Staying On
by Paul Scott
Summary
Tusker and Lucy Smalley stayed. When the British left India in 1947 the Smalleys, a colonel who never rose and a wife who never had the life she was promised, remained in the hill station of Pankot, and by 1972 they are the last of them, living in an annexe of a hotel now owned by an Indian couple who would like the space back.
The novel opens with Tusker's death and then goes back a few months. Almost everything in it is domestic: a dispute about the rent and the mali, Lucy's visits to a hairdresser, Tusker's refusal to discuss money, the Indian owner's ambitions for the hotel.
What makes it more than a comedy of decline is Lucy. She has spent forty years being an appendage to a man who never once told her anything, and Scott gives her a long passage near the end, addressed to nobody, that is one of the most quietly shattering things in postwar English fiction.
It is short and can be read alone, though readers who know the Raj Quartet will catch dozens of returning names. Very funny for most of its length, and then it is not. Best for anyone who thinks the end of empire is a subject for large novels and wants to see it done in one small one.
Under three hundred pages and completely accessible with no prior reading. The domestic comedy of the first half is genuinely funny, which is what makes Lucy's final passage land as hard as it does.
Historical Context & Significance
Staying On won the Booker Prize in 1977. It is a companion to Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, the four novel sequence beginning with The Jewel in the Crown, and returns to two minor characters from it.
Philip Larkin chaired that year's judges and is reported to have threatened to jump out of the window if the book did not win.
Scott could not attend the ceremony. He was already ill with the cancer that killed him within months, at fifty seven, and he never saw the enormous audience that arrived for his work when Granada televised The Jewel in the Crown in 1984, six years after his death. Staying On was itself filmed in 1980 with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson.