The Strangler Vine
“the story succeeds on so many levels—characterization, descriptive narrative, an exciting plot—that one is enthralled . . .”
In a stunning debut novel, M.J. Carter uses her journalistic and nonfiction writing skills to create an evocative picture of 1837 Colonial India that combines the immediacy of tomorrow’s headline with narratives about exotic lands in the style of 19th century novelists such Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, or Wilkie Collins.
William Avery, Ensign in The East India Company stationed in Calcutta, is bored, frustrated, in debt, and in despair over his lack of opportunities for advancement. In short, Avery is ripe for the plucking by Colonel Patrick Buchanan, Chief Military Secretary, “who handed out promotions and positions,” and the Secret and Political Department of the Company.
Avery is ordered to locate Xavier Mountstuart, a poet whose latest work is salacious, libelous, amusing, and a thinly disguised expose of the East India Company’s corruption, and the adulterous and generally unsavory behavior of European society in Calcutta in general, and certain of its members in particular. So enraged is a very rich English merchant depicted in the poem that he has threatened to sue both Mountstuart and the Company which sanctioned the publication. It is not a lawsuit the East India Company wishes to face.
The Company wants Mountstuart found and returned to Calcutta, and Avery is to accompany Jeremiah Blake, “a civilian gone native,” to find the missing poet. Avery has already met Blake and found him “a poor thing, grizzled, puffy-eyed, wearing a mangy beard, and barefoot.” Even though the young ensign has been enamored with Mountstuart’s work since boyhood, he wants nothing to do with the mission or Blake.
Jeremiah Blake is no less enthusiastic about the mission, but “has obligations to the Company,” although what those obligations are remain unknown to Avery. Blake also does not Avery to accompany him. “He won’t do. He’s never left Calcutta, and he has no languages.”
Avery’s attempts to decline the mission are brushed aside by Colonel Buchanan. If the mission succeeds, Avery may return to England with a fat pension if he prefers not to stay India. If he fails or refuses to obey his orders, Buchanan promises to “see to it that you are sent to the most remote malarial hole in Bengal where, if you are not of cholera within two years, you will be half-mad with loneliness and boredom and ten and still neck-high in debt.”
Buchanan also orders Avery to “keep a weather eye on Mr. Blake. Make sure he is doing his duty.” In other words, the ensign is to spy on Blake and report any suspicious behavior to any senior officer in whatever village or city he may find himself.
A week later the expedition with Blake in charge and Avery temporarily promoted to lieutenant, leaves Calcutta for Jubbulpore, a distance of some 700 dangerous miles. If the expedition and Blake’s company is not enough cause for low spirits, Avery is appalled to learn that he will have to leave most of his possessions behind, and there will be only three natives as servants.
Mir Aziz, a long-time native member of the Company, befriends Avery and explains the customs and superstitions of the country through which the exhibition passes. Conscious of bending, if not breaking, the taboo against associating too closely with the natives, Avery is secretly glad that someone—anyone—will talk to him. Blake will neither talk to him more than necessary, nor explain why he secretly visits the villages they pass on route.
It is during the trip to Jubbulpore that Ms. Carter reveals the metaphor at the heart of the story: the strangler vine which wraps around and chokes the life out of the host tree, much as the East India Company is strangling India.
In a sense, Avery has a strangler vine of his own. His own boyish innocence and his belief in the benevolence of the Company are strangling his powers of observation and his ability to discern “when something is not quite right.” He fails to realize Jeremiah Blake’s worth and appreciate his judgment until it is nearly too late.
No act illustrates Avery’s innocent belief in the Company and his decision “to do his duty” than his decision to reveal his doubts about Blake as per Colonel Buchanan’s orders even though “With every word I felt increasingly uneasy.” His choice of senior Company confidante is Captain William Sleeman, head of the Company’s Thuggee Bureau, and one of the few historic characters in the book.
Captain Sleeman is credited with identifying and suppressing the Thuggees, roadside robbers who befriend, then strangle their victims in the name of the Goddess Kali. Ms. Carter suggests that Sleeman is also a victim of innocence. He may have invented the cult of Thuggee out of exaggerated tales of ordinary bands of criminals.
Captain Sleeman refuses to discuss Mountstuart, so the expedition travels on to the Kingdom of Doora where the pace of the duo’s adventures increases as Avery saves the Rajah’s life on a tiger hunt, and they are captured by brigands as they travel deeper into India.
Imprisoned in a cave by the brigands who intend to kill them, Blake and Avery finally discover Mountstuart, also a prisoner. The meeting with his childhood idol and events on their escape further strangle Avery’s remaining innocence until little remains.
An old-fashioned adventure story of men against a dangerous and alien environment is combined with a modern reinterpretation of the East India Company and British Colonialism.
The subtle condemnation of colonialism might have been even more convincing if the juxtaposition had been stronger between the original intent of the East India Company to open trade, and its subsequent transformation into the strangler vine.
Nevertheless, the story succeeds on so many levels—characterization, descriptive narrative, an exciting plot—that one is enthralled by the duo of Blake and Avery, and anticipates their further adventures.