I had never heard of Emma Smith until I saw her photo on this Persephone Post. I really liked the look of her and I really liked the sound of The Far Cry, which was published in 1949 when she was 26. Based partly on a trip to India she had made a couple of years earlier -- helping to make a documentary about tea plantations -- the novel tells the story of fourteen-year-old Teresa Digby, who is suddenly and unexpectedly removed from school and the house of her cold-hearted aunt May and taken to India by her father.
This could have been the beginning of a lovely romantic travel story, but that is not at all what this novel is. Teresa and her father have nothing really resembling a relationship -- since he handed her over to Aunt May after her mother left when she was four, he has had little to do with her. In fact he only decides to make the trip to India because her mother has written to say she is coming over from America to fetch her. A difficult, bad-tempered, disappointed man, he is determined not to let his hated ex-wife get hold of Teresa, and he chooses India only because Ruth, the beautiful and much-loved daughter of his first marriage, has married a tea-planter and gone to live in Assam. Teresa, of course, has no say in the matter whatsoever. She is a deeply unhappy little girl, terrified of almost everything and everyone she encounters, including her brusque and distant father.
The journey, for these two awkward and ill-assorted misfits, is a complete nightmare for a good deal of the time, though Teresa does experience some welcome freedom on board the ship to Bombay, and becomes fond of her cabin-mate Miss Spooner, an independent and kindly spinster. But the train from Bombay to Calcutta, and then from Calcutta to Assam, is a real endurance test, with hours of monotony only broken up by endless games of piquet. Teresa, however, has fallen in love with India -- the colours, the sights, the noise, the strangeness, have all combined to blast away her narrow little world view and she spends a good deal of time in sheer delight. It's a delight still tinged with fear, though -- of her father, of her unknown sister, of the people she is forced to meet at the Club once they finally arrive in Assam. And, in Assam, all is not well with Ruth, though her besotted father does not recognise it. She is a deeply disturbed and unhappy woman whose life is lived keeping up a facade of beauty and charm, under which she is slowly crumbling. It's hard to imagine what could possibly be a satisfactory outcome for any of these troubled characters and it takes two tragedies before the end of novel offers a glimpse of a happier future for Teresa.
This is truly a remarkable novel for several reasons. The plot is fascinatingly unpredictable -- not in a shock horror way, but because its twists and turns are at the same time unexpected and completely believable. The descriptions of India and its teeming life are superb -- Elizabeth Bowen wrote of the novel that "I can think of no writer, British or Indian, who has captured so vividly, with such intensity, the many intangibles of the Indian kaleidoscope". And above all the characters and their interactions are quite brilliantly captured. There's Teresa, of course, with her fears, her passions, her sharp intelligence, all her problems clearly stemming from the fact that she has lived for fourteen years with no love in her life. Mr Digby, her father, is an extraordinary creation:
Hypocrisy, about which he constantly talked and from which, one understood, he ceaselessly suffered, he did not recognise when it came into the same room or sat down beside him. Since, he knew, the world abounded with it and was made ugly by it, he was forced to discover it hidden in every guileless action and in the most unlikely people. Double-dealing flashed around him like swords. He searched for and longed to discover innocence, and suffered terribly. And was gullible, no one more so, thought Teresa, kicking a rose bush as she passed...
Then there's poor, troubled Ruth, her unhappy husband Edwin, admirable Miss Spooner and others, all vivid and entirely, unexpectedly, real.
You can see from the passage I've quoted that the writing is highly intelligent, and often quite densely written, so that at times you have to stop and think about what is being said. So, not a novel you could, or would wish to, race through, but one that repays attentive reading. I could go on about it for ages but I don't want to bore you. As you can tell, I really loved it.
