A Black Englishman

From Publishers Weekly
In her sweeping ninth novel, Slaughter loosely retells the story of her maternal grandmother, who moved to India after WWI with her military husband and ended up in an insane asylum at age 30. In 1920, Isabel Herbert, the fictional protagonist, escapes the war's ghosts by marrying and accompanying her distant husband, Neville, to India and is immediately seduced by the country's "voluptuous grandeur"—and by the titular black Englishman, Sam Singh, an Oxford-educated Indian doctor ("I learned a long time ago that an Indian is black"). Their affair, as Isabel writes in a letter to Sam, "will take us to the limits of our courage," and both suffer for it—in addition to a thousand small injustices, Isabel is attacked by her cuckolded husband and nearly sent to an asylum, and Sam is unfairly arrested and brutalized in connection with a terrorist attack. Slaughter tells a beautiful, haunting love story, set against a simmering backdrop of religious violence and political turmoil. Her novel is filled with trenchant observations about class, sex, imperialism and especially race, but she sometimes drives home her points too bluntly, as when Isabel muses: "Would I desire him if his skin were ebony.... What's the exact shade of rejection, anyway, and when does otherness become revulsion?" Despite the occasional slide into didacticism, this is a moving and powerful tale. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
As a tableau for human dramas, few settings provide as opulent or sweeping a backdrop as India, especially during the period in which the country was simultaneously becoming mired in violent clashes between religious and social sects and struggling to free itself from years of oppressive British rule. The daughter of a British colonial civil servant born in New Delhi, Slaughter intimately knows the conflicts she portrays in this provocatively explosive story of a dazzling and dangerous love affair. Slaughter's hero, Samresh, a native Indian doctor trained in England, and heroine, Isabel, the estranged wife of a ruthless British army officer, personify the various dichotomies paralyzing the country. Their illicit love affair is doomed from the start, embodying not only the moral isolation that accompanies adultery but also the timeless divide separating two races and two cultures. Luminously written, lavishly detailed, Slaughter's latest novel sumptuously limns the depth and breadth of the subcontinent in a sweeping panorama as intoxicating and electrifying as the land itself. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
Praise for Before the Knife:

"Remarkable . . . Written with such beauty, courage, and truthfulness that it will rank with other masterpieces about life in Africa." --The Times (London)

"Searing . . . [Slaughter] captures the dark beauty of her adopted homeland, and her passion for it is contagious." --Boston Globe



Book Description
India, 1920: exotic, glamorous, and painfully wrenching away from England's colonial grip, only to be thrown into ethnic violence and terrorism. Isabel, a young woman in search of herself and in flight from the ravages of the Great War, is thrust headlong into a passionate and dangerous liaison with Sam, an Indian doctor and a graduate of Oxford University who insists, against all odds, on the right to be both black and British. Their devotion to each other takes them across the length and breadth of India and to the brink of disaster.

This is a powerful and erotic love affair that combines the themes of colonial exploitation, political and ethnic tensions, race and sexuality, and the many forms of partition, both secular and religious, that endanger our world. A Black Englishman is an epic and intimate novel about love and loyalty, revenge and faith, race and identity, and what it takes to be human.



About the Author
Carolyn Slaughter was born in New Delhi, India, and spent most of her childhood in the Kalahari Desert. She is the author of eight other novels and the memoir Before the Knife. She now lives in the United States.



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Love crosses the color line, in the India of the British Raj. A young Welshwoman arrives in India in 1920 with her newly married husband, a professional soldier. Theirs is a pragmatic union, not a romance, and when the woman meets an Indian doctor-a high-caste Hindu, Oxford-educated, fabulously rich, intensely idealistic-they fall passionately in love. After many separations and ordeals (the doctor is tortured by the Brits, the woman survives a knife attack by her vengeful husband) and many changes of locale (a dreary barracks bungalow, the gorgeous replica of an English country house, idyllic Jammu, wild, anarchic Peshawar), the lovers find refuge in the remote tea hills of Assam. That's the storyline of Slaughter's (Dreams of the Kalahari, 1987, etc.) ninth novel, and it looks inviting, possible grist for the Merchant/Ivory mill. Up close, however, there are problems. Isabel Herbert needs to leave Europe and the stench of a war that claimed her childhood sweetheart. But with her money and looks, couldn't she have found a better mate than Neville Webb, a lowly sergeant and "lout" (Isabel's word)? And in caste- and class-conscious India, isn't Dr. Sam Singh slumming when he takes up with Isabel? That's for starters. Husband Neville departs for the North-West Frontier to fight Afghans, leaving Isabel conveniently on her own, able to slip out of the constricting web of barracks society. It's all too easy, even for a free spirit like Isabel, as is her flight to Delhi to become a doctor, with no thought of the marital repercussions. Neville does catch up with her, but the other major plot developments occur offstage: The brutal communal violence in which Sam's wife dies, and a bomb attackaimed at the Viceroy, which leads to Sam's imprisonment and torture (his father is an arms merchant involved with terrorists). The jerky narrative pauses often to reflect on Sam's dual nature (black and English) and the age-old paradox of India: extraordinary beauty, abject misery. Great potential, clumsy execution.


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