his childhood friend Krishi, the prince of Jundapur. There he meets Krishi and his childhood sweetheart Dora – the threesome that used to be: but now, somehow dead. In the lifeless fossil of his childhood friendships, William also discovers the rotting birds. However, he travels on to the island of Manoba, where we find him, writing his memoirs, still trying to catch a glimpse of the birds of paradise.

Paul Scott’s prose is rich, thick and almost gooey. It sticks to the palate of your intellect and has to be scratched off in multiple attempts. This makes reading him a chore sometimes. Scott stops just short of Virginia Woolf. And like I said before, all of it is metaphor.

I absolutely loved this style in the Raj Quartet. It was perfect for capturing the fading days of the British Raj in India, through the intertwined lives of multiple personalities. But used on such a small canvas as in this novel, it just becomes too rich: too much to digest in a rather short novel of 200+ pages.

Scott’s atmosphere is brilliant: his characterisation, superb: and his prose, delectable. But in this novel, I felt it was all a bit of too much dressing on what is, after all, an eminently forgettable story.

[Wreade1872 · Rating 3 out of 5]

"..I've been trying to tell the truth about people as I thought they were and about myself as I thought I was."

Well that was existentially depressing, and not in an awesome way like the The Tartar Steppe or something.
Its also really hard work, even the good parts. The author has a very purple verbose style, which i normally like. It works well in describing scenes but a lot of it is simply about thinking. He can spend endless paragraphs analysing why people act the way they do and rarely comes up with an answer or even an interesting question.
A lot of the scenes are half remembered events, and while the inexactness of memories is very realistic and maybe even important to this particular story, that does not make it any less frustrating for the reader.

Its mostly a biography and the early portions in a (i'm guessing) somewhat fictionalised India are pretty good although not as magical as some other india related books i've read.
The 2nd quarter is the worse part, a turgid mess of the characters life until middle-age, it takes real concentration to stop your eyes glazing over.
Finally though we get back to something which lends itself better to the writers overdone style, which are events during and after WWII. These parts are really good, even the psychological analysis parts work well, for the first and last time in the story.

The whole thing finishes with a whimper rather than a bang, which in this case may actually be what the author intended. Only towards the end does it become apparent that the whole tale has been about the pointlessness of life, or most lives.

Hard graft, only recommended for readers who like to really earn their enjoyment of a book ;) .

[David McGrogan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The predominant impression of this book is of languid, elegant, stylish writing, which only ultimately reveals depression, misanthropy, repressed homosexuality, and not-very-repressed misogyny. It's beautiful, but nihilistic, introspective and bleak - rather like England's answer to Yukio Mishima - and has very little in the way of story. It's the kind of thing that one simply can't imagine being published these days, for its slow pace, its modernist preoccupations, and its coldness. But it's far superior to the nonsense put out by the likes of Ian McEwan, whose work is probably the closest we nowadays get to Paul Scott.

[Anne Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Scott always writes beautifully and with depth-- this particular novel is more wistful and addresses the genesis of some of our life long regrets. Fitting then that I read it and talked about it before I knew he wouldn't write anymore novels..

[Moses · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paul Scott is a very good writer and a sad, sad man.