1. The Hamilton Case
By Michelle de Kretser
Little, Brown, 2003
Conflicted, painfully snobbish Sam Obeysekere would rather be "under an imperialistic yoke than put [his] trust in a fellow who went about in sandals." Sam, an Oxford-educated Ceylonese lawyer, lives in colonial duality: a privileged member of the local aristocracy in 1930s Sri Lanka who plays cricket and attended a school "founded in 1862 by an Anglican bishop on the pattern of Eton and Rugby" and yet can be called a "nigger" on the streets outside his club. He makes a name for himself with a local murder case involving a British (read: white) tea-plantation owner. All this against a complicated, almost gothic backdrop of family dysfunction: not one but two smothered babies, glamorous mothers and sisters slowly going mad in evening gowns, the deep jungle always just outside. "The Hamilton Case" is an extraordinary, dizzyingly evocative portrait of Sri Lanka's colonial past, where "the British had entered the country's bloodstream like a malady which proves so resistant that the host organism adapts itself to accommodate it."
2. China to Me
By Emily Hahn
Doubleday, Doran, 1944
The people in Emily Hahn's frank and unapologetic memoir, "China to Me," seem like characters in a Noël Coward play, making an entrance, uttering their bon mots, then sweeping off stage. The palmy world of 1940s prewar Shanghai and British-governed Hong Kong is rendered in swish dinner parties and horse races attended by dashing expatriates knocking back champagne. Hahn, an American writer who cared not a whit for public opinion, kept gibbons for pets and had a baby out of wedlock with a married British intelligence officer. ("I don't know why I have always had so little conscience about married men," she writes languidly.) Cut to the war and the horror; she describes it all with appro priate solemnity but never loses the tone of a supremely acerbic society gadabout confiding in you at a cocktail party.
3. The Necklace of Kali
By Robert Towers
Harcourt Brace, 1960
For a refreshing, refracted perspective on colonial India—that of a U.S. State Department officer in the days "when the weird old body of the British Raj was at last thrashing like some foundering dinosaur towards extinction"— read Robert Towers's "The Necklace of Kali." Consulate Visa Officer John Wickham is part of what is called the "Jungly Wallah" set: "a shifting population of rich Indians, Persians, Armenians, poor but ingenious White Russians . . . and assorted American and Britons," who take their name from the club they all frequent. Wickham is a complicated, principled man, whose dealings with people from all strata of society mirror the uneasiness of a country on the cusp of a bloody independence.
4. Sea of Poppies
By Amitay Ghosh
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008
Amitay Ghosh uses a vast and vibrant canvas for "Sea of Poppies," the first in a trilogy that is still being written. Set in the years before the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century, when Britain was making a fortune from poppy crops in India, the story opens in the port city of Calcutta and brings together characters that include a low-caste giant who runs away with a widow; a mulatto sailor with "skin the color of old ivory"; and Paulette, a French orphan. These people will meet as they gradually make their way to the Ibis, a triple-masted schooner that is being prepped to take indentured workers to Mauritius, off the African coast. Ghosh revels in the joy of language—"as chuckmuck a rascal as ever you'll see: eyes as bright as muggerbees, smile like a xeraphim"—but he is also a splendid storyteller. In the last pages, the Ibis is being tossed by a mighty storm, the characters growing desperate. I was desperate, too, for the next book.
5. A Many-Splendored Thing
By Han Suyin 韓素英 (洋人)
Little, Brown, 1952
"You can't be both east and west at the same time," says British foreign correspondent Mark Elliott to the beautiful Eurasian doctor Han Suyin. But of course she can, in roiling, postwar colonial Hong Kong, where people "circulate among the bridge and mahjong tables." In Han's semiautobiographical novel "A Many-Splendored Thing," the widowed doctor embarks on a doomed, short-lived affair with the dashing—and married—journalist. The starry-eyed quality of their infatuation leads to occasional sentimentality: "Mark and I had many friends, and one of them was the moon." But the book is an invaluable—and startlingly modern—record of a certain time and place, thanks to Han's razor-sharp eye for the hypocrisies of the colonial order, as when a society matron remarks that "Hong Kong would be a wonderful place if there were not so many Chinese."
—Ms. Lee's novel, "The Piano Teacher," was recently published in paperback.
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