Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In The Mission House, Hilary Byrd flees his demons and the dark undercurrents of contemporary life in England for a former British hill station in south India. Charmed by the foreignness of his new surroundings and by the familiarity of everything the British have left behind, he finds solace in life’s simple pleasures, travelling by rickshaw around the small town with his driver Jamshed and staying in a mission house beside the local presbytery where, after a chance meeting, the Padre and his adoptive daughter Priscilla take Hilary under their wing.

The Padre is concerned for Priscilla’s future, and as Hilary’s friendship with the young woman grows, he begins to wonder whether his purpose lies in this new relationship. But religious tensions are brewing and the mission house may not be the safe haven it seems

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Hilary Byrd is coming unglued. He's in the early stages of a mental breakdown, he's fast departing the middle-aged years with their gradual loss of the pleasant illusion of a limitless future, and he's at odds with modern England at every turn. His rock of a sister can't seem to save him from this sense of being cut off, so for once in his life he takes a decision. He decides, about his own life's direction, that he will go Find Himself in India.

She disapproves of this, really for quite sensible reasons, but the time to be sensible is past.

I was ready, at that point, to stop reading for good. After all, I liked—a lot—but didn't love Author Carys's novella West, with its gorgeous sentences and its superbly concentrated plotting. I thought this read would be a similar exercise. So I put it down at this rather mundane point, and didn't pick it up until I read this year's glorious paean to Love, and lovingkindness, Clear.

This turbocharged my willingness to look further into this take on self-discovery through travel to "exotic" locale...a drearily bourgeois genre that I really, really do not like. Elizabeth Gilbert and Peter Mayles ruined it for me with their icky Othering search for "Authenticity" which comes across to me in this elder stage of my life as "authentoxicity." I am shocked at anyone, in the twenty-first century, who can make it all the way through a story like those without thinking, "interrogate your privilege, or at the very least recognize it!" That is, of course, the person of the Twenties talking to people of the Nineties...societal advances do not travel against time's arrow.

But this story isn't of its time...its time is now...nor is it about another time, it's set now. Just not here. Ooty, the old British "hill station" where the book is set, is in South India. Are your feelies itching as much as mine right now? I mean...hill station! That really übercolonial concept of "place the colonizers go to escape the commonfolk when it gets too hot." And a British guy rents a mission house, where the imperialists of the spirit retired from their efforts to screw up the indigenous population's relationship to their own souls with the caustic bleach of christiainty!

The icks are building steadily.

This, then, was not the most satifying of follow-up reads to my joyously absorbed Clear. I'm not revealing my dark corners when I say that all things christian leave me coldly hostile. Hilary isn't much of a christian, demonstrating a glancing awareness of but no familiarity with the mythos. His occupancy of a younger colonialist man's living quarters that were built as, and still serve as, a locus for slopping this terrible blighting thought pollution all over poor India (which, not coincidentally, has its own history of exporting religious intolerance). That young man's rush home to Canada is, permaybehaps, intended to serve as a kind of Divine Will's invitation for void-of-course Hilary to come be a white savior. I got that vibe as his relationship with Priscilla deepened, mostly because of "the Padre," who I took against from giddy-up to whoa.

Nonetheless, I can say that my tonal twangs where I was likely meant to thrum instead, were idiosyncratic to me. I think a person less repulsed by christian overtones might not even see them in this story. My discomfort with the ableist misogyny, the colonialist-Finding-Himself in the former colony, and that really terrible Padre, means all my stars are for the beautiful sentences, unfolded with the inevitability of flower petals obeying Bernoulli's spiral.

Not my most resounding recommendation, I fear. ( )

I wasn’t sure how this novel would end until it did, which is a good thing. I’m not certain the late introduction of the assassins was right because they were the only characters in the novel which weren’t characters. ( )

Transformation comes in many forms. For Hilary Byrd, it begins when he reaches the high hills in India where an old mission house will become his lodging for a time. Life in Petts Wood, UK, has been a disappointment. As has he, he imagines. But others are also in the process of transformation. His auto-rickshaw driver’s nephew, Ravi, is transforming himself into a country and western singer, one piece of apparel at a time. And malformed Priscilla, who is missing her thumbs and has one leg shorter than the other, is becoming someone desirable and desired, and possibly also a country and western singer. But more things are changing than any of them know and even if transubstantiation is not an option, there are still opportunities for sacrifice.

