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kjcharles 's review for:
A Necessary Evil
by Abir Mukherjee
An excellent detective novel, streets ahead of the first, which was damn good itself. The writing is stellar, the atmosphere and setting of the last days of the Raj vividly depicted, and I totally did not get anywhere near guessing whodunnit, which is pretty rare for me.
One of the great features of this series is the narrator Sam Wyndham, a war-traumatised policeman with an opium habit. Wyndham is a white man of his time and the author doesn't spare us that--he is by most lights progressive but we see the deep discomfort he feels about a white woman/Indian man relationship, we see how he interacts differently with a mixed race woman, and even though he shockingly shares lodgings with an Indian, his sergeant, he still doesn't get his name right. (Racist colleagues dubbed Surenandrath "Surrender-not"; Wyndham tries to use his real name but eventually gives up because the d isn't English style.) This is actual flawed hero stuff, not the usual "messy divorce, drinks, gambles", and it brings the fundamentally destructive, cruel, dehumanising racism of the Raj front and centre. There's no comfortable Good White Guy to make it okay here. Everyone's pretty flawed in fact, all just struggling on. (There's a great ref to the Viceroys of India all just trying hard not to be the one in the hot seat when India is eventually lost to the empire.)
How historical detective fic should be: immersive, informative, entertaining, super vivid. Cracking stuff.
One of the great features of this series is the narrator Sam Wyndham, a war-traumatised policeman with an opium habit. Wyndham is a white man of his time and the author doesn't spare us that--he is by most lights progressive but we see the deep discomfort he feels about a white woman/Indian man relationship, we see how he interacts differently with a mixed race woman, and even though he shockingly shares lodgings with an Indian, his sergeant, he still doesn't get his name right. (Racist colleagues dubbed Surenandrath "Surrender-not"; Wyndham tries to use his real name but eventually gives up because the d isn't English style.) This is actual flawed hero stuff, not the usual "messy divorce, drinks, gambles", and it brings the fundamentally destructive, cruel, dehumanising racism of the Raj front and centre. There's no comfortable Good White Guy to make it okay here. Everyone's pretty flawed in fact, all just struggling on. (There's a great ref to the Viceroys of India all just trying hard not to be the one in the hot seat when India is eventually lost to the empire.)
How historical detective fic should be: immersive, informative, entertaining, super vivid. Cracking stuff.