The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [216]
Her body, both young men were interested to discover, was remarkably like the statues of young women they had seen.... The only significant difference...was that Lucy had pubic hair; this caused them a bit of a surprise at first. It was not something that had ever occurred to them as possible, likely, or even desirable.
“D’you think this is supposed to be here?” asked Harry, who had spent a moment or two scraping at it ineffectually with his board. Because the hair, too, was black it was hard to be sure that it was not simply matted and dried insects.
“That’s odd,” said Fleury, peering at it with interest; he had never seen anything like it on a statue. “Better leave it, anyway, for the time being. We can always come back to it later when we’ve done the rest.”
As the situation deteriorates inside the Residency, Farrell’s descriptions acquire a surreal edge:
The smell, which was so atrocious that the butchers had to work with cloths tied over their noses, came from rejected offal which they were in the habit of throwing over the wall in the hope that the vultures would deal with it. But the truth was that the scavengers of the district, both birds and animals, were already thoroughly bloated from the results of the first attack...the birds were so heavy with meat that they could hardly launch themselves into the air, the jackals could hardly drag themselves back to their lairs.
The heat grows more intense and bodies killed by cholera or the mutineers fill up graves. But the tea parties go on, if without tea; birthdays are celebrated, and meals of horse flesh consumed in the cramped quarters of the underdressed women. The rituals of courtship, too, go on. Fleury continues to pursue Louise and Harry falls for Lucy.
Long-cherished beliefs, however, are beginning to weaken inside the Residency. It is becoming clear that “India itself was now a different place; the fiction of happy natives being led forward along the road to civilization could no longer be sustained.” The Collector wonders
how it could ever be that the hundred and fifty million people living in India could ever have the social advantages that made young people like the Fleurys and the Dunstaples so delightful, so confident, and so charming.... Would Science and Political Economy ever be powerful enough to give them a life of ease and respectability?
As the mutineers press closer, the Collector’s electrometal statuettes of European geniuses are beheaded, and the heads deployed as cannon fodder:
The most effective of all had been Shakespeare’s; it had scythed its way through a whole astonished platoon of sepoys advancing in single file through the jungle. The Collector suspected that the Bard’s success in this respect might have a great deal to do with the ballistic advantages stemming from his baldness.
The head of Keats with its luxuriant metal growth is not as effective; and it is not surprising, given the changing view of progress inside the Residency, that Voltaire’s head gets stuck in the cannon.
Weak and exhausted, the padre thinks he was mistaken to praise the Great Exhibition, the “Vanity Fair of materialism.” The Collector, too, remembers with regret the
extraordinary array of chains and fetters, manacles and shackles exhibited by Birmingham for export to America’s slave states.... Well, he had never pretended that science and industry were good in themselves, of course...they still had to be used correctly. All the same, he should have thought a great deal more about what lay behind the exhibits....
“Feelings,” the Collector