Carys Davies writes of a modern India that has been utterly shaped over decades more than two centuries earlier by the British. It too is now misshapen , so much so that even plant species commonly thought to be native (e.g. eucalyptus) are in fact merely an invasive species which sprouted from seeds inadvertently carried in a soldier’s backpack. Davies writes beautifully. So much so, that even if the central figures and locale of the story are not of immediate interest, you will find yourself swept along.

Gently recommended. ( )

t first glance, the cover design for the Australian edition of Welsh author Carys Davies doesn't seem to have anything to do with The Mission House. But it does: those eucalyptus leaves symbolise the ubiquity of things — and people — that are out of place. Just like the central character in the novel when he notices that these leaves are everywhere in the Indian town where he has sought refuge. Hilary Byrd feels out of place in the modern world, but postcolonial India isn't a place for him either.

Hilary Byrd is a quiet, gentle and shy man, a librarian who hasn't adapted to the way libraries have morphed into places not primarily for reading. They are now community places where books and reading are only a part of what's on offer. There was a child performing an on-again/off-again tantrum in my library yesterday, and I went out of my way to be friendly to the young mum not coping very well with two kids under four because I guessed she was feeling that she was being judged. But it was easy for me. I was out of there in five minutes. Some librarians have to put up with this kind of bratty behaviour all day, every day. And then there's the awful rudeness, foul language and abuse of people who don't respect the fact that they are in a shared space, as depicted in The Mission House. The modern world of entitlement is no place for a gentle soul like Hilary Byrd.

Gradually it is revealed that Hilary Byrd descended into deep depression, from which his loving sister Wyn has rescued him more than once, but his impulsive flight to India has put him out of her reach. There he is rescued from confusion and doubt and running out of money by the Christian Padre who lets him stay in a room vacated by the young missionary who was supposed to replace him. And then, after a fall in the town, Hilary is rescued again by Jamshed, an auto-rickshaw driver who becomes a patient listener to Hilary's anxieties while driving him around the town each day.

At page 30, the author signals that Ooty, a hill station in South India, is not going to be the safe haven that Hilary craves.

In due course, the old driver, Jamshed, will be questioned about the tall tourist, Mr Hilary Byrd.

In a leaf-green room with a small high window and a broken electric heater he will sit for hours during the investigation on a moulded plastic chair and tell the brown-uniformed policeman that looking at the tall Englishman that first day at the terminus, he had seen only money.

Money so that the tank of his auto could always be full, so he did not have to beg his customers for a 100 rupee note when they'd barely set off so that he could call at the Bharat Petroleum Station to buy fuel for his empty tank. Money for a pair of shoes which matched. Money for his nephew's crazy costume.

'Don't leave anything out,' the policeman will say and the old man will nod. Even though there are certain details, now, that do not seem important. (p. 30)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/03/30/the-mission-house-2020-by-carys-davies/ ( )

Neat little novel set in an old British hill station in the Nilgiri hills of Tamil Nadu, involving a 50-odd years old burnt-out British bachelor and former librarian, who mis-reads the generous hospitality of an Indian priest and his adopted handicapped daughter.

In this slow burner, the Britisher Byrd, grows fond of the girl, teaching her sewing, reading and baking. Once he has fallen in love with her, the old priest announces he has found a suitable partner for her – the previous occupant of the mission house, a young Canadian missionary. Disappointed Byrd decides to return to good old Blighty and give up on life. But then a freak, Modi style, incident occurs, and the novel achieves its climax. The girl elopes with a boy who sings Westerns, on his horse. The Canadian missionary decides to abort his flight back to India, thus evading marriage out of pious pity. And a bunch of Hindu fundies butchers Byrd to death mistaking him for the Canadian missionary.

Byrd exemplifies the old fashioned, gallant colonial gaze, misinterpreting the new violence-fraught Indian society, seeking the ‘purity’ that Modi could not impose as a gang leader, but can indirectly put in motion by spreading a toxic mix of violence and populism married with some misinformed historical Hindu revisionism. The innocent auto rikshaw driver, Jamshed, loses both his stalwart client and his odd-ball nephew. ( )