Description
In Bombay in the 1930s a young British clerk named Tom Brent is persuaded by a botanist named Saxby to stay on in India. Saxby is that rare Englishman who really understands Indian culture, but he's also elusive and deeply flawed. Years later, after Tom has become a soldier and been wounded in Burma, he is sent on a mission to Malaya to track down Saxby, now suspected of murder. The second half of the novel, set in 1945 (a time when Scott was in Malaya), is a strange brew of exotic romance, tensions between army officers, and the mystery of the jungle: its cultures, religions, and fauna. The love pavilion is where Tom meets his Eurasian lover and imagines he can escape the constraints of British colonial notions of manhood.
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Paul Scott is most famous for his much-beloved tetralogy The Raj Quartet, an epic that chronicles the end of the British rule in India with a cast of vividly and memorably drawn characters. Inspired by Scott’s own time spent in India and Malaya during World War II, this two powerful novel provides valuable insight into how foreign lands changed the British who worked and fought in them, hated and loved them.The Chinese Love Pavilion follows a young British clerk, Tom Brent, who must track down a former friend—now suspected of murder—in Malaya. Tom faces great danger, both from the mysterious Malayan jungles and the political tensions between British officers, but the novel is perhaps most memorable for the strange, beautiful romance between Tom and a protean Eurasian beauty whom he meets in the eponymous Chinese Love Pavilion.
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