[Review] Miranda Carter: 'The Strangler Vine'

Lately I have become enamoured by fiction that features India and its history. As one might expect, I encounter quite a mixed lot. Now, however, I have read 'The Strangler Vine', exquisitely written by biographer and historian Miranda Carter.

[Buy the book here]

'The Stranger Vine' is the story of William Avery, who arrived in Calcutta in 1837. He is then tasked by the English East India Company to keep an eye on Jeremiah Blake, a man with 'a chequered history' as one might say. Their mission is to find Xavier Mountstuart, writer of 'Leda and Rama', a roman scandaleuse, that has caused much furore and discomfort in the higher circles of Calcutta. Although he had promised to leave India, Mountstuart vanished in India's interior. He endeavoured to write a lengthy poem about the elusive thugs, the fabled killers.

Miranda Carter has a way with words. She writes in perfect prose that transports the reader to times long gone. Sentences are composed with great care and I have never before read the surface of a lake at night being described as 'undulating black silk'.

'The Strangler Vine' has been described as 'a pinch of Moonstone, a dash of Sherlock and a soupçon of Fu Manchu. These descriptions, laudatory though they are, are all quite wrong. The story is a mystery and Avery is no Watson to Blake. To explain one might think back to the other side of the globe where 'greenhorns' were inexperienced cowboys and 'old hands' were the seasoned ones. Also, there isn't an evil genius, like Fu Manchu, secretly at work. The forces Blake and Avery are up against are working 'for the greater good', which is even more terrifying than it sounds.

The title of this immensely rich and gratifying novel tell us as much: a strangler vine is a vine that wraps itself around a tree. When it grows stronger, it starts to strangle and suffocate its host. It is a perfect analogy of the way the East India Company was dealing with India and its inhabitants. It was to be its downfall.

'The Strangler Vine' is - not surprisingly - highly recommended. Buy the book here.