Keating, HRF - Bribery, Corruption Also (1999)

C

Not the best Ghote—small-scale, and the villains get away with it, which is unsatisfying and makes the story feel a bit pointless.  As always, though, Keating writes very well, and Ghote is delightful.  HRFK’s books are very subjective—Ghote is as much the story as its protagonist, because everything is seen, smelt and felt by and through him—we become Ghote and identify with him to a degree uncommon in the detective story.  We experience Calcutta, ‘this too exuberant city of joy’, where everything is done to excess, from the perspective of a Bombayite annoyed by the Bengali talkativeness and arrogance—particularly his wife’s.  Protima plays a much bigger part, from memory, than in any story except Bats Fly Up for Inspector Ghote.  The plot is Keating’s favourite one of the underdog Ghote against the rich and powerful, here a villain so rich that he is ‘unbribable by God’.  For once, Ghote loses.  Ghote and Protima are threatened with arrest for offering a bribe to the crooked lawyer’s peon (later murdered—we never find out how or by whom, although we know why), and have to bribe a senior policeman to escape to Calcutta.  The book is a study of corruption: Is it necessary?  Can anything be done without bribery?  Does it benefit the poor as much as the rich?  Can it ever be stopped?  Ghote’s conclusion—and the book’s moral, with which I don’t agree—is that bribery and corruption are always with us and must be endured, but ‘one must try always not to do it’.  This might be OK for a developing nation like India, but doesn’t apply to Britain or Australia.

Keating’s gentle humanism—believes in decency and trying to do one’s best.  What does Symons believe in?—his books are about absurdity of reason, order and civilisation after horrors of WWII—deeply pessimistic and nihilistic.

Nick Fuller.