Alexander McCall Smith, of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency fame, has moved, literarily if not literally, from Africa and Scotland to Sri Lanka. He has placed the story of his latest novel The Pavilion in the Clouds, on the grounds of a tea plantation in colonial Ceylon.
It’s 1938 and Henry Ferguson works long hours at the tea factory on his grounds, while his wife Virginia tries to stay occupied by caring for their eight year-old daughter, Bella. It’s difficult for Virginia to make friends isolated and away from the central town of Kandy, where many of the colonials congregate, and Bella is usually engaged with her lessons, thanks to a tutor named Miss White.
These two women get off to a rough start, especially when Virginia starts a reading group and doesn’t invite Miss White to attend.
The group met every three weeks to discuss books sent up to them from the bookseller in Kandy. Their meetings took place in a small pavilion that a previous owner of Pitlochry had built on the edge of the main bungalow garden, just at the point where the land dropped in a steep plunge of several hundred feet to the slopes below. The pavilion projected over the edge of this drop, supported by wooden pillars driven at an angle into the side of the cliff. This gave it the feeling of being suspended in the air, often above the wisps of cloud that floated across the valley down below.
The pavilion would become a central scene in the tension between the two women that would result in one very confused eight year-old. The novel mostly centers around Bella and her ability to cope with loneliness out in the middle of nowhere. She has a nearby friend, a boy named Richard who is a couple years her senior, but otherwise amuses herself with a pair of dolls she names after the Tang dynasty Chinese poets Li Po, also known as Li Bai, and Po Chü-i, or Bai Juyi, that her mother reads to her. McCall Smith’s reputation as an engaging storyteller is substantiated in the personification of these dolls.
They never fought, although Li Po sometimes accused Po Chü-i of being greedy and secretly helping himself to extra slices of cake. Li Po also had a pet whom only the two of them could see: a mongoose, called, coincidentally, Rikki Tikki Tavi.
The setting of pre-War Ceylon presents McCall Smith with an opportunity to interrogate colonialism, mainly through the progressive thoughts of Virginia, who can’t understand why her family had to settle in Ceylon when it belonged to the Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Burghers, and others. At one point Virginia thinks with disgust about the way colonials treat their workers.
They had no right to order these people around—she, at least, understood that, even if none of the others, none of the planters or their wives, understood that. We are uninvited guests, just as we are uninvited guests in every corner of the globe; and yet we take it upon ourselves to dictate who things should be done. That was the massive, almost unbelievable, conceit upon which the whole colonial enterprise was built, and yet which nobody seemed to see.
The plainer Miss White seems more at ease in Ceylon and India, even though the wealthier residents of their community talk about her behind her back, predicting a future of spinsterhood. The conflict between the two women will come to a breaking point just before war breaks out in Asia, but it won’t be until Bella is older that she’ll understand what really happened back in Ceylon.
McCall Smith’s new novel is also a way for him to explore the Scottish presence in Ceylon several decades before this story takes place. Perhaps the most famous Scot in Ceylon back then was Thomas Lipton.
He had been born in the Glasgow Gorbals, in the humblest of circumstances, and had risen to the top of the tea world through his own efforts. The boy who started off as a messenger, running errands, ended up consorting with presidents and princes.
This bit of historical reference blends in well with the tea plantation setting, although other historical characters, like Edwina Mountbatten, given brief cameos later in the story, seem a little superfluous.
As a stand-alone novel—unlike Mma Precious Ramotswe, we don’t expect to see any of these characters again—The Pavilion in the Clouds may not have the legs of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. Nonetheless, it’s an entertaining book with strong characters and beautiful settings, from the mountainous tea plantation in Ceylon to the rolling hills of the Scottish countryside